Mozilla Backup 1.2 ReleasedSaturday January 3rd, 2004Pavel Cvrcek (a member of CZilla team) has released Mozilla Backup 1.2. He writes: "Mozilla Backup is a tool for backing up and restoring Mozilla profiles. Version 1.2 adds better backup files, multilanguage support, support for Netscape and some new features. In addition several crash bugs have been fixed." unfortunately, this seems to be written in a Windows-only non-portable way. Given that Mozilla is a portable app that runs on many platforms this is a pity. My thoughts exactly. It would be very nice to see a Linux/*BSD/MacOS version. More than native versions, what about a XUL/JS based version using Mozilla as a middleware? Before you ask, the title is for dramatic effect but, partially true. I think that Mozilla as much as it touts XML in everything, should have a universal format for settings, bookmarks, mail, calendars, etc. This should be platform aganostic and be designed with the fact that are multiple mozilla apps (Mozilla Suite, Firebird, Thunderbird, Custom mozilla based apps, etc.) that could be under on directory and could be used seemlessly. This would also make for more robust and usable profiles. I would like to use my profile when my brother is logged in to the family computer for instance. I would like to read my email in either the Mozilla Suite Mail App or Thunderbird. The unifying thing would be my profile that is usable in any app. This would simplify the whole backing up process and would enable something much more important though, the ability to test my data on beta versions without having to manually copy it over (which is something I already have to do). It would also be easier to create 3rd party apps with a standardized XML file format so that 3rd parties could put in their own data and tags along-side Mozilla's. Don't get me wrong though, I love and appreciate Mozilla Backup. I use it and I think it's very valuable and my previous post isn't intended to dampen or demean the project but, I think that there is a whole seperate program for backing up data and not something that is in Mozilla itself is a great usablity hinderance. The fact that data doesn't move across programs and is kinda hard to backup and isn't automated within mozilla itself isn't as smooth as needs to be. Just having a *complete* explanation of Mozilla's saved state would be a nice start. There are scads of .db files (some surely leftovers from previous versions, but nothing ever says so) and half a dozen .js files, plus a bunch of .rdf files, the plugin registry, .mab/.nab/.na2 files, and miscellaneous oddments. I run a fleet of public workstations, and we've punted the whole idea of trying to save profiles for our six million potential users, so every time you sit down at one of our stations is the first time as far as Mozilla is concerned. Just try to find the place where Mozilla stores the URL for the one-time page it shows at first startup (which we want to point to our own site, since that's where our users expect to start). This is actually easier to arrange with IE6, *ahem*. This is no doubt a very nice app for those who use Windows. It would be great if the author would document what exactly the program does and how it does it so that others who want to implement a portable version would have an easier start. This is great, but wouldn't it be better to just fix the profile corruption bug, since it strikes at the heart of why people use a web browser? sPh |