Friday, February 20, 2009

How Can I Sync Bookmarks Across All Browsers? [Ask Lifehacker]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/tUR3xOwENwQ/how-can-i-sync-bookmarks-across-all-browsers

Dear Lifehacker,
How can I sync favorites in Opera, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox? Is there any way to do it, beside manually export everyone and then painfully editing the HTML?

Best Regards from a Daily Reader

Dear Daily Reader,

For Firefox and Internet Explorer, at least, we'll whole-heartedly recommend the newly IE-friendly and Safari-friendly Foxmarks. It doesn't have the password support of its Firefox iterations, but it does do an admirably swift job of keeping your bookmarks and toolbar favorites synced up in the background.

As for Chrome and Opera, well, that's a trickier task. If you're using all four browsers equally, you might want to consider using the long-standing, well-tested Delicious as your primary bookmarking tool, since its accessible from anywhere, keeps everything in sync with or without your action, and has handy bookmark bar tools for reading and saving bookmarks from any browser. When you import your bookmarks from any browser, they'll be set to private by default, saving you a whole bunch of work. The minor pain is that new bookmarks can't be set to private by default (correct me if I'm wrong, readers!), but it's truly the only way to keep your bookmarks in sync without a lot of import/export/save shuffling.

Unless, of course, one of our readers have a smart solution for shuttling or syncing each browser's HTML bookmark files around—maybe an AutoHotKey script? A clever use of syncing tool Dropbox, simila! r to how we utilize it as the ultimate password syncer?

Peace and soul,

Lifehacker