Firefox, FTP, and Sync

I've used Filezilla for the last few years for FTP. It's got a few quirks, but it works pretty well. And it has a Mac version (and Linux) which I need.

Recently I started using the FireFTP Firefox add on. It's only at version .99 but it seems to work fine. And of course, like most Firefox add ons, it's also cross-platform.

It's another example of the "browser as a platform" trend.

The more I do on the browser, and on multiple computers (work, home, laptop), the more I want to sync my browser "environment" - mostly cookies and passwords.

Up until recently I was using Google Browser Sync to do this. Again, it had some quirks, but it mostly worked. But Google has dropped the project. They recommend using Mozilla Weave. At first, I couldn't even download Weave (maybe they got swamped with traffic?) I now have it installed (a somewhat painful process) but it takes a long time to sync - a lot longer than Google did.

It underscores how performance is a lot about perception. If they didn't display a "working" dialog it would be less painfully obvious how long it took. Unless I'm rebooting, I don't really care how long a program takes to shut down, as long as it doesn't make me watch the process. Although browser restarts (required by updates) would be slower.

Weave is only at version 0.2 so hopefully it will improve. I'll use it a while longer and see.