I have three computers – one in the office, one at home, and a laptop. I’ve thought of using only a laptop, but discarded the idea considering the weight of the desktop replacements.
This means that I’ve got three machines with bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, and other stuff I find useful. Keeping the same information on all machines has been nearly impossible, which means I have difficulty logging into my multitude of blog sites to post.
But I’ve found the cure, and I’m pretty darn impressed. It’s call Google Browser Sync, and it’s making my life easier already.
Browser Sync is a Firefox-specific extension that synchronizes your browser settings across computers. Once installed, you can keep all your Firefox browsers in tune with each other with the same set of bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and so on.
Browser Sync is operating system agnostic. If you run Mozilla Firefox, then you can run the extension.
During set-up you have the option of synchronizing your bookmarks, passwords, history, cookies, open windows, and tabs. You can opt out of any of these. You also have the option of encrypting any of this data. If you opt to encrypt anything — and I recommend that you always do in the case of your passwords — only the encrypted data goes to Google’s servers. The decryption happens on your PC. That means the information sent and stored on Google’s server is PIN-accessed, encrypted and completely safe.
Once installed on both PCs, these systems automatically uploaded and synchronized their settings. The program avoided such pitfalls as duplicating identical bookmarks, and the like. It also assumes that if you have the same bookmark in two different places, you want to keep both of them. It just won’t duplicate two of the same bookmark in the same folder.
If you use more than one computer, Google Browser Sync is one tool that will make your life easier.
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