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Bookmark Synchronizer Xmarks Hangs Up Their Hats
krulgar writes "On January 10, 2011, Xmarks will be closing their doors. A free service being replaced by free software. It would still be nice to have a single way to keep my bookmarks from my work machine in sync with my home machines and my mobile devices without exerting much effort. Xmarks seemed to be the only ones with that clear vision, maybe the replacement tools can grow into this space, but it's still a little sad to see a useful tool wave goodbye."
I've been using Xmarks since they were Foxmarks and it's the only tool out there that syncs multiple browsers. It's really handy when you have a folder full of client URL's and you need to check them on multiple browsers and operating systems. I'd gladly have paid for the service - but they never asked or proposed it. Sure some people would have balked and left, but those that stayed could have supported your business. I refuse to give my bookmark data to Google and I really just don't trust anyone else that is associated with a search engine or browser developer.
It's sad that they've reached the point of having to shut down, but i've got to say that at least they've handled the situation with a lot of class. They're giving their users several months warning rather than just shutting down the servers overnight, and when they did market research that indicated there wouldn't be enough demand for a subscription version to sustain them they just decided not to offer one and shut down gracefully. As opposed to what seems to be the more common tactic of convincing their biggest supporters to hand over money for a little while and then having to shut down anyways, and then figure out how to do refunds or just tell everyone to go suck it.
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For one, Xmarks synchronizes not just bookmarks. They synchronized passwords, history and tabs too, if the user enabled such options. If you are as paranoid about privacy as must /. users, you could use your own server.
But it doesn't matter. Firefox Sync is built in to Firefox 4, and it does all that too.
I agree. The alternatives there provide sync across computers but only for the same browser. I use both Chrome and Firefox extensively and I will greatly miss the ability for (fo)Xmarks to sync my bookmarks, passwords and tabs across all my browsers, regardless of whether its Chrome/Firefox.
For now, I'm using Firefox sync as my primary syncing mechanism and importing into Chrome whenever I update something in Firefox. Its somewhat annoying, but I guess I'll deal. Maybe I'll switch back to using primarily Firefox.
If you happen to have your own apache server handy, just setup up a personal server with Xmarks, it works beautifully (over https as well). I'm using this combination for quite some time now, with great satisfaction and independence. As stated above, I also don't want to store my private stuff on third party storage.
think of the opportunities they for data mining.
Someday when I grow up I want to be fucking evil like you.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
At least on Firefox, your bookmarks are no longer saved as a simple file. As such, a "very small shell script" would not do the same job.
go to about:config, change browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true.
I am saddened to think of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) going under. Their announcement email explained the situation very nicely, however, and one can hardly fault them for calling it quits. They were never able to monetize the data they aggregated, and not enough people would be willing to pay a subscription fee now that all the browsers are providing sync themselves.
I've been their add-on since almost day one; at first they didn't even have a central server to provide the service, it was just an add-on that you could point to an ftp server of your choice. (You can still point it to an ftp or WebDAV server of your choice, so that is one way to keep using it, at least until browser updates break compatibility).
Actually, Foxmarks once got a stolen laptop returned to me. About a month after my house was burglarized, I noticed new bookmarks showing up in my browser on my other machines. The person who "acquired" my laptop never bothered to wipe and reinstall, or even to create a new user account. So every time he bookmarked a URL, Foxmarks would diligently sync it to my other computers. So, from my own machine, I edited all of the bookmarks to point to a redirect page on my server. Once my changes were synced back to my stolen laptop, I was able to record its IP address every time he used one of his bookmarks. I gave that to the police, and another month later they got my laptop back after subpoenaing his ISP to get his address.
So, Foxmarks has a special place in my heart.
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