One of the biggest headaches in deciding when to upgrade to Firefox 3 has been the whole issue of extension (in)compatibility.
Many (most?) plug-ins can be made to work through Nightly Tester Tools, which permits users to “force” Firefox 3 to allow extensions to run, regardless of advertised lack of compatibility. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for several extensions — in particular those that deal with passwords and bookmarks, due to fundamental changes to Firefox’s handling of passwords and bookmarks.
In the past couple of days, I’ve come across information on two of my favorite extensions that fall into that difficult category.
The first of those is Google Browser Sync, a 20% project from Google which enables folks who use Firefox 2 on multiple computers to keep bookmarks, passwords, cookies, and history data in sync.
Unfortunately, it looks like GBS isn’t going to be updated for Firefox 3. It’s a shame, since it was the only extension I had come across that synced so much of a user’s profile. Fortunately for me, I’m currently down to using only one copy of Firefox, since the next best alternative, Mozilla Weave, seems to be alpha-quality. (Users who only need to sync bookmarks seem to have Foxmarks as the preferred alternative.)
The other extension I’m missing for Firefox 3 is Password Hasher. It’s a cute little utility which hashes out unique passwords for different sites using a code word you choose and the site’s URL, thereby allowing you to (theoretically) easily use a different password at different sites. Throw in the ability to unmask password fields, and it proves to be a particularly handy extension.
And…the developer has promised to update it for Firefox 3. That’s a good thing, since the next best extension I’ve found, PasswordMaker, has a couple of annoying bugs under FF3.
And FWIW, all the other extensions I regularly use seem to be doing OK in FF3.
