While I’m putting together my final review of Moon OS I thought I’d talk a little about a plugin I use a lot these days. Xmarks started initially as foxmarks, a Firefox plugin for backing up your bookmarks and actually syncing them each time you add/remove links. Adding a plugin to firefox is such an easy and, importantly, quick procedure that it meant you could share your bookmarks between two places effortlessly.

That functionality continues today with Xmarks but has been improved and expanded to include other browsers.

To date these are Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. The beta release for Google’s chrome is out and seems stable thus far. Also added since foxmarks is an ability to back up usernames and passwords as well as bookmarks. Possibly very useful indeed.

The main use I have found is while programming websites. I have quite a carefully built collection of bookmarks to reference pages for php/html/javascript; whatever it might be, without which I would spend a lot more time scratching my head trying to remember rules and snippets. Without acknowledging browser differences your site could be rendered in some very different ways. As a result, I seldom find myself using only one browser at a time.

I don’t own a Mac and irrespective of my feelings on them I need to know how they and webkit will render a design. The only way I have of doing that is to boot into Windows and run Safari. Working mainly in Linux and with Firefox this means I loose access to all my carefully organised bookmarks. Not so with Xmarks. Now I can access them anywhere. Even from within a Linux Live CD.

There are far more uses for this than the ones I cite above, they’re just from my experience but I genuinely recommend this plugin. If having a safe, back up of all your bookmarks wasn’t enough, you can access them through the most popular browsers on any operating system quickly and easily. For free.

Job done.

Before I could even get ready to start reviewing Flock I had to see what it was like to install it. There were a few little niggles to sort out but generally it was pretty easy.

In case there’s anyone out there who’d like to give it a try in Linux Mint – here’s a guide on how to do it.

Tutorials > Linux > Install Flock in Linux Mint

All I will say is that I’ve been a gmail user for years now and love the way they handled emails, adding coherency to your mail, linking threads and similar conversations. Wave seems like a logical move from there.

I will be watching the development of this product very closely though. Looks like google are onto a winner. Plus I love the fact that it’s html5. Most browsers are moving towards this, apart from IE which edges forward then has to double back to fix errors. Tsk tsk.

Google Wave – Read More

Basically, with this theme I wanted something really personal, the kind of theme you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. I also wanted to make its palette slightly ubuntuesque with oranges and browns. I think it’s coming along pretty well.

Damn it looks good in firefox

One thing though, it’s highly firefox/webkit optimized. It will always look better in firefox or any browser supporting the border-radius css3 property (currently just safari for the mac). Sorry IE and Opera users but my site just won’t look as good in your browsers. Perhaps a while down the road (when these incompatible browsers have done a little catch up. Apparently IE9 will include support for border-radius as well as native SVG support… but that’s thought for another day.

For now, the screenshot comes proudly from firefox… 3.0.10 and I think it’s looking great!

Currently on my main desktop I have:

• Firefox - as I’ve said you just can’t beat it.
• Google Chrome / Xulrunner – really quite nice, although I’ve found it a tad unstable and not as fast as I’ve heard tell of, it certainly starts quickly though! I’m keen to wait and see it mature, add plugin support – and then see how it is.
• Opera - Nice to switch to occasionally, and it pioneered a lot of the features you see in modern browsers, home page “speed dialer” springs to mind straight away
• IE7/8 – Unfortunately I like watching 4OD on my computer and currently there is no way to do this without ie6+, windows media player 10+ and a myriad of other dependencies. As a result I must use a form of windows, and I have to have Internet Explorer installed. Since my computer came with Vista (only basic though) I boot into it for tv – and some games.
• Konqueror – Despite being a staunch gnome user, recently I’ve been dabbling with slax again and so have been using kde. Quite shockingly (to myself at least) I’ve really grown to like it. The use of a lot of integration widgets and plugins that used to bug me I found really useful and quite concealable if you want to get some web page real-estate back. Plus getting flash to work in it (even though in slax I could only comfortably get flash 9 working – 10 didn’t seem to want to play) was a nice treat and was no drain on resources.

And more besides! With all these I am able to get the largest scope of possible target web visitors and at least try to cater for all their needs.. well most of them. IE fixes still leave a bad taste in the mouth. Damn dirty browser…