Sync Firefox Addons, Settings

I happen to use four instances of Firefox– One each on my personal laptop, office laptop, remote desktop and solaris desktop and find it very tedious to have all the same stuff synced across the browsers.

When Xmarks came, it solved part of the problem by syncing Firefox and Chrome bookmarks. But I was still looking for a solution that could sync my settings, addons. Mozilla Weave partly solved bunch of it by providing settings sync. But wait a minute, addons?

Then I came across another addon, which became the solution to sync every kind of stuff across Firefox browsers, no matter what:

Siphon (Download)

Siphon is a firefox addon that promises to kick all the crap and sync it all. Siphon will manage and sync all your Add-ons with your different computers. That means tt will also save your Add-on list if you ever need to reinstall Firefox.

Siphon is still in the beta but works fine almost all of the time.

Now, you can combine Mozilla Weave with it to sync all your Firefox settings, bookmarks. you can also use xmarks for bookmark sync across browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome.

Using this methodology, everytime you install  a new firefox, just install Siphon and it will do everything.

Limitation: Support for profiles, Themes sync will be added soon.

2nd Option is to use FEBE addon.

FEBE (download)

FEBE also does similar stuff but does a backup instead of Sync.

FEBE backs up your extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and just about everything else Firefox offers (it can even backup/restore your entire profile). You can selectively restore only the items you need. For instance, you may just want your bookmarks restored and leave everything else as it was.

Key Features:

  • Schedule automatic backups in time-stamped folders
  • User-defined backups: Make backups of virtually any file or folder – Firefox related or not. Just specify what to backup and FEBE does the rest.
  • Auto-Upload backups to your Box.net account.
  • FEBE 6.2 has a new, simpler profile restore interface. No need to use the Firefox Profile Manager to manually create a profile to restore into.

The thing I don’t like about this addon is that it doesn’t sync witha  cloud service automatically, and that could be pointed as a big limitation. Everytime you want to sync with new PC, restore the backups manually from file location. On the contrary, it’s more featureful.

Choose your wishful methods, and let the syncing prevail!

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