I have been using Xmarks for some time now to keep my bookmarks synced between my home desktop and my work laptop. I also started using a vmplayer virtual machine on my home desktop machine when I work from home. Again I used Xmarks there as well, keeping all may bookmarks in sync.
I finally got a smartphone and so naturally wanted to have may bookmarks synced to may phone as well. Here is were Xmarks lets me down a bit. It turns out that in order to sync to my android phone I would need to be a "premium" user, which is $12 a year. This seems like a lot for just a little gain, especially if you consider that I would need to do this for my wife as well. I supposed we could share one premium account and use different profiles, but this situation made me think about what and why I want to sync bookmarks.
The original idea of Xmarks was nice, you have one set of bookmarks that you can access from anywhere, using any browser. In reality however I tend to use the same browser and same applications , across all my devices. So for example right now Chrome is my main browser, the only real reason I still have firefox or ie is because some web apps, particularly some of my work apps, don't like Chrome, so for those I fire up firefox.
So the situation really is that I really only need to have bookmarks for the applications that I would actually use with a given browser. What I am doing now is using Chrome sync for most of my bookmarks and firefox sync for the applications that I need to use on firefox. It may not be ideal, but then again having to have multiple browsers installed on the same device in the first place is not ideal.
So in the end what I have is cross device bookmark syncing, but not cross browser bookmark syncing, which is what I had with Xmarks. If I could go back to using Xmarks for everything I probably would but at this point $12 a year seems like a lot for that little bit of extra functionality.
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