Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Business Continuity and Browsers

Browsers are increasingly becoming essential tool for business (if they are already not so). We find several good browsers on the internet: Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera and Chrome. All brosers are increasingly focussing on extensions, speed and other user features. 

But business use puts some additional requirements on the browsers. How about 'disaster recovery'? If a PC crashes or  simply browser install gets corrupted, how do we recover from such an event?

The most essential information contained within a browser will be the bookmarks and passwords. While it is easy to export passwords and even sync between several installs of browsers, the case is different in the case of passwords. As far as I know, among the popular prowsers only Chrome, IE and Firefox support exporting passwords (using extensions). Opera and Safari passwords can either not be exported or the solution requires an tool you need to purchase. Even then it is not guaranteed that you will be able to import it into another browser.

I find it very necessary to be able to export/sync passwords and maybe to import it into another browser.