Profile Sync Daemon is a tool to move the web browser profile to RAM, using tmpfs, which has the advantage of reducing disk writes (useful for SSDs, some would say), increased speed and responsiveness.

The tool supports most browsers: Chromium, Google Chrome, Firefox (stable, beta, aurora and firefox-trunk), Conkeror, Midori, Opera (including Opera Next) and Qupzilla and is based on an old script (we've covered it on WebUpd8 back in 2009), with some extra features: this is a daemonized script and has recovery protection, as well as support for all the above mentioned browsers as opposed to the old script which only supports Firefox. It's also a lot easier to use.

Since RAM content is cleared on reboot, Profile Sync Daemon automatically syncs the profile back to the physical disk using a symbolic link and rsync at a given time interval. Furthermore, the profile is synced back to the hard disk before you shut down or restart your computer, so no profile data is lost. Still, use it at your own risk!

Earlier this week, the Opera Desktop Team announced Opera 11 "Barracuda" which they say it will bring "another popular Opera feature will be taken to the next level".

While Firefox 4 is still in beta and even though it seems it will be released in March, it might actually be further delayed, the first Firefox 5 mockups are already starting to emerge.

It seems that Mozilla will adopt something called "site-specific" browsers (this is basically the old Prism with a new look) or "desktop apps" starting with Firefox 5, which will have an integrated site menu. Here are some mockups to understand how that will work:

Opera 11 has finally been released! You probably already know what's new in the latest version of this amazing web browser, but let's recap the major new features:

Extension support: this was probably the only feature that Opera was missing for many of us (even though a lot of features for which you must use an extension on other browsers were there by default in Opera). The extensions work just like in Chromium: an icon is displayed next to the search bar (or no icon at all) and you also get an extensions page from where you can disable or uninstall the extensions (to reach this page you either have to right click any extension and select "Manage Extensions" or press Ctrl + Shift + E). You can check out the Opera extensions @ https://addons.opera.com/

After adding a new address field, visual mouse gestures and an updated mail panel last week, Opera 11 beta has been released today with yet another innovation: tab stacking.

The Opera developers have just announced that Opera 11 will finally get extensions support. The announcement also states that porting extensions from other browsers (they are most probably referring to Chrome) will be very easy and the extensions will either display a new button in the browser UI or will run in the background without any UI element.

I don't know about you, but for me this is very exciting news as the extensions (even though opera offers a lot of functionality which you'll not find in other browsers by default) were the only thing that kept me from using Opera as my default web browser.

Alpha builds of Opera 11 will soon be available for download @