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Taking Zotero out of the Browser with the Zotero Standalone Beta

August 29, 2011, 11:00 am

By Mark Sample

Balancing RockLast week the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media announced the release of a new beta of the standalone version of Zotero, an open source reference manager and ProfHacker favorite.

Zotero has long existed as an extension within Firefox, but since the release of the alpha standalone version in January, it’s been possible to more or less use Zotero with other browsers, such as Safari or Chrome, on any of the major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux).

The new beta brings added features, greater stability, and—I can’t help noticing—a better icon. I’ve been using the standalone Zotero for the past few days, and I’m happy to say it’s been working quite well. Using the Chrome connectors, I’ve been able to save references from journal databases and the like as easily from Chrome as from Firefox.

I’ll update ProfHacker when I have a better feel for Zotero Standalone, but I can already share a few discoveries:

  • If you happen to have both Zotero Standalone and Firefox open, the Firefox Zotero extension will disable itself, though you can still save citations and pages using the familiar icons in the location bar; they’ll be sent directly to the standalone version. This makes it easy to keep using Firefox but run Zotero as a separate application.
  • Zotero’s proxy rerouter does not run in the standalone version. This is the feature of the Firefox-based extension that automatically sends you to, say, JSTOR using your library’s proxy server when you click on a JSTOR link found in a Google search. For some users, the lack of the proxy server may be a deal breaker, while other users might not even notice it’s missing.

So far, everything else seems to run as expected. If you’re already comfortable with Zotero, the standalone version will feel like home. And if you haven’t tried Zotero, the standalone version might be worth a look, especially since it doesn’t commit you to any single browser.

Download the Zotero 3.0 Beta.

[Balancing Rock photograph courtesy of Flickr user Dennis Jarvis / Creative Commons Licensed]

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  • adam3smith

    I’m curious what people are thinking about the new Word Processor integration. I have a project to finish, so I can’t test it, but it seems like there have been _huge_ improvements with that.

    Note that the new Zotero beta also finally includes duplicate detection and merging, perhaps the most frequently requested feature – it still has some flaws (that are being addressed), but works quite well overall.

  • windfix

    Never really saw the point… Zotero is awesome in FireFox as it stands.  Safari and Explorer are both junk, Chrome is limited albeit slightly faster (and consistently fouls up Google account integration, ironically).

  • adam3smith

    well, people really wanted it, I guess that was the point. I prefer running Zotero in FF as well.

    But more generally, the new release is a big deal even if you’re not going to use the Standalone. There is – again – a little bit of an update in speed, there are a large number of small bug fixes and a good number of improvements – I’ve mentioned duplicates and the new Word integration, there is also dragging whole collections to groups, there is online editing of items, there will soon be better online display of libraries, there is, under the hood, an improved translator structure that allow a) for automatic testing of translators and b) for server side translation, there is embedded bibliographic data in citations in the word processor, there might be color coded tags…. there is really something for everyone.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=564475866 Ron Lubensky

    I solved the Zotero standalone proxy problem with Chrome by writing my own extension for it: http://www.deliberations.com.au/2011/11/using-zotero-standalone-with-chrome-proxy-problem-solved.html

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