dale lane

Imagine the scene.

You are sat at your computer, reading a fascinating article online.

You’re about halfway through reading it when something comes up and you need to leave your desk.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finish reading the page on your mobile? (Without needing to remember how you found the webpage, or what the URL is?)

With this Firefox extension, you can. 🙂

When Firefox properly release their new mobile browser, and Weave starts to deliver on the promise of browser data in the cloud, then this sort of thing will all come out of the box.

But this hack might help fill the gap while we wait for that.

I will write a few posts explaining how I implemented some of the more interesting bits of this, but in the meantime I thought I’d start by showing the end result.

What you do

Click on the toolbar icon showing the mobile phone with the arrow going into it.

The page currently open in Firefox will be sent to your mobile phone and opened in Pocket Internet Explorer.

Or, coming back the other way…

Click on the toolbar icon showing the mobile phone with the arrow coming out from it.

The page currently open in Pocket Internet Explorer will be received from your mobile phone and opened on your computer in Firefox.

After all, why keep reading something on a two-inch screen when you get back your computer? Move it to your computer and finish reading something there.

What it needs

The hack has been written to use:

• Firefox – I’m using Firefox 3, but it should run on Firefox 2 as well
• Windows Mobile – I’m using Pocket Internet Explorer on a Windows Mobile 6 phone, but it should work with WM5 as well
• ActiveSync – I don’t make my own connection to the mobile, instead using RAPI to reuse an existing ActiveSync connection. (Which makes this all sadly rather Windows-specific)

How to install it

You need the Firefox extension (v0.6).

If you unzip the archive, you’ll find a Firefox extension xpi file inside which you can open with Firefox to install.

(Unfortunately my web host won’t let me host .xpi files, so I’m putting it in a zip as a workaround)

In order to get the current page from the mobile, I also need to run some code on the phone. This needs to be installed using this Windows Mobile extension.

(Sending a web page from your computer to your mobile will work fine without this – you need the bit of code on the phone to go back the other way.)

Known limitations

Pages are transferred by URL, so if a website redirects mobile browsers to a different page, then you might not end up with the same page on your phone that you had on your computer. (E.g. if you are looking at http://twitter.com/ then click on the toolbar button, it’ll probably be http://m.twitter.com/ that gets opened on your phone).

If you have your Firefox in a sandbox to limit it’s administrative privileges, (e.g. you run it with something like DropMyRights) then you might need to fiddle with the executables that the Firefox extension runs, otherwise they may not be allowed to run.

Tags: cloud, firefox, mobile, sync, windows mobile, windowsmobile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.