So tonight I get home from work and get the call up from the boss saying one of our clients would like me to copy 68GB of data from a Linux server to a USB drive attached to a USB1.1 port on a Windows server. Oh, and it has to be done before the backup starts processing at midnight.

Now, I dunno how many of you know how fast USB 1.1 is, but its damn slow. Off the top of my head, it tops out at about 12Mb/s. USB 2.0 being up to 480Mb/s I think (runs off to Google to make sure …. …. …. …. YAY! I was right.) What this means is that if you have a hard drive plugged in to a USB 1.1 port, it don’t mean squat that you’re copying data across a gigabit LAN when you go from 1Gb/s all the way down to, at best, 12Mb/s. Thats like trying to squeeze a melon through a hole the size of a lemon (to steal a certain phrase some women have used.)

Anyway, 3 hours later I called them up and said theres no way its going to get done before the backups happen at midnight and I’d rather let it happen during the day when we can leave it running without worrying about the backups or anything else. This isn’t the live database by the way. Its the standby database in case the server running the live database drops off the face of the planet. So at worst its 24 hours behind. The new system we’re waiting on them to OK will fix that with a nice fat HA cluster and journaling databases running on another big blade system. But all this is completely beside the point.

What I really wanted to say was that I’ve finally given to running Firefox 3.0RC1 at home. After getting so used to it at work (I run the portableapps.com version of Firefox on the Windows computers I use at work) I decided it was about time I installed it at home properly and found work arounds to the main issues I’ve got with it.

Ultimately, my biggest issue was the lack of a Google Toolbar. There are several features of the toolbar I use, but most importantly is the ability to easily access Google Bookmarks. I just happen to be one of those that uses Google to store all my bookmarks. I also use Google History, but without the Google Toolbar for Firefox 3.0, that is essentially gone till they release the toolbar.

So I sat down and started looking through Firefox addons in the hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be one or two that let me access my bookmarks. And what do you know, there are a few that are not too shabby.

The first one I installed is called Google Bookmarks Button Reloaded and at its core it provides a button on your toolbar that allows you to see your bookmarks, as well as Star pages. Essentially exactly what you’d be looking at by default on the Google Toolbar itself. Very nice little addon and a LOT faster than the Google Toolbar for some reason. Definitely not complaining there.

The second one I installed is the GMarks addon. This one offers a lot more features. Essentially it provides all the features for Google Bookmarks that you had in Firefox 2′s native bookmarks. So a sidebar, a manager and so on. Theres also a menu, Star button and so on. Very useful.

Both support nested labels. This is a must. When I first imported all my bookmarks from Firefox into Google, it took all the folders and separated the various levels of folders with a : character. In both the addons, you can specific the separated character and they will display the labels nested like folders again. Very useful and makes navigating the bookmarks a lot easier.

There are definitely features of the Google Toolbar I’m going to continue missing (such as Pagerank and Google History.) However the access to Google Bookmarks was ultimately the main reason holding me back from using Firefox 3 at home. Now that I’ve resolved that, its time to look for things like an updated WebDeveloper toolbar and and an updated Firebug. Wish those would hurry up and get sorted out. Very much missing them already. So I still find myself in Firefox 2 for my development stuff.

Is Firefox 3 ready for primetime? Not yet. They need to really start pushing the Addon developers to update their code in a big way. There are very fundamental addons, such as Google Toolbar and Firebug, that they really need to ensure are available when Firefox 3 is finally released as a full product.

The browser itself is solid and finished as far as I’m concerned. On both Windows and Linux. I don’t use my Mac much anymore. Now lets get the extra stuff running for those already using older versions of Firefox.