No, this isn’t an “Internet Explorer is crap” article.

This was very frustrating. I was rewriting the CSS for the web site I’ll be opening up later today, doing a first test of the changes in Firefox, and none of the changes were showing up on the page.

Using Firebug and XRAY, the changes weren’t even appearing in the CSS as they reported it.

I started out tweaking the CSS and became more and more confused as the changes I was doing failed to make any impact on the appearance of the page. Once I found that they weren’t being recognized I thought that Firefox must be caching the CSS file and not reloading it… I found an extension to give me a handy “clear cache” button… that didn’t do it… I went into the preferences and cleared the cache by hand… no good.

I tried the page under Safari and it rendered the way I expected it to. I tweaked the CSS and saw the effects of the tweak. That was good news… but why wasn’t Firefox working? I’d never run into this kind of problem with it before.
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I use two computers for development - a portable (MacBook Pro) and a desktop (Mac Pro). It’s helpful having the two different environments, and it’s helpful having a backup in case one of them has a problem. It does open up all sorts of issues about keeping things in sync.

I primarily use Firefox as my development web browser, for reasons I’ll get into in another article. I keep a set of bookmarks in Firefox for all the blogs and web sites I’m working with, as well as other online tools that I use (Google AdSense, Google Analytics, LinkShare…), and Firefox remembers login information for all my accounts.

It’s a pain in the ass duplicating things across instances of Firefox.

That’s where Google comes in. Google has provided a free Firefox extension which will synchronize Firefox’s bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and even open tabs and windows, across instances of Firefox.
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