Mash Note: Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer

Brian Dillard, Friday, October 12, 2007 @ 5:30 am

All bookmark sync utilities are not created equal. Plenty of browser add-ons promise to keep your favorites in sync across computers, while Del.icio.us and its ilk host your links up in the cloud. For my money, though, if you're a Firefox user with a serious bookmark habit, nothing beats the free browser extension Foxmarks.

I'm the first to admit that I've got a problem with my bookmarks - all 3,000 of them (and counting). I do tons of research for this site and my other writing gigs. When I come across something useful, I hit Command-D automatically. (I'm just as bad with clippings in my RSS reader.) Every once in a while, I do a clean sweep: reading, filing, purging. But until I've extracted whatever piece of knowledge I need from a particular link, I want access to it from all of my workstations and Internet devices.

That's where Foxmarks comes in. When you set up an account and install this free Firefox extension on multiple computers, it keeps the bookmarks in sync across machines and backs them up to the Foxmarks server. When you bookmark something at home, then want to refer back to it the next day at the office, you're golden. And when you're away from your own workstations - say, in an internet cafe or on a mobile device - you can hit My Foxmarks, the webapp version of the service.

The Foxmarks browser add-on gives you some fairly coarse-grained control over how and when syncing occurs. If you set your preferences to sync manually, or only on shutdown, you may get stuck answering a series of dialogs as the server parses your changes. My recommendation: Enable automatic synchronization in the background. In earlier versions of the service, the sync dialogue would hijack your browser and hog your CPU, especially if you were digging around the browser's "Organize Bookmarks" screen. Such performance problems have now been reduced, if not eliminated.

As for My Foxmarks, it, too, has improved over time. The current interface uses the YUI and Ext libraries for a seamless, desktop-like Ajax experience. The UI offers both a folder-tree view and a paged grid view; you can access individual bookmarks' details from either view. There's even an iframed preview pane that can show you the target of a bookmark without leaving the Foxmarks site. And, of course, there's a scaled-down mobile version. All in all, it's a slick, well-designed experience.

Of course, there's always room for improvement. I find the built-in Firefox bookmark manager cumbersome, buggy and annoying. I'd love to see the Foxmarks team position My Foxmarks as a powerful, intuitive web-based replacement. To get there, they'd probably need to add inline editing, a more customizable interface, and perhaps integrated tagging. A trash bin for deleted bookmarks would also be pretty cool, as would the ability to batch-delete bookmarks without constant confirmation dialogs. Most browsers' internal bookmark managers - and most social bookmarking services - don't offer a very efficient or useful UI. It would be great to see somebody get it right.

I have no idea whether such features are in the cards, but Foxmarks's developers aren't resting on their laurels. Just yesterday, they announced a beta of Foxmarks 2.0, which promises to offer:

• Major changes on the server side, including much more efficient syncing.
• A nice tweak to the syncing process so that it preserves favicons across computers.

Pretty sweet!

Technorati Tags

• Firefox
• bookmarks
• Foxmarks
• YUI
• Ext

agile ajax

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1. 

   What about Google Sync for Firefox and the Google Toolbar Favorites ?

   Comment by Juan Pablo, Friday, October 12, 2007 @ 7:22 am

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