2006/11/13
Synchronizing bookmarks revisited
It's been over two years since I blogged about synchronizing your bookmarks in Firefox. Boy, does time fly!
Since then, the bookmarks synchronizer extension wasn't particularly well maintained. About a gazillion different versions popped up, because every new Firefox version disabled the previous one and a new person would be clever and release an updated bookmarks synchronizer. Which was okay, but required some searching everytime a new Firefox version appeared. Another thing I began to dislike about the bookmarks synchronizer was the fact that it took 15-20 seconds to download my bookmarks and update them everytime when I started Firefox. At some point that gets annoying.
As the attentive reader might have noticed the previous paragraph is written in the past tense. Because when I heard about Google Browser Sync I tried it immediately. And it works so well I installed it at all my systems two minutes later. It's a blessing. Not only does it synchronize your bookmarks transparently and without errors, it also synchronizes saved passwords, cookies, browsing history and open tabs. And if you're afraid uncle Google will read your passwords, don't be, because they're all stored encrypted. And I hope they don't have an uber-unlock-key ;).
Another less well known cool tool for synchronizing bookmarks is BookmarkBridge. This tool can synchronize bookmarks between various browsers, including Mozilla browsers, Internet Explorer and Konqueror. It's not a browser extension so synchronizing is a manual action, and BookmarkBridge doesn't keep them up to date. But still it's pretty useful to have those frequently visited URLs at your fingertips in those non-primary browsers. It's open source and platform independent, with installers for Windows and Linux. It's in the debian packages as well so all it required was 'sudo aptitude install bookmarkbridge'.
Since then, the bookmarks synchronizer extension wasn't particularly well maintained. About a gazillion different versions popped up, because every new Firefox version disabled the previous one and a new person would be clever and release an updated bookmarks synchronizer. Which was okay, but required some searching everytime a new Firefox version appeared. Another thing I began to dislike about the bookmarks synchronizer was the fact that it took 15-20 seconds to download my bookmarks and update them everytime when I started Firefox. At some point that gets annoying.
As the attentive reader might have noticed the previous paragraph is written in the past tense. Because when I heard about Google Browser Sync I tried it immediately. And it works so well I installed it at all my systems two minutes later. It's a blessing. Not only does it synchronize your bookmarks transparently and without errors, it also synchronizes saved passwords, cookies, browsing history and open tabs. And if you're afraid uncle Google will read your passwords, don't be, because they're all stored encrypted. And I hope they don't have an uber-unlock-key ;).
Another less well known cool tool for synchronizing bookmarks is BookmarkBridge. This tool can synchronize bookmarks between various browsers, including Mozilla browsers, Internet Explorer and Konqueror. It's not a browser extension so synchronizing is a manual action, and BookmarkBridge doesn't keep them up to date. But still it's pretty useful to have those frequently visited URLs at your fingertips in those non-primary browsers. It's open source and platform independent, with installers for Windows and Linux. It's in the debian packages as well so all it required was 'sudo aptitude install bookmarkbridge'.
