Saturday 4 February 2012

Sync Firefox addons using Dropbox

I wanted to blog about this a while back but I've been to lazy to do so. I've done this a couple of month ago irritated on the fact that Firefox was unable to sync my addons across computers and I think it was a mistake on their part.

Anyway, this is very easy to do using Dropbox.

First close down Firefox and then go to:

~/.mozilla/firefox

You can use Nautilus for this, is probably faster and easier too. In there should be one folder for each user in Firefox. Go to the one you want to sync the addons with. Probably will be the one with "*.default" in it if you don't have any users in Firefox.

Within that folder will be another folder called:

extentions
Will be this folder the one we are going to sync. Cut this folder on place it in your Dropbox folder. I place mine in:

Dropbox/App_sync/Firefox
 Once you pasted the folder in the right place, right click it and select
Make link
Now cut the link and place it on the folder where we got the original "extensions" folder. Once you placed it in the right place rename it with the original name and that's it.

The only drop back with this method is that Dropbox is not very good at syncing multiple computers at the same time. If you have multiple Firefox opened in different computers and start installing/removing addons at the same time it may give you a problem.