General Question Regarding Standalone

mapmaker

Just a question out of naivety. I've been quite happy with the Zotero add-on to Firefox but am a little bit curious about the Standalone now that it is out in alpha. I'm wondering if someone might be able to provide a list of reasons why I (and others) should take a look at the Standalone. I understand there are memory issues and some would prefer to use other browsers, but are there other reasons to consider the Standalone?

Thnaks

adamsmith

no. If you're happy with Firefox and that's your default browser there's absolutely no reason to use the standalone.

arinbasu

I am quite excited to see standalone Zotero. However, my experience with standalone Zotero at this stage (?pre alpha/alpha) has not been pleasant at all.

I downloaded the linux version (Zotero_linux-i686.tar.bz2), extracted and started the ./zotero from terminal window. For the first two minutes it showed alright, and I could see the familiar Zotero "box". However, once it started syncing with my Zotero account, the program hanged up. The machine almost froze (it's an old machine, 512 MB RAM, running Antix (Debian) distro. I cannot seem to use Zotero at all. I did not run Firefox and Zotero simultaneously, in fact, I uninstalled Zotero from my firefox 4.0 beta 11 build.

Any idea what may be the problem? As a comparison, Firefox 4.0 beta 11 runs alright and is quite fast on this machine.

adamsmith

As a start, try working without sync, or at least without automatic sync to get a sense of whether things are working in general.
Then, considering that you have a very, slow computer with small RAM - how long did you let Zotero run trying to sync before quitting? If you do a full sync that might take up a good amount of resources.
Also, did the terminal say anything?

protein function

OK, now its is Q3 2013 and I will be installing Zotero on a new Windows device shortly. I have loved Zotero for Firefox for many, many years -especially its feature set, syncing and stability of recent years - but find myself dabbling with Chrome and IE. I love the Bookmarklet 'app' which gives you the freedom to be browser agnostic. Is the standalone the way to go? Does it have the same rich feature set, syncing and stability of the FF add-in?

adamsmith

You can look at the 3rd slide here for a basic comparison:
http://www.slideshare.net/adam3smith/intro-zotero

Standalone looks basically the same, syncing&stability is the same. There are some downsides in terms of import - especially using the bookmarklet. But if you're mainly using pubmed anyway that shouldn't matter.

If you have both installed, they'll also share a data folder so you can move back and forth between Zotero Standalone and the FF add-on.

protein function

Great. I'll install standalone, FF add-in and bookmarklet and use as needed.

adamsmith

For Chrome you'll also want the Chrome Connector - that's pretty much as good as the Firefox add-on on import (with some quite specific exceptions).

grubs

In my field where I'm trying to import citations and pdfs from the scientific literature I do encounter a fair bit that the firefox plugin imports but standalone wont. My workflow now involves using both. When I'm in research mode trolling for new evidence I use Firefox. When I'm in writing mode using my library I use standalone.

My browser of choice is Opera ... so its a three way juggle sometimes.

adamsmith

do you have examples? For Standalone with Chrome connector I'm not aware of many sites that wouldn't at a minimum download citations. The bookmarklet is a different story. The next version of the Chrome connector will likely run in Opera, which now accepts Chrome extensions.

grubs

"The next version of the Chrome connector will likely run in Opera, which now accepts Chrome extensions."

I didn't know that. Thanks.

I haven't keep any notes on examples of problems sorry.. but I'll keep some better notes now and see if I can pass on some info that might be usefull... even if just for testing compatibility.