I have been using Firefox for a while now and whereas version 2 has been good, it has been plagued with a memory leak that gets so bloated that I have to re-start the browser every couple of hours. So when they announced Firefox 3, I kept wanting to try it out but decided to hold off on the beta builds until they were more stable. Well, they finally came out with the first Release Candidate version, and I decided it’s time to take the plunge.

Lifehacker has a helpful article (as is often the case) on getting Firefox 3 up and running. The most useful tip is getting old extensions to work with the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

Unfortunately, not all was well with the upgrade. After installing Firefox 3 and the Nightly Tester Tools extension to force extension compatibility, Firefox kept crashing on startup. So I had to start it in Safe Mode and disable all the extensions. I then tested them one by one to find out which one really wasn’t compatible. Here’s the good news, the extensions that worked:

• Adblock Plus
• All-in-One Gestures
• coComment (not working completely, does not collect comments)
• Diigo Toolbar
• Email This!
• Google Gears [updated]
• Google Toolbar for Firefox [updated 6/17/2008]
• Grab and Drag
• Greasemonkey
• IE View Lite
• Image Zoom
• Nightly Tester Tools
• Tab Mix Plus (after installing developer build)

And here were the ones that didn’t:

• del.icio.us Complete
• Google Browser Sync (discontinued via Lifehacker)
  

Firefox 3 does seem to be more stable and the memory leak seems to be better contained. With the previous version, the site that caused the worst runaway memory leaks was Google Sites, so I’m leaving it open to see how well Firefox 3 copes with it. Regardless, it looks like the general direction is positive. Now if Google would just show Firefox 3 some love, all would be good.

Update: After trying to use the del.icio.us Complete extension, realized it didn’t work and it looks like this extension is no longer being developed. Had to switch to del.icio.us official Firefox extension.

Update: When trying to install Firefox 3 rc3 on my Thinkpad with Vista, ran into this Windowblinds bug. Upgrading to the latest version of Windowblinds 6.1 build 97 eliminated the problem.

I can’t even remember when I first started to save and preserve my internet bookmarks from version to version, computer to computer, and even in the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox (I’m sure it didn’t go all the way back to my Netscape browsing days). Well, last week, I finally went through my old bookmarks that have been stagnating in my Firefox browser ignored and unused.

I used to spend a lot of time organizing and maintaining them, but in the last few years, I’ve slowly moved away from using them, having found more effective solutions online. Hence the title of this post, which is in reference to an increasingly popular concept, cloud computing. This is the notion that instead of storing information, in this example bookmarks, locally on my computer, I save them on the web, or “in the clouds”.

Here’s a list of web applications that I use in place of my old bookmarks folders and some descriptions of how I use them:

• del.icio.us: any interesting sites that I want to ‘bookmark’ go into this account, which I also publish as an RSS feed.
• Bloglines: RSS feed reader to keep up with news items published from websites that I follow.
• Google Maps: geographical tagging of locations which I frequent or would like to check out.
• Google Docs: organized notes of topics that I have researched online
• Google Web History: using the Google Toolbar I have an online accessible record of my browsing history which is also searchable in case I want to find a site that I visited before but forgot to record.
• Remember the Milk: task list of things to do, websites to visit, topics to research, etc.
• diigo: in conjunction with a Firefox add-on, I can annotate and highlight web documents.
• Amazon Wishlist: for products that I am interested in or want to keep track of.
• Review sites: keep track of those items which I have tried or would like to try.
  • Yelp: restaurants and stores
  • Flixster: movies
  • Goodreads: books

By definition, these applications are accessible from any computer or device that can go online. But that is also one of their downsides, since for the most part they cannot be accessed offline. That is until offline solutions like Google Gears are more widely implemented.

Another interesting thing that I noticed as I was putting together this post was that these web applications are more than just a repository for what I used to use as ‘bookmarks’. They provide a richer experience and collection of all the things that I do both online AND offline. I guess I should re-word the title, but ‘Stuff in the Clouds’ just didn’t sound right.

I have been wanting to find a way to consolidate the different comments that I make around the web at different blogs or forums, and I came upon this web service called coComment, which does exactly that. It allows me to keep track of my comments (through a firefox extension) and view them all together in a running report. The other nice thing for my own blog is that I can also display the most recent comments that I have made in my sidebar on the right (on the main page).

I have also made the comments on philomyth.us compatible with coComment, so that if you want to use it yourself, you can track your own coComments here as well. Actually, coComment has some other useful features, but these are the ones that I found most interesting and beneficial.