Tag Archives: Firefox

The FLOSS tortoise, chasing the wrong proprietary hare. Again.

For most of the aughts, the various Linux desktop projects tried to catch up to Windows by copying features wholesale, while Mac OS X innovated like crazy and blew past both by building an amazing desktop experience.

The omission of Chrome & Safari from Paul Rouget‘s pro-Firefox Is IE9 a modern browser? reminds me of that misguided attempt. I hope Firefox doesn’t make the same mistake as desktop Linux; it would be a shame if they focused all their energy trying to catch Explorer, while missing the rapid user-interface innovation going on elsewhere.

Update: Here’s an example of a great idea from 2007, from Alex Faaborg, out of the user experience team at Mozilla, that didn’t make it into Firefox 3.

Eat your heart out, Google Browser Sync

I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend Glyphobet Browser Sync as an alternative to Google Browser Sync. Here it is:

rsync -av --delete user@remote.host:~/.mozilla/ .mozilla/

Some of the great advantages to Glyphobet Browser Sync include the fact that all your browser settings are transmitted securely over SSH, are password protected by UNiX file ownership and permissions,1 and do not require the presence of a large corporation with a dubious privacy & security track record. Plus Glyphobet Browser Sync takes advantage of industry standard technologies, just like MacOS X.

  1. Not all features available under MS Windows. []