Tag Archives: google

Mozilla Firefox Sync Awesomeness

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When I recently rebuilt my laptop, I switched back from Google’s Chromium browser to instead use Mozilla Firefox. Whilst I really liked Chromium, there were a few specific reasons which push me more towards Firefox:

  1. I trust the Mozilla Foundation to uphold my desire for producing a great browser more than I trust Google. This isn’t because I believe Google to be evil, but rather that Google’s motivations are to sell advertising, whereas Mozilla’s is to produce a great browser.
  2. The performance issues that pushed me away from Firefox 3 have largely been rectified, reducing the benefit of Chromium.
  3. Standardising my systems on Firefox, means I can make use of Firefox Sync

This last one is of particular interest to me – Firefox Sync is a feature which allows all your Firefox instances to synchronise data between themselves, using a freely provided public server or your own server.

I think this is one of the most compelling user feature improvements since they released version 1.5 IMHO – the ability to synchronise my bookmarks, credentials, history and best of all, open tabs lists, allows me to effortlessly have multiple devices for browsing without dealing with the frustrating issue of the bookmark or saved password being on the other machine.

For example, I setup a Firefox instance on my Linux laptop, Windows VM and my phone and could see all the tabs between them:

Tabs from Linux laptop's POV

Tabs from Windows VM's POV

Tabs from Firefox on Android's POV

I’ve found this tab synchronization to be one of the most useful features, it makes it so much easier to find an article I was in the process of reading to finish whilst I have free time when traveling.

If you’re one of those people with multiple devices (desktops, laptops, work machine, personal machine, tablets, phones, etc) it makes life so much simpler. And as long as you have Firefox 4+, it ships as a native feature.

For details about using Firefox Sync and how it works see Mozilla’s details on the service and/or read the getting started with Firefox Sync FAQ.

 

As you probably know if you ever read my blog, I’m pretty keen on using an entirely open source stack – and so Firefox Sync is naturally fully open source, including both the client (Firefox) and the server components.

This lack of an open source server kills Chromium for me, since the Chrome sync relies on your Google Account and their servers. :-(

Using Mozilla’s open source sync server isn’t as easy as I’d like it to be… building a working server from their source code and limited documentation is a bit of a mission, particularly when some documentation is outdated and doesn’t apply to the latest commit, or when troubleshooting documentation barely exists.

However I’ve managed to successfully package RPMs against CentOS 5 for sync server and dependencies and am currently running further tests before I release them. Ideally I’ll make some time to build them against CentOS 6 as well (done them against CentOS 5 first, since that’s my current production host OS of choice – also the hardest since the version of python it ships with is too old).

With support for SQLite, LDAP, MySQL and Memcache it’s quite flexible and designed to scale to the huge user volumes that Mozilla undoubtedly have – I’ve been running tests with SQLite, but will be having a play with MySQL and OpenLDAP over the next few days as it would be nice to align it to my existing LDAP server.

Expect another blog post later this week with details on how to obtain the RPM packages, along with instructions on setting up your own sync server. It only took me about 3 days full effort of packaging weird python dependencies and getting a working set of configuration and spec files for the sync server to make this stuff work, so hopefully someone is actually interested!

100% pure freedom phone?

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As per my earlier rant about Android’s openness, I’m not particularly happy with all the binary components on my phone, nor am I particularly happy with the Android Market’s control and lack of clarity around licensing.

There’s multiple issues with propietary software and why I’ve always been an advocate for not just open source, but more importantly, software freedom. In particular, I try and structure all my computing environments so that I can:

  • Always customize the applications I use if needed – this could be bug fixes, feature changes, etc.
  • Having advertisement and tracking/spyware free software. I’d rather pay good money for software than have it advertisement supported or selling my information to others.
  • Have no dependence on gatekeepers running centralized services – I prefer to run distributed federated services, such as SMTP, (Email) and XMPP (IM) for communications, rather than relying on proprietary networks (eg imessage, skype).
  • Full control and responsibility for the security and privacy of my own data, rather than outsourcing to cloud providers.

It seems it would be possible to replace most of the proprietary components that Google supplies with open source components, but in a quick search I didn’t find any Android distributions that have this bundled up into an easy packaged solution.

One of the more popular distributions, Cynaogenmod has some nice features and is open source, but isn’t specifically designed to be *only* open source, whereas I want a distribution that focuses on making it easy to find, install and manage open source software only.

So I’m making plans to do a custom build of Android for my phone which will feature only free as in freedom software components, with the exception of the hardware driver binary blobs.

  • Replace Android Market with the all-open source F-Droid application – this market is 100% open source and both the client and server are open source, so you can even start your own market. One particularly good feature, is the ability to install older versions, I’ve been bitten in the past with updates introducing bugs in the past with no rollback.
  • Email is well handled with open standards IMAP and IMAP IDLE – I’ve been using K9 Mail for some time (open source build of Android’s email client with additional tweaks) and it works beautifully. With the IMAP IDLE functionality, my phone gets notified about the new mail message within a few seconds of the mailserver completing the processing of the message through to my inbox.
  • Replace contact sync with an LDAP contact directory and sync tool to go against that. LDAP is supported by most address book applications and is something I want to use for all my contacts to make it easier to move between applications.
  • Obtain an XMPP client to replace google talk with support for any XMPP/Jabber server desired, whether Google or another server. Considering I use my own XMPP server already, this is something that’s been on my list for a while.
  • Use aCal with an open source CalDAV server (such as DAViCal) for sharing calenders between devices.
  • Replace google maps with open street maps.
  • This would also offer the advantage of not needing to use Google’s cloud services for storing my address book information, something I’ve never particularly liked the idea of, but was somewhat forced upon in the early days of Android 1.5.

As part of this change, I would also end up dumping Android Market and going with only open source applications for Android – the downside will of course be less application selection, but the up side would be less crapware, no adware applications and full control to install any version and manage applications better.

And the end result would be a truly free, open source Android OS on my phone, which I have full control over, with all data stored on either my phone or servers under my control.

I’ll be fitting in the work as I get time slowly replacing components till I have a reliable fully open stack on my phone and blogging my progress. :-)