How To Synchronize Your Firefox Bookmarks On Multiple Computers

While there are many social bookmarking options out there, (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, amongst many more) most people still like to have their bookmarks saved on their physical computer, myself included. The largest hassle with this is if you have multiple computers, say at home and at work, it can be a nightmare remembering which computer has which bookmarks, and always making sure that that you have your latest favorites on each.

This is where bookmark synchronizers can come in extremely handy. While there are many of them out on the market, my hands-down favorite has to be Foxmarks.  As the name would imply, this is a tool built only for the Firefox web browser, but as we have said before, it is the one we highly recommend everyone use.

The system is fairly simple in that you download a small additional piece of software for your browser, known as an “extension”.  This, like any other extension, is just a small item that will help your Firefox do more tricks and helpful tasks, thus extending its functionality.  To download the extension visit their page on Firefox’s site here.

What happens is once you’ve installed it, you will be asked to set up an account, just like you would any other service.  Once done, it will make a copy of your bookmarks and upload them to a central computer, a server, in their system.  You then will go to the second computer and download the extension again.  The difference here is that instead of creating an account, you will sign in to the one you created on the previous computer.  Once you have signed in, you will be asked if you want to upload what is on this computer and replace what is on the server, or if you want to start merging them what is on the server instead.  You want to start with what is on the server as this will simply merge your two sets of bookmarks, the other way will overwrite what you already saved.

Once you have gone through this process once, you will never have to do anything again except occasionally wait for them to finish syncing before you shut down Firefox, but it will warn you whenever this happens.  From here on out, the extension will automatically detect when you have made changes to your bookmarks, upload them again to the server, and when you go to the other computer, it will automatically download the changes.  Your bookmarks will now be constantly merged so they will look exactly the same on every computer you add this to.  You can do it for home, work, your laptop, any computer that you own.  I do, however, recommend you never do this on a computer that is accessible by users other than yourself as it would give them access to all of your bookmarks as well.

It’s a brilliant little system, and something all of us here at StarterTech use all of the time to sync across all of our systems.