Firfox profile
I think it's been over half a year since i completely switched to Firefox and, frankly, do not have any desire of getting back to IE (except for the rare occasions when the site doesn't come up right). Particularly i like it because of all the add-ons. I got this small weather bar at the bottom of the window, which is extremely helpful in the erratic Ithaca weather. I love BugMeNot plug-in and DownThemAll is also very handy. I am checking out a citation add-on from Zotero and am about to switch to del.ish.us as the main favorites manager. And there are more which i don't have the time to look up. I can feel the program getting more and more customized to my needs and it nice.But there is also a concern. I am still using windows. So eventually i will have to re-install the computer. What will happen to all the personalization i have done to Firefix when i re-install it? The beauty of these add-ons is that they become so "transparent" that you just use them without thinking: "here i am going to use DownThemAll", or "i am checking weather with Forecastfox" (I actually had to look up the name of the add-on, to write about it here). You simply use it.
So here is the idea, and my guts' feeling is that it has been implemented already, but if not, i hope someone with enough coding skills will pick the challenge up. What if we could save a profile of our Firefox? Kind of an image that we could put at a newly installed machine, and it would have all the features we got used to? Such an image could be stored at a third party server, or you could just make it locally and back it up. But the main pint is that you personalized configuration of Firefox would be backed up.
What do you think?
2 comments:
There is the same problem with any application that you heavily customise with plugins/addons. The way to switch it to a new PC is to back up the entire image of your computer when you've gotten everything installed as you like it.
And you can already back up other application data by backing up Application Data folder in your Windows profile.
It's a GOOD thing about Firefox that it doesn't try to be everything to everyone and all of these add-ons can be added and removed easily. That means it's really not that hard to re-add Firefoxcast and delicious addons if you have to re-install Firefox on another machine.
True - you can have an image of the entire computer, though it seems like a bit too much effort + what if your computer unexpectedly crashes for example? Wouldn't it be really cool if every time you configure the Firefox, it would save its image on some third party server? So when you re-install it, you have one point of reference for your entire configuration...?
It's not that it is difficult to re-add all add-ons, but in addition to the time it consumes, i for example, simply do not remember what are all the add-ons i have installed. I just use them and apparently they are so good, that i simply do not think about them. To a degree it even stops me from trying new things, because i don't want to over-complex the Firefox, so i wouldn't get used to it and then not being able to reproduce that configuration...
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