Hot on the heals of my Top 5 Firefox Extensions I Can’t Live Without, I have discovered another nifty way to make your Firefox settings more portable.

If you already use the highly-recommended Bookmarks Synchronizer Plugin, then you know the convenience of remote location of your bookmarks, and how handy it is to cart your settings with you across multiple computers and operating systems. Well, while playing with my userContent.css this afternoon, a small, somewhat dim lightbulb went off in my head. I wonder if I could make this as portable as my bookmarks?

Turns out you can. With one oh-so-simple line of code, you too can drag your custom XUL hacks with you across multiple computers.

If you have never experimented with hacking your userContent.css file, well now is the time. For this example we will apply some simple but usable hacks that will change your browsers’ cursors for javascript and external links, as well as improve the look of the Firefox standard error pages. (1)

Download the sample userContent.css file.

The first (and highly recommended) step is to ensure that your custom behaviours actually work the way you want them to. So, locate your profile folder and save the file in that directory as userContent.css. To test whether the styles are working as they are supposed to, restart your browser and then mouse over this link and look for a change in your default cursor. If you see a move-styled cursor, then the sample styles are being applied correctly and you are ready to continue to step two.

The next step is to upload that CSS file to your, or a friend’s, or even your ISP’s web server. I chose to save that file as userContentRemote.css.

Once that is done, open up your local version of userContent.css and replace all of the styles in there with one, very simple, and ever-so-damn-obvious line of code:

@import "http://someserver.com/userContentRemote.css";

It is just so simple I would wager more than a few dollars that I am most certainly not the first person to think of it. But regardless of that, with one simple line of W3C-valid CSS I am able to make my Firefox browser settings portable across as many computers as I can be bothered to use.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.