Kerkia

Bookmark Synchronizer

Background

Web browsers all support bookmarks, sometimes called favorites, and web surfers do use those heavily. As you work on multiple computers, multiple browsers sometimes, and even on public computer at times, there is a need to view the same bookmarks wherever and however you work, in short to synchronize in real-time those bookmarks between all of your systems.

Recommendation

If you use Firefox only as your web browser, then we recommend Weave from Mozilla Labs, a Firefox extension. This tool is very stable and reliable, more than others we’ve evaluated, and it also supports the synchronization of your history, passwords and even tabs if you’d like. We also find that it respects the privacy and security of your bookmarks very well.

Xmarks is our second best recommendation and comes in the form of an extension for various browsers. It used to be called Foxmarks and got renamed after it started supporting other browsers as well. It now supports not only Firefox but also Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, and this multi-browser support is really its key feature. We’ve had a few issues with it and saw it failing on Internet Explorer with certain bookmarks quite often, but overall it appears fairly reliable. It also provides a few more features such as bookmark sharing and site popularity and detailed information.

Another way to achieve this is to not use the bookmark manager of your web browser and to instead use a cloud-based bookmark system. This solution does not leverage the nice built-in features of those browsers but has the merit of not requiring synchronization per se and being simple to implement since there is no need for downloading additional software. If this is your preferred solution then we recommend using http://delicious.com/.