It Sucks Because

• You have no easy way to manage what account links will open with (mailto, calendar, docs)
• You can’t (easily) have to inboxes open at the same time from different accounts
• All of your bookmarks, history, open tabs, plugins sync no matter what account you’re using
• Every account is subject to the same browser plugins permissions
• You are limited to a single private browsing window
• This method doesn’t work for all Google services

How to Make it Better

Chrome and Firefox have the ability to set up multiple user profiles. In Google Chrome go to the settings and click add a new user.

Once you do you’ll have new icon in the top left corner (at least in Chrome) with the icon for the new user. Click this drop down to select your new users and you’ll be prompted to sign into your Google account to start syncing your data. Each profile will be able to sync bookmarks, open tabs, search engines, passwords, and extensions individually so you don’t have to worry about opening your browser at home and seeing all your research tabs from work.
Using multiple profiles allows you to have multiple windows open each with their own Google profile signed in. Any mailto, calendar, or docs links will open in the browser window (and Google profile) of the last active window.
You now have the ability to also open multiple private browsing windows (one for each profile) for testing websites without cache, and logging in with additional credentials. Don’t want to test a new browser extension with your Google Apps domain admin user? Test it, and its security, on your personal account first without worrying about it stealing confidential information.

Why It’s Still Not Perfect

• No way to set a shortcut to control which profile opens initially (opens last used profile)
• No ability to selectively sync content between profiles*
• Multiple users are not supported on mobile browsers
• Switching users/windows may get confusing if you have a lot open

I have been using this method of managing my browsing habits and Google accounts for about a year now and I would never go back to the old multi sign on method. Got any tips for Google account management and browser syncing? Please leave them in the comments.

*I am able to sync selective content by using 3rd party services for my passwords and bookmarks. I use LastPass and Diigo under a single account and just install the extensions in each browser profile.

I want to start with something that has been around for a long long time but I have just recently started using it. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. What does that mean? Think of it as a myspace/facebook/last.fm of bookmarks. What you do is you bookmark things in your browser, just like you normally would, but the bookmark is actually stored with del.icio.us instead of locally on your computer. Once you bookmark something you can see who else has also bookmarked the same thing, and then see what else they are bookmarking. You can also create networks of people and keep up to date on the things they are bookmarking. It makes finding new things a little bit easier. It is also great because you have access to all of your bookmarks where ever you are.

The next thing I found is by a company called Cooliris and it is a plugin called Previews. The first noticeable thing it does is it adds a extra button you can click when you hover over links in your browser. The picture below shows it better than I can say it.

If you click/hover over that question mark blue book thingy it will bring up a window showing where the link goes. But it does it all without leaving your current window.

You can still browse just as you normally would inside the smaller windows and you can also join the window to your current Firefox session by clicking the tab button. You can also skip to the next link on the page or email the link to someone. Not that emailing links to people is new, but doing it without leaving your current browser window is pretty new to me. You do have to sign up with a Cooliris account for email, which is a obvious downside, but that is only if you want to use the email feature.

As if my right click menu wasn’t crowded enough, it also gave me a couple new features to highlight text and do a google, google image, wikipedia, or dictionary search all without leaving my page.

If you are doing a Google image search outside of Previews and want to view all the results as a slide show Previews can do that too. Simply do the search and hover over one of the image results then click on the play button.

But slide shows is where my next plugin comes in. This next one is called PicLens and it is also made by Cooliris. This is the coolest browser plugin I have ever seen. It makes me want to buy a touch screen display just to have this running at my desk at all times. Cooliris has a pretty cool video of the plugin in action and I will try to capture what it does in a couple screenshots.

The first thing that happens is you get this new icon.

Then whenever you click the icon to launch Piclens you get a full screen 3D wall. Each icon represents a story, picture, video, or search result. You can then click on each picture and it will play the video, show a summary of the story, or display the picture.

The categories are on the top left side and the search is top right.

You use the bottom blue bar to scroll through the wall.

When you click on a video it starts playing automatically.

You can also double click to make it go full screen or play a slide show.

I really can’t describe how smooth and great looking this plugin is. I also can’t explain how much memory the thing eats! Seriously, don’t try to fold proteins or play Unreal Tournament 3 in the background while this is running.

One other reason I thought Piclens was so cool is they have a WordPress plugin; yes I installed it. The plugin adds a link to the bottom of each post and you can click on it to view all the pictures in that post without needing to install Piclens. That is pretty cool but it isn’t super useful seeing as there aren’t a whole lot of pictures to look at on my blog. What it is good for is viewing something like a gallery. Thanks to some cleaver people they found a way to do it with Gallery2.

I installed the needed items on my gallery and you can have a look at it here. What you do is just go to the gallery and click the play button that shows up on any image when you mouse over it. Piclens will then load up and show the current image using the 3D wall.

All you need to do to make Piclens work with your Gallery2 installation is upload this xml.php file the file here to the root of your Gallery2 installation and then edit the theme.tpl file for whatever theme you are using. Make sure you rename the xml.php_.txt file to just xml.php. I am using carbon as my theme so I found the file in gallery2/themes/carbon/templates/ folder on my server. To edit the file you need to find the line that has

{if $theme.pageType == ‘album’}
{g->theme include=”album.tpl”}

and add

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”MediaRSS:{$theme.item.title}”
href=”/gallery2/xml.php?g2_itemId={$theme.item.id}” />

on a new line right after the first text.

That was it. It works fine for me on two computers with Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7 but please let me know if you find that it doesn’t work in other browsers or other operating systems (I am too lazy to turn on my mac).

Please also let me know in the comments if you have found any other browser plugins that I may not know about.