Comments on: Fixing a Firefox user profile, and Foxmarks

By: The Dog’s in his Chair, the Cat’s on the Floor, and it’s Time for Sarcasm! ~ ThermionicEmissions

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:10:13 +0000

[...] Fixing a Firefox user profile, and Foxmarks [...]

By: Scot

Scot — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:48:13 +0000

MichaelHorowitz:

I haven’t played with the portable version in quite some time. I like the idea, but the performance thing is a big deal with me. Nothing annoys me more than waiting. It’s the reason why I use Safari instead of Firefox on the Mac. Still, you’re right, some people might find the portable version ideal.

There are also other fairly easy ways to export your bookmarks (if not the rest of your user data).

– Scot

By: Scot

Scot — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:37:46 +0000

evano: You’re right, I’m not sure how I missed that feature. I’ll amend the story. I agree, it would be nice if you could exclude some bookmarks entirely from MyFoxmarks. But that wasn’t my main point.

– Scot

By: michaelhorowitz2

michaelhorowitz2 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:26:52 +0000

For Windows users, the portable version of Firefox, available at portableapps.com, offers many advantages. For one thing, it avoids problems like these. Its a trivial matter to backup a portable version of Firefox and the backup includes everything: bookmarks, extensions, GUI customizations, etc. etc. It does, however startup a bit more slowly, small price to pay though.

By: evano

evano — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:22:44 +0000

Foxmarks/Xmarks does allow you to specify parts of your bookmarks file to synchronize through its Profiles feature. You can create as many profiles as you want — home, work, laptop, kids computer, etc — and then assign each computer or browser a particular profile.

Most of the tech blogs and webdev news sites I have bookmarked are assigned to both my Home and my Work profile since I refer to them in both places. My banking and bill payment sites are assigned only to my Home profile, so I have no worries that personal information like that will wind up on my company’s network or on my laptop, if it’s lost.

All of the bookmarks are still available on the password protected MyFoxmarks site, so if you were looking to avoid having certain bookmarks synced at all, rather than just not available, well… then Foxmarks doesn’t have that feature.

By: Scot

Scot — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:14:50 +0000

Foxmarks, the precusor to Xmarks (which is only avail. in beta for FF right now), works fine on Safari. To be honest, I don’t find that I need any other plug-ins at all, under FF or Safari. I used to be a big plug-in guy, but FF has advanced to the point where I just don’t need anything other than Foxmarks.

By: rickogorman

rickogorman — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:00:57 +0000

I stayed with Firefox when I switched to the Mac because of all the plugins. There are a number that I rely on to make web usage tolerable. Safari doesn’t seem to have anything like the same range of plugins. In addition, I notice that its zoom feature is the cludgy text zoom, not the zoom for the whole page (images and all) that Firefox has. I love this feature–it means I can use a high res on my monitor yet make pages very readable. Zooming in Safari breaks the look of the pages much quicker.

However, Safari 4 beta has page zoom, so that might help. Now I just need a few other things, such as the Xmarks for Safari (I use a PC at work and my Mac at home), good tab control (maybe Safari has that–I use TabMix Plus on FF), download control (I don’t want a separate window to open with the downloads–I like the download bar that Ff has as an add-on), script control (I love the control that NoScript gives me with Firefox) and (you’ll hate me for this) good adblocking software.