I use Firefox, Opera, and Safari on a regular basis on three computers at home (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and two at work (Windows and Linux). That’s 11 sets of bookmarks that I’d like to pare down to 2.

del.icio.us helps somewhat, especially since I discovered I can add it as a search in both Firefox and Opera, but web apps have a certain amount of delay that doesn’t work for the most frequently-accessed sites. And I don’t want to add yet another web app, I want to sync the bookmarks in each browser.

Most of the solutions I’ve found (.Mac, Google Browser Sync, Opera 9.5, various Firefox extensions) are geared toward syncing two or more copies of the same browser on different computers. What I want is to bookmark a site in Firefox on one computer, and have it show up in Safari on another.

Any suggestions?

Update: I have since discovered XMarks, which does exactly what I need on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari (but not Opera, though I use it a lot less these days).

Update 2: XMarks eventually shut down. These days I use Floccus Bookmark Sync (my review).

2 thoughts on “Unsyncable

  1. I’m not sure what you mean by “web apps have a certain amount of delay that doesn’t work for the most frequently-accessed sites” – I use the delicious as my bookmarks extension in firefox and haven’t found any delay; the minute I tag something, it’s there. Or if you mean you have to wait for the menu item or sidebar to open, I use the bookmarks toolbar showing with my favorite tags (part of the extension). I don’t have other computers/systems, but I like it b/c I can give multiple tags to a bookmark and it’s backed up if my ff goes kablooey. And I just learned how to use shortcuts for certain common bookmarks on delicious (tag it shortcut:whatever). I don’t know how it’s integrated with other browsers, but I’ve found it sure beats the hell out of regular bookmarks.

  2. I meant pulling up the actual delicious web page. It always takes several seconds, which is longer than just going to the toolbar. (It’s worse on Opera. 9.x on Linux just chokes on a few sites, including delicious and Digg, pausing for 15 seconds or more before anything is responsive. Fortunately, it looks like 9.5 has fixed whatever was causing it.)

    I actually wrote most of this post over a year ago, before the current delicious extension was available, but never got around to posting it because I wanted to expand it. Then when I wrote my post about Opera 9.5, I realized I wanted to link to this one… but hadn’t posted it yet! I should’ve done some more editing.

    Unfortunately, Delicious integration on browsers other than Firefox is fairly limited. The bookmarklets for Opera and Safari, and the extension for IE, just open (and pre-fill) the appropriate page on the website.

    So for now it’s a solution for Firefox, or for Firefox and Flock, but still doesn’t solve the Firefox+Opera+Safari problem.

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