Sharing bookmarks between Mozilla and IE
Is it just me, or is there really no good way of sharing bookmarks between Mozilla (or Firefox) and IE?
While I used to browse using IE up until recently, I find myself using Firefox most of the time these days, mostly due to its excellent support for tabbed browsing (does anybody else find it surprising that IE still does not support this feature?). However, I still use IE sometimes, and I would really like to see a good way of sharing bookmarks between these two browsers. Both browsers support import / export mechanisms that allow me to manually synchronize bookmarks, but there is no way of performing this synchronization automatically whenever a bookmark is added, removed, or edited.
For various reasons, I prefer IE’s storage of bookmarks (aka “Favorites”) as files on the filesystem. I think that the hierarchical nature of bookmarks and categories maps very well to folders and files, and I find it much easier to manage bookmarks this way than to deal with the clunky HTML file that Mozilla uses for this purpose. This also allows me to easily synchronize sub-categories of bookmarks between different computers (for example at home and at work).
My ideal solution would probably consist of a Mozilla option that would cause it to store its bookmarks as favorites instead and disable the “bookmarks.html” file alltogether. Because of Mozilla’s platform independent nature, I realize that this feature is highly unlikely to ever get implemented, and I don’t feel like messing with the core Mozilla source code myself. I am curious if this could be implemented as an extension, though. I should look into this when I get a chance…
June 19th, 2004 at 7:09 am
[...] . I am still looking for a good solution of sharing bookmarks between IE and Firefox (see my original posting). This situation will be furt [...]
July 12th, 2004 at 1:45 am
Hey Digital Hobbit, found you through a Google… ahem… yeah I’m looking for the same thing too. It’s such an obvious thing, you’d think there would be a tool to easily and efficiently do such a thing. Right now, I’m resorting to manual labor clunk-clunk synchronization, and to say the least, it’s a real pain
August 14th, 2004 at 11:00 pm
Found your site using google too. it’s a pain to update both bookmark in 2 browser at a same time. hopefully someone can find a software allowing us to do this.
August 15th, 2004 at 3:11 pm
Still haven’t found a perfect solution. What I really want in addition to synchronizing bookmarks in IE and FireFox is is a way to synchronize this information between my desktop at home, my laptop at home, and my desktop at work. Yahoo (for example the Yahoo companion) might be another option for the latter, but unfortunately this only works with IE.
For now, I think I’ll try using the FireFox Bookmarks Synchronizer extension to at least synchronize my FireFox bookmarks across all machines. These days I mostly use FireFox anyway, so I can probably live with this setup and simply export to IE every once in a while. Still, not quite ideal…
September 14th, 2004 at 5:15 pm
I was looking for the same thing, I settled for http://www.sync2it.com/
Not free, but at $10 / yr. not bad either. However, it’s not perfect, it still has some issues. I am still going thru the free 90-days trial, we’ll see if I sign up for the service. I recommend you also use the Bookmarks Sort Firefox extension with it.
If you want to run your own server (or hack it), it’s open source:
http://bookmarksync.sourceforge.net/
Other solutions:
Good if you don’t want your bookmarks on a server (for privacy): http://www.magnusbrading.com/bmc/ ($16 is not bad at all)
October 24th, 2004 at 3:49 am
I use bookmarksink.com to host my bookmarks and the McTubster hacked version of the bookmarksync client (which only supports IE and Firefox PR1 - fine for me, I only use these two) . It is the best free solution I have been able to find, but it still has lots of bugs and crashes occasionally. I am not a programmer, but if you are, and have some spare time, see if you can work on improving the client. It is a really useful little app and recently it seems that work on it has been abandoned. There are lots of people out there who would all be extemely grateful. Here are the Links:
Bookmarksync Hacked Client for use with FF PR1 and IE ONLY (Mozilla/Netscape not supported):
http://www.mctubster.com/syncit/
BookmarkSync FAQ Wiki
http://bookmarksync.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/FAQ
Bookmarksink.com - register your account here - plus download and install the reg file (if you use FF, don’t download the client from them, use the hacked client above)
http://bookmarksync.sourceforge.net/ - Official dev site.
October 24th, 2004 at 12:38 pm
Thanks for the recent suggestions. I’ll definitely check them out.
December 28th, 2004 at 3:17 pm
Sync2It (http://www.sync2it.com) hasn’t abandoned the project! Our latest client (1.7.x) supports Firefox 1.0 and Opera 7! All the the client source code is available on-site too. (I think that makes us unique!) We are committed to keeping BookmarkSync alive and well.