Life is grand

The more I come to rely on web-applications the more I think site tailored browsers are a good idea. The idea is best explained with an example; I have GMail open in a Firefox tab for most of the day. It is all too easy to inadvertently close that tab when it is lost amongst 30 others. I also have to swap to the tab every now and then to check if I have email (I can’t use the GMail notifier because I am running hosted Google on my own domain.) Starting a new email means clicking on the tab and hitting compose. I could open it in its own Firefox window but then it is part of the Firefox window list and gets closed when I close Firefox. It doesn’t have a distinct icon in the dock/taskbar either. The list goes on. At the end of it though you realise that what you are frustrated with are all the things having separate desktop apps solve.

But I still want to use the web-app and not a desktop app.

So imagine if you will a customised instance of Firefox that on start loads up my GMail URL, provides a distinct dock icon as well as a “new mail” indicator and right-click “new message” functionality. It runs separatley from my other Firefox instances too.

It need not get too complicated. It shouldn’t end up being a bloated desktop app and it shouldn’t be hard to use it on multiple computers. Really it is just a single-tabbed Firefox instance wrapped around the web-app.

This isn’t my idea though. Matt Brindley is making a living from selling site-specific browsers. He hasn’t done a GMail one yet but I’ll bet there are plenty of people willing to shell out a few bucks for one.

S3Fox is an extension for Firefox that gives you an FTP like view of your Amazon S3 account. You can upload and download files, view their URLs, create “directories” (S3 doesn’t technically support directories within buckets and so this has to be faked) and set the Access Control List on items.

I got an invite to AllPeers but have nobody to share with. So if you are on AllPeers then add PaulMWatson as a contact please.

As much as I like running the Attention Recorder it is obviously still in its early stages as managing it between multiple machines is not easy. The main problem is the Domain Blacklist. Whenever I add a new domain into my work machine I have to do the same on my laptop. Then today I installed the GestureBank recorder and had to copy all the domains out of the Attention Recorder into it.

Fortunatley if you are a bit techy you can make this easier by opening your Firefox prefs.js file and finding the line that starts like so; user_pref(”attention.blackListDomains”. You can take the value of that and copy it into the other key/value pair that starts with; user_pref(”gesturebank.blackListDomains”.

Thinking about it I wonder if I can simply sync my prefs.js file between machines. I’d love it if it were that simple to sync Firefox and extensions such as GestureBank.

Ultimately though my Attention Trust blacklist shouldn’t be stored with the recorder but with my Attention Trust account. Somewhere. Out there. On the web.

Google have released a browser synchroniser extension for Firefox. I was thrilled to read about it and quickly installed the extension. The idea is you install the extension on multiple computers and your settings are saved with your Google account. Then whenever you swap computers your Firefox settings will follow.

Sadly it is not quite all that I was expecting. It only syncs cookies, saved passwords, bookmarks, your history and tabs/windows. Synchronising cookies is useful as is saved passwords. But of the people who will use this extension how many still use bookmarks as opposed to delicious or BlinkList? I haven’t bookmarked a site in Firefox in ages. The history sync is useful for some but now that I am using the Attention Trust Recorder it is not going to change my life. The tabs/windows restorer sounds great but doesn’t work half as well as SessionSaver (it really only reloads the URL. SessionSaver will restore the state of the page including field values, tab history etc.)

So all in all not terribly useful. Not yet at least. I’d like to see Google extend the syncher to include extensions, themes, browser settings and layout. If they did that it would be a very useful tool indeed.