Keep in sync with Xmarks

xmarks

While I’m putting together my final review of Moon OS I thought I’d talk a little about a plugin I use a lot these days. Xmarks started initially as foxmarks, a Firefox plugin for backing up your bookmarks and actually syncing them each time you add/remove links. Adding a plugin to firefox is such an easy and, importantly, quick procedure that it meant you could share your bookmarks between two places effortlessly.

That functionality continues today with Xmarks but has been improved and expanded to include other browsers.

To date these are Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. The beta release for Google’s chrome is out and seems stable thus far. Also added since foxmarks is an ability to back up usernames and passwords as well as bookmarks. Possibly very useful indeed.

The main use I have found is while programming websites. I have quite a carefully built collection of bookmarks to reference pages for php/html/javascript; whatever it might be, without which I would spend a lot more time scratching my head trying to remember rules and snippets. Without acknowledging browser differences your site could be rendered in some very different ways. As a result, I seldom find myself using only one browser at a time.

I don’t own a Mac and irrespective of my feelings on them I need to know how they and webkit will render a design. The only way I have of doing that is to boot into Windows and run Safari. Working mainly in Linux and with Firefox this means I loose access to all my carefully organised bookmarks. Not so with Xmarks. Now I can access them anywhere. Even from within a Linux Live CD.

There are far more uses for this than the ones I cite above, they’re just from my experience but I genuinely recommend this plugin. If having a safe, back up of all your bookmarks wasn’t enough, you can access them through the most popular browsers on any operating system quickly and easily. For free.

Job done.

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