For the longest time I've been using quite a number of Firefox extensions. The known problem with that is a steady slowdown, which is only amplified by my habit of soft bookmarks, i.e. having hundreds of open tabs with their corresponding state (which is the whole reason to do that).
However seeing that a lot of state is captured in a very inconvenient form, that is, it's hard to modify a long list of tabs, I want to make both this and incidentally also sharing of state between sessions and even browsers much easier.
The idea is to separate part of the browser state into a separate component, namely a database server for cookies (and other local storage), tabs, sessions and bookmarks. This way and by having a coarse control over loading of sessions the process of migrating state between sessions and browsers should be much easier.
Fortunately most of the browser extensions APIs seem to be usable enough to make this work for at least Firefox and Chrome, so at the moment I'm prototyping the data exchange. Weird as it is for Chrome you have to jump through some conversion hoops (aka local native extensions via a local process exchanging data via stdio), so it seems that the Firefox APIs, since they allow socket connections, are a bit friendlier to use. That said, the exchange format for Chrome, Pascal string encoded JSON, seems like a good idea with the exception of forcing local endianess, which is completely out of the question for a possibly network enabled system (which is to say, I'm definitely going to force network byte order instead).
