I read quite a few blogs. My usual process for doing that is to browse through my list of unread items and then open up a new Firefox tab for each article that I want to read. Then I take time throughout the day to read through the open tabs that I have. For the most part, this system worked really well for me with a few exceptions.
One of those exceptions was when I installed a new extension. In order to complete the installation of a new extension, you need to restart Firefox. With 1.x versions of Firefox, you would lose all of your open tabs if you restarted Firefox. That meant that I would lose all of my unread blog articles if I installed a new extension. I would often wait an entire day to restart Firefox because I needed time to go through my blogs. It was a major pain but something that I could work around.
However, if Firefox crashed then I was totally screwed. After going through that a few times, I looked around for something that would remember what tabs I had open so that I could back them up. I chanced upon SessionSaver and used that for a while. It worked really well and all was good.
But then I had another problem. I use Firefox on my PC at work as well as on my PC and Mac at home. A lot of times, I found that I would come home and want to continue reading an article that I had started at work. Unless I saved that article in my local bookmarks or in del.icio.us, I would lose track of it.
If only I had a solution that could combine SessionSaver's ability to back up my open tabs while also saving that data to a central server so that I could reference it from different computers.
That brings me to Google Browser Sync. This extension "...continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions."
While I didn't think about it at first, synchronizing cookies has been one of the nicer features. Since most sites use cookies to remember you when you log in. By synchronizing cookies between browsers, Browser Sync lets me stay logged in to a site at home even though I logged into while I was at work.
Now with something this good, there are always downsides. In order to provide this magical synchronization service, Google has to store the data somewhere. Their choice is to save the data on their servers. For me, that's not a big deal. But there are some folks that don't like having their personal data exposed to Google. To appease those folks, Google does let you adjust the settings of the extension to decide what data you would like to synchronize.
Overall, Browser Sync definitely qualifies as a must-have extension. I'd be lost without it as I try to synchronize my sessions between home and work. Give it a try and let me know if you think it's a must-have.