Friday June 25, 2004

When I read a book, I buy three copies and keep one in my briefcase and two in my house -- one upstairs and one downstairs. Usually, the briefcase copy is a paperback for portability. Having multiple copies is very convenient, but keeping track of where I am in the book is challenging -- I have a bookmark in each book, but they of course aren't in sync and it takes some time to figure out where I last stopped reading.

Well, of course I don't read books this way -- that would be silly. But this is exactly the situation for us people who read the Internet from multiple machines. I have three copies of Mozilla at home -- one on my iMac, one on my XP box, one on my Linux box. Each with a different set of bookmarks on them.

This is totally unnecessary. Why not have Mozilla optionally store the bookmarks in a network repository reachable from all of my Mozilla instances? One easy and obvious place would be in a Bookmarks mail folder on my IMAP server. There might be other configuration state that would be usefully stored in the network as well, but I'd be happy to have my bookmarks accessible from any of my clients.

Of course, this idea could be expanded by specifying a standard bookmark representation (XML would do nicely here) and by modifying all of the major browsers to support the format. But why not start with Mozilla?

This blog entry is one in a series on why storing state in the network is superior to keeping it on a client device. If you use multiple clients (cellphone, PDA, laptop, desktop) you should be thinking seriously about this issue.