The Author – Bart Busschots
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Oct
20
Synchronizing Your Bookmarks on FireFox
Filed Under Computers & Tech on October 20, 2006 at 10:26 pm
If you have multiple computers I’m sure you’ve often wished you could easily sync your bookmarks between them. I know it’s happened me that I come across something on desktop at home, I book mark it, then a few weeks later I’m out on the road and I really need it but it’s not in the bookmarks on my laptop. Bookmarks Synchronizer 3 is a nice solution IF you have access to a server either via FTP, or HTTP if your server is webDav enabled (like a .mac iDisk).
[tags]FireFox, FireFox Extensions, Bookmarks[/tags]
The plugin works by importing and exporting your bookmarks as an XML file which it can read and write to your server. You can also set the plugin to automatically download your bookmarks when FireFox starts and then upload to the server when FireFox closes. As well as the standard configuration screen like most extensions have this extension also adds an option to synchronize bookmarks to your Bookmarks menu. The Screenshots below show the main configuration interface to setup the extension and also the new option in the Bookmarks menu.
In theory you can choose to sync only a sub-set of your bookmarks but I haven’t gotten this to work reliably yet. I was trying to get my home bookmarks to appear inside one folder on the bookmarks bar of my work machine. It sort-of worked, in the Manage Bookmarks interface the structure was perfect but FireFox had real issues with having two folders called Bookmarks Toolbar Folder and it was displaying the wrong one. It also didn’t let me delete bookmarks anymore. I reverted to a backup of my FireFox preferences folder to fix the problem and haven’t tried again.
Conclusions
I have been using this extension to fully sync my bookmarks between my desktop and my laptop and it works perfectly. This extension is also cross-platform so it can be used to sync all your browsers even of some are on different operating systems.
P.S. .Mac Instructions
The screenshot below shows how you .Mac customers should set up Bookmarks Synchronizer 3. You do of course need to replace joebloggs with your .Mac username and of course enter your own password.
[…] Bookmarks synchroniser Research assistant Bart sent in a nice tip this week. He says, “I have another problem-solving FF extension for you and your listeners. This time the problem is synchronizing your bookmarks between multiple computers. Anyone who has more than one computer they regularly use has probably wished they could always have access to all their bookmarks. The Bookmarks Synchronizer 3 FF extension lets you do just that. You can get it from addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1989. The only slight down-side with this one is that you need access to a server to get this to work. The server needs to support either FTP or be a webDAV enabled web server. However, one good thing is that the iDisk you get with a .Mac account is in fact a WebDAV enabled web server so .Mac users can also play along. As always full details including screen-shots and special directions for .Mac users can be found on my blog: bartbusschots.ie/blog.” […]