The extension allows you to sync your bookmarks, cookies, history, passwords and auto-complete settings across all of your machines. You can also restore the open windows and tabs from your last session no matter where you were when you were last browsing. Furthermore, you can de-select certain settings that you don’t want to synchronize, such as your saved passwords.

All you need for Google Browser Sync is Firefox 1.5 or later and a Google Account. The extension asks you to set up a PIN, and the system uses that PIN to encrypt the transmissions that occur while you are uploading or downloading your browser settings.

There are several other browser sync extensions available for Firefox, but none of them appear to be as thorough as Google’s.

There are a number of contributing factors to the low iCab use. Partly is has to be because there are so many other good browsers that get a lot more press. In most cases Windows offers more choices in any product category. Not web browsers. Safari, Apple’s default browser is pretty nice. The four Gecko based options: Firefox, Camino, Mozilla(SeaMonkey) and Netscape, all work well. Safari WebKit has been built into OmniWeb and Shiira, as well as numerous no browser products allowing us to browse web pages in outliners, RSS readers and web text editors and Mail. And, there’s Opera, another good but under used browser. That doesn’t even count Internet Explorer for Mac, which is a better browser than Internet Explorer for Windows.

Another reason that iCab isn’t used much is that fact that it has been in beta for years and years. I remember trying a version of iCab on my old Performa 6500, which I replaced five or six years ago. That’s a long time to not finalize iCab. It may hold the world’s record for a functional product that has gone the longest and never reached commercial release.

I don’t know what is needed before the iCab people decide it is ready. It has been stable for me. All the functions seem to work. It is fast and renders modern CSS designed web pages beautifully. It may be some German desire for absolute perfection. Who knows? I have no problem recommending it.

I had iCab on my hard drive just to check web pages in it. Then I thought that it would make a good dedicated browser to use for maintaining this site. My Firefox bookmarks folder is totally overstuffed and I thought to start fresh and only bookmark, which iCab calls Hotlist the sites directly related to this site, like my server control panel, my visitor statistics pages, the Wordpress administration and so on.

However, I find that the more I use it the more I like iCab. It has extensive Preferences that let me customize my browsing experience. It blocks ads and popups well. It has extensive contextual menus. iCab does tabs. It has several included skins. And it will display Page Source in an external text editor of my choice, making it much easier to see the underlying HTML of pages. I know, that’s something only a web designer would love, but, hey, that’s me.

There are some other features that are perfect for designers:

• iCab records all HTML errors of Web pages. A smiley will show if the HTML code is OK, the smiley will be green and smiling. Errors make the smiley red and sad. By clicking the smileys iCab will open a window where all the found errors are listed with a small description.
• Portable web archives. HTML pages can be stored in a compact ZIP-file, including all images of the page.
• Download manager HTML pages can be downloaded including all the linked pages (the depth can be configured), so that one can later access these contents off-line.

Something else that iCab offers that seems neat is a Kiosk mode. I’ve never needed it but it still seems cool.

And iCab is the only modern browser that will still run on pre-OS X Macs.

iCab 3.0 Beta 382 is available for MacOS 8.5 and newer and MacOSX 10.1 and newer in different languages. Theoretically there will be a free and pro version of the browser, if it ever goes final. I’m not holding my breath.

publisher: icab

Recommended

I don’t know about you but with almost every project I work on I do research. I check out the sites of my client’s competitors. What information do they offer? How do they look? How do they market or optimize for search engines? Then there are the hundreds of subliminal clues that I absorb and can’t even categorize. That all amounts to hours of looking at sites before I form even the initial half-formed ideas of what the site should be.

It’s very useful to have local copies of particularly good examples of both design and copy. Webstractor makes that very easy.

It allows you to create projects then save individual web pages, with included media, to the project. It also allows you to edit those pages with OS X’s built in TextEdit engine, cutting, combining and reformatting. If you are interested in how ads are placed, leave them in. If you only want the main page content, simply delete the elements you don’t want. Once you’ve captured a document, it’s yours.

Your project can even include external TextEdit, plain text or Word documents, as well as photos and PDF’s. All text, no matter how it was captured, is searchable. However, PDF’s are not editable.

The assembled document can be printed or exported as a PDF, complete with an auto generated table of contents.

If you want Webstractor to check sites periodically and automatically capture any changed pages, that’s built in. You can either capture the new page as a separate entry in your project of replace and existing version. You can also use the contextual menu to save a page from Safari into an existing project. Handy.

It’s not perfect. Webstractor has problems rendering some CSS based layouts, and while its speed has improved greatly from early versions, it can still be pokey in edit mode on my iBook.

Even though, Webstractor makes it very easy to compile web references into a single document, you can do the same thing manually by simply copying and pasting into TextEdit. If you are a serious web researcher the extra ease of use makes Webstractor worth the $79 price tag. If you only occasionally need to save web text and images, it probably isn’t.

Publisher softchaos
Webstractor 1.6 – (English, French, Japanese) $79
Universal Binary – Intel and PowerPC native
System Requirements: Mac OS X version 10.3 or later

Ease of use: 5
Features: 4
Value: 3
Documentation: 4
Macness: 5

Recommended

In an article at Spread Firefox there are many valuable thoughts about fanaticism. Liking something because it’s cool is definitely good for that brand. But excessive mudslinging at the competition, without factual backup, reflects poorly on the community. From the article

In my opinion it’s ridiculous to have “loyalty” to a company. I base my evaluation of products only on their own self-worth and merit as a product, and not on any pre-conceived opinions about the company that develops it or distributes it. Generalizing about the software of one company as a whole is, frankly, narrow-minded and readily worthy of ridicule. A comment such as ‘Note also that Firefox users are in denial about the greatness of Microsoft’s products.’, would display a bias for Microsoft products and discredit whoever said it. Both sides are doing this, and often our side is a bit ruder about it. Of course you can often expect that if one application from a company is good that they have applied the same level of standard to their other applications, but you still have to try them out to see what you think of them.

Camino is a Mac Web browser based on the Gecko/Mozilla rendering engine. But unlike its cross-platform sisters Firefox and SeaMonkey, Camino is built on and for Macs. And, yea, verily, it is good.

This baby is fast. Web browsers have been getting faster for the last year or so but this may be the fastest browser around. Period. Safari is fast. Firefox, once it opens, is fast. Opera and iCab are fast. Camino feels faster. It probably isn’t for all web pages but it sure feels that way.

While Camino doesn’t support Mozilla/Firefox XUL extensions, there is a range of extensions and apps available for extending Camino. First I highly recommend that you (if you haven’t already) install CamiScript and CamiTools. These provide plenty of extra punch, from Ad Blocking, Bookmark Syncing and theming, to site styles and advanced preferences. Visit Downloads/addons thread for Camino for more.

Also, Mozilla bookmarklets play nicely in Camino too, so that goes a long way to filling the gap left by the Web Developers extension. I still use Firefox for analyzing page design. I still use Safari when I need to copy entire pages into TextEdit, preserving (mostly) formatting and images. However, Camino is my default browser, giving me Gecko page rendering in a real OS X application. That’s important because Safari chokes on WordPress, which powers this blog, often spewing errors when I try to edit pages.

Is this the be all and end all of browsers? Not hardly. There are simply too many excellent Mac browsers now days, an embarrassment of riches, really. Camino is a match for Safari in features, with better ad blocking. It’s free. Give it a try.

Publisher: http://www.caminobrowser.org/

Camino runs on Mac OS X 10.2 or later

Ease of use: 4
Features: 3
Value for money: 5
Macness: 4
Recommended