Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers
Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.
1. Foxmarks/Xmarks
Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)
Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords
Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.
Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.
To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.
2. delicious
Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)
Saves: Bookmarks
Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.
The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.
The browser extension for IE8 can be found here
The browser extension for Safari can be found here
For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.
3. Mozilla Weave
Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)
Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs
Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.
Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.
There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.
Tags: bookmarks, delicious, Firefox, mozilla, weave, xmarks
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Thanks for sharing. May I suggest another way to synchronize bookmarks across browsers? It’s Tidy Favorites – a PC utility which offers both offline and online synchronization, lets synchronize bookmarks across PCs, has a thumbnail-based interface and much other.
Good article! But I have a slightly different need, and am hoping someone can address this. Until recently I used MS Excel to build myself a “home page” which was basically a large table of hyperlinks. Being an Excel whiz I put a bit of text into a cell (say, “CNN”) and then used the Edit-Hyperlink menu to add a URL to the cell. But what’s more, for sites that required a username and pwd (my bank, for example) I would put the username and pwd in the “Tooltip” field of the hyperlink setup. Once my Excel sheet was formatted the way I wanted it I could Save As a web HTML page and use it as my home page for all my browsers. Plus it was incredibly easy to copy that file to other computers as necessary or save it to a flash drive to take it with me. While there was a risk of someone perhaps getting a copy of it and having my usernames and pwds, my situation in life allowed for that to be a very low risk.
so that said, can any of these bookmark managers do that? specifically: have a place to store usernames and passwords, be easily portable from one computer to another, and save the bookmarks as a FILE that could easily be used on a new machine that didn’t have the utility available?
BTW the reason I am looking for a new solution is I recently left my job and no longer use a PC. I have two Macs at home, and Mac Office does a HORRIBLE job of saving this HTML file. It leaves off the tooltips, and it doesn’t format it anywhere near WYSIWYG.
Xmarks does save bookmarks and passwords and it should be portable to any OS that can run Firefox. I doubt it has any feature to save unencrypted passwords to a file, though.
Perhaps you may want an online spreadsheet program like Google Docs?
Yeah, using Excel to build a webpage.
That’s a really great idea.
Xmarks does save bookmarks and passwords and it should be portable to any OS that can run Firefox. I doubt it has any feature to save unencrypted passwords to a file, though.
Perhaps you may want an online spreadsheet program like Google Docs?