It’s time for a little pre-holiday true confessions. I have a love hate relationship with bookmarks in Safari.
I love to collect them. I hate checking, pruning, and organizing bookmarks. Worse, I hate the steps required to sync up Safari’s bookmarks with other browsers on my Mac.
Apple’s iCloud sync does a decent job of keeping Safari bookmarks synchronized between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but does squat about keeping those same bookmarks up to date on Chrome and Firefox.
Enter yet another on again and off again love affair with a free Mac utility. I once loved and used Xmarks, a utility which does just that– it synchronizes Safari bookmarks to other browsers.
Then, for whatever reason, Xmarks stopped synchronizing Safari’s bookmarks. So, I started over a few times. Then it worked again. Then it stopped working again. Now it’s back to working again.
When it works, Xmarks is a wonderful utility. But it’s free, which means it’s a labor of love for whoever publishes the utility, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a business model to keep it going or provide support.
Yet, it’s still around.
Xmarks is available for Firefox on Mac or Windows, Chrome on Mac or Windows, Internet Explorer on Windows, and, of course, Safari on the Mac. There was an option to view your bookmarks online through your Xmarks account, but that’s being dumped in favor of LastPass, the online password management system company that runs Xmarks.
Xmarks also has a paid premium service which includes bookmark sync capability for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Windows Phone, and Blackberry.
Installation of the free version is straightforward, but you need to setup an Xmarks account.