I like to format my computer fairly often which means having all my data in one easy to find location. Not only does this make backing up easy but it also removes that dreadful feeling you get when you realize your new OS install overwrote your irreplacable bookmarks, precious emails and/or accumulated works of Bettie Page.

Bookmarks are easily forgotten but with a few tweaks FireFox 3 can back them up for you.

Customize your bookmark backup settings

Open FireFox 3.

Go to about:config in your location bar.

Specify browser.bookmarks as your filter.

Set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true.

Create a new string titled browser.bookmarks.file and set its value to the location you want to backup all your bookmarks to.

In my case I entered “D:\ForestMist\Personal\bookmarks.html”.

Restart FireFox.

Epilogue

Everytime you close FireFox it will export a fresh copy of all your bookmarks to the file you specified. There may a slight performance hit for doing this but I think the benefits far outweigh the cost.

Now you can mirror your bookmarks with services like SugarSync, share them easily with friends or just have peace of mind in case the new JSON database FireFox 3 uses behind the scenes explodes in a spectacular example of Murphy’s Law.

Google Chrome is quite a nice browser, especially for a first release. With a bit of tweaking I’d say its can be a wonderful competitor to not only FireFox, Safari and Opera but the evil that is Internet Explorer. IE version 6 is definitely evil but perhaps IE 7 is more akin to lawful chaotic.

Pleasantries

• Right click in the address bar and you can “Paste and search” or “Paste and go” depending on the text in the clipboard.
• Local searches open up a pane which shows you the number of matches along with buttons that let you easily navigate to them. Matches are also displayed as colored lines in the vertical scroll bar.
  
  
• Input field highlighting is nice and obvious.
• Address bar highlighting.
• Downloads are unobtrusively displayed in a bar at the bottom of your browser.
  
  
• Tabs can be separated from their parent window and then recombined later.
• The special page “about:memory” not only shows you memory usage of Chrome but of any other competing web browsers that are open simultaneously.
  
  
• Incognito mode means they’ll never know where I go. Well, unless they subpoena my ISP records….
  
  
• The default page of popular, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs is very helpful.
  
  

Unpleasant Fleas

• View source slowly reloads the page instead of reading from a local cache.
• I’ve had trouble pasting via keyboard shortcuts in certain HTML input fields. Right click + paste selection always works though.
• RSS feeds are viewed as plain text and there is currently no support for subscribing to them.
• Downloads started in one window are not displayed in the download manager of another. The download is not interrupted thankfully but you are unable to monitor it if you close its parent window.
• The circular download progress graphic is very hard to monitor at a glance. A simple bar would have been much more effective.
  
  
• CTRL+Mouse Wheel only changes text size. I would prefer it to zoom the entire page instead.

I will continue to use Chrome for select tasks but sadly relying on it fully would be folly. Lack of RSS features and a missing plugin architecture (NoScript is a must) is just too high of a cost.

I think of Chrome as speedy motorcycle in your garage of browsers. She’s great for tearing up the asphalt on the weekends but just don’t take her out in the rain or you’ll wind up as road pizza. Soggy, messy, squelchy burbling road pizza. Missing quite a few important toppings too I might add.