Posts Tagged ‘Firefox extension’

Google Notebook Extension for Firefox 3.5

Well, I read the reviews for Firefox 3.5 which were favorable to say the least, downloaded it and fired it up. Then the dialogue appeared: The following extensions are incompatible blah blah ……… Google Notebook. I was not happy, I rely on this extension to a level that is stupid. I spend a lot of time online and this extension enabled me to highlight just about anything, right click and save to Google Notebook. The long and short of this is that everything that I have come across that I have deemed interesting or potentially useful is part of one, now huge, searchable database.

Other Google notebook users are much more organized than me and use the tool in a much more organized way, having different notebooks for different topics, tagged and organized. To me this took away the main point which was an ultra fast, ultra convenient tool, that did one thing very very well.

Anyway, enough of the rambling, The author of the blog, Google System has come up with a brilliantly simple way of installing the Google Notebook extension on Firefox 3.5

Download this:

http://dl.google.com/firefox/google-notebook.xpi

The file was at this location yesterday, if it is no longer available here or at the link in the instructions please let me know in the comments.

Then follow these instructions.

* save the extension to your computer: right-click and select “save link as”.
* download 7-zip, an excellent open-source software for archiving files, and install it.
* right-click on the extension (google-notebook.xpi), click on “7-zip” and then on “open archive”. Right-click on “install.rdf”, select “Edit” and replace “3.0.*” with “3.5.*”. Save the file, close Notepad and update the archive.
* now you can drag the .xpi file to your browser and install the extension.

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Firefox For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

This is bare bones, go to this site for much more info including a good discussion about the merits of other note taking software and a link and instructions for Internet Explorer users.

Google Notebook is being discontinued although it will still be available for existing users, Google argue that Google Docs have made it redundant. This is crap, they occupy very different niches. The company doesn’t get much wrong but this is one decision that should be reversed, after all Google are all about the concept of the “Cloud”, i.e. remote applications and data storage, and it doesn’t get much more cloud than Google Notebook.

No Google Browser sync for Firefox 3 – ever

Check update at bottom of this post – Easy fix for Google Notebook Firefox extension not working in later browsers.

This is irritating although not catastrophic

Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

This is a surprise, I’ve just got used to GBS (Google Browser Sync) doing its thing behind the scenes and have come to take for granted the fact that the browsers on all three of my computers would look the same and have the same bookmarks.

Judging by the comments there are free products that have most of the functionality but none that sync passwords- this will be the real pain. I will be loading the Firefox extension Foxmarks later on today, from what I can gather they store bookmarks on the web and most people seem to like the service. The bookmarks on the web thing does feel a bit retro though. I liked the fact that GBS worked in the background and was very unobtrusive.

This commenter (on the original article) raises an obvious point:

g33k at 12:32 PM on 06/13/08

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Call me Captain Obvious, but why don’t they just open-source the thing and let the OSS community take it and run with it? That way, they don’t have to do any more work and those people who value the extension will be able to still use it. Like one of the previous posters said, GBS did password syncing, which I found valuable. Excluding some bookmarks was also nice.

*

The discontinuation of GBS may not be critical but it got me thinking about just how much of my computer based stuff is tied up with Google and that if they pulled the plug on some of these other services I would be, well screwed is the politest term that comes to mind:

I have two years of work on Google Notes and if that were to go the way of GBS I would be in trouble – I have literally thousands of notes in maybe 50 or so notebooks from a period (I think) of over 3 years. There is no way that I could copy and paste all of these into something else.

I am going to have to think on this a little.

UPDATE: Easy solution here