Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s shameful. Seasoned Web developer-for-a-living like me should have automatically switched to FireFox sometime in the 14th century or so. That is to say, yeah, I’m late here.

But the problem has been my multiplicity of Macintoshes. I regularly use three Macs: my MacBook Pro (work/primary), my dual G5 (fun/image processing) and our Mac Mini (entertainment/media). I clung to OS X’s Safari browser for so long because I have Apple’s .Mac service, which automatically synchs a whole buncha crap between these three machines every so often (every hour in my case). Synching included bookmarks–but only for Safari, of course.

I just couldn’t wean myself onto the Truly Awesome Deity that is FireFox because I needs me my bookmarks. And no way am I going to manually manage bookmarks on three machines. I need some centralized bookmarking, hard.

So several paragraphs ago, you, savvy reader, were probably shaking your head in condescending disbelief, uttering “del.icio.us, you moron”. And you’d be right, except that a) I don’t want to have to click (several clicks) to a Web site every time I want to find one of my bookmarks, and b) I also need to store private links, like bank sites.

But, Oh, lordy, the del.icio.us FireFox extension rocks my socks off. It replaces the bookmark management in FireFox with my centrally-stored del.icio.us bookmarks and allows me to bundle bookmarks by tags, or whatever, and search them instantly. That means I can have lots of my day-to-day bookmarks right in my task bar (or whatever) but not have all of the more miscellaneous, rarely-used stuff in my face. Viva la organization! And, since everything is central to del.icio.us, bookmarks are instantly updated and kept synched across all of my installations of FireFox. All I can shout is “YAY!” “FINALLY!”

I’m off to debug some JavaScript now with the eminently fabulous FireBug extension now…