My Mac life requires a cultivated bookmark collection. That’s easy enough and simply requires a little discipline and pruning to ensure bookmarks are up to date and organized. What if your Mac life requires more than one Mac? Or, a Mac and PC? Or, Mac, PC, notebook? How do you keep browser bookmarks synchronized between them? There’s really only one way. And it starts with Free.
Xmarks The Spot
For whatever reason, I seldom run into a fellow Mac user who has Xmarks. It’s a free browser bookmark service that syncs your bookmarks Mac to Mac to PC, and browser to browser.
Xmarks gets installed on each Mac or PC you use. Then it keeps track of all changes you make to your bookmarks and synchronizes them seamless between machines over the internet.
I keep Xmarks on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, and on each of my three Macs (two desktops and notebook). Any change I make to bookmarks on one Mac get updated automatically during the next online sync by Xmarks.
There’s not much to show of Xmarks other than preferences.
My sync needs are simple so preference settings are simple. I want it automatic, launch at login, and detect any changes I make to a browser’s bookmarks.
Profiles can be set up to protect important bookmarks. Advanced settings include logging and encryption.
How is it possible to do such synchronizing for free? Xmarks is part of LastPass, which is an extensive, multi-platform password management system for Macs and PCs, iPhone and Android and Symbian phones. And Windows Phone and BlackBerry.
If you use and like Xmarks, maybe you’ll like one of the LastPass products. I consider Xmarks a loss leader. It’s free. It works. There are premium features that have a price tag, but for simply synchronizing bookmarks between Macs and browsers, nothing is better.
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