I like the idea behind Xmarks but there seems to be something I am doing that’s just not working.

Here’s what I’ve done.

  1. Installed Xmarks on all of my browsers. For Internet Explorer this meant a small system tray app.
  2. Made one set of bookmarks the Master To Rule all of My Bookmarks™. I did that once and confirmed that Xmarks has those bookmarks via the My Xmarks page. Neat page BTW.
  3. Synchronized all of my browsers. The first time I selected “the download and erase bookmarks on this browser” option.
  4. Bookmarks are synchronized! Sweet.

A few days later I started losing whole sections of my bookmarks. Not so sweet. Fortunately Xmarks has a great revision system and I was able to roll back to the set I wanted. Repeatedly. Sometimes more than once an hour.

I think the culprit is Chrome but I just couldn’t get the darn thing to behave. I’m sure Xmarks is not at fault, It’s just that one of my browsers never attended kindergarten and doesn’t know how to share with the other kids.

I’m back to manually synchronizing my bookmarks which isn’t a big deal as I don’t add to them that frequently. For Firefox I’m using Mozilla Sync which has developed into a nice option from years ago. For that browser it just works and also synchronized my add-ons, preferences, etc. For Chrome the bookmarks are shared using the Great Google Data Collection Experiment™.

This may have been why I stopped using this software in the first place. Meh, back to sorta syncing my bookmarks at least in Firefox and Chrome.