Xmarks works really well… if all that matters to you is bookmarks.
But what about your browsing history? Your user dictionary? Your search autofill? Your Persona skin? Your extensions?

And what if you have multiple Firefox profiles?
Well that's my predicament. At the time of this writing there are no solutions. Google Browser Sync is discontinued. Google Wave is… I don't even really know what I'm supposed to use that for. Right now I have my FF profiles in my Dropbox folder and it's syncing EVERYTHING. We're talking about all the cache, the massive urlclassifier3.sqlite file, the places.sqlite file (which is inevitable since it holds my bookmarks, but Xmarks at least syncs individual bookmarks instead of the whole file!)
I need a solution.

Please Mozilla – Weave my online experience back together. It's totally disjointed. I'm about to give up and only browse the web on a single computer.

I installed Firefox 3.1b2 and the current Weave on XP and Mac OS. The Mac is new, and I hadn’t bookmarked anything there. The XP is “mature”, and had a lot of bookmarks.

I enabled only bookmarks, and did an initial sync on both machines. The bookmarks from the XP machine transferred to my Macbook, and all seemed well.

I then proceeded to start organizing my bookmarks on XP (remember, it is “mature” – a lot of old and un-categorized bookmarks). Bookmarks I moved seem to have been transferred OK. But ones that I deleted were not always deleted on the Mac. Some were, some weren’t.

However, something else much more serious has occurred. I have a recursive mess! I previously had nothing under “unsorted bookmarks” on both machines. I’ve always added new uncategorized bookmarks in the main bookmark menu. I dunno at what Firefox version “unsorted bookmarks” appeared, but I’ve never used it, and my browser has always defaulted to adding bookmarks to the main menu.

Now, I have a second copy of all of my bookmarks (from the very top level “All Bookmarks” down) under “unsorted bookmarks”. And…. at the bottom of that, yet another copy of all of my bookmarks under another “unsorted bookmarks” entry. Ad infinitum. Well, I don’t really know if it is ad-infinitum, because I don’t have the patience to drill-down and see how far it goes.

But it looks to me like it’s turtles all the way down.

I think it’s best to revert to Firefox 3.06 (or 3.07) and recover my bookmarks from backup media. Not useful, and quite scary at this point. Disappointing, to say the least, at a point after more than a year of development.

Hey, I know it’s beta, alpha, or less, but…

Ugh, now I’m confused where my bookmarks are or how I’m going to get them back the way they were. My bookmarks.html is dated 1/4/2009, and backup dated 1/4/2009. So this is not where they are. There’s a bookmarkbackups directory in my profile, and that has an html file from 1/4/2009, and several json files with various dates up to the present. The json files are all around the same size, so no apparent growth.

I’m guessing, then, that my bookmark file is not actually growing, but that this is some sort of bug that makes the display code recursively display the bookmark directory structure endlessly.

But where the heck are my bookmarks kept? Is the bookmark file no longer used once you are using Weave?

It may be helpful to know how I have my bookmarks organized. Most of them live in the Bookmarks Toolbar. I have about 10 folders there, some of them with many subfolders. I put new bookmarks in the main bookmark menu, and eventually move them to to toolbar folders. As I said, I NEVER use “unsorted bookmarks”.

I’ve been using FEBE for general profile-backup purposes for a month or so, but haven’t personally tried out the extension-management functionality… sounds worth looking into if you need to keep multiple browser installations in extension-sync, though.

As for selectively syncing various folders of bookmarks, Foxmarks added that functionality at some point not too long ago — they call it “Sync Profiles”. You can (for example) define profiles for “Work” and “Home” browsers, and designate bookmarks folders that should not (or should only) be sync’d for different profiles.

I’ve been using Foxmarks for a VERY long time, and it would be hard to overstate how awesome I think it is. I originally installed back in the days of the Firefox 1.5 -> 2.0 journey, to protect against that annoying bug where Ffox occasionally just blanked a profile’s personal/historical data w/o warning — I was tired of losing my bookmarks and just wanted them archived somewhere outside the browser! The fact that it became my ONE consolidated bookmark set, and was always the SAME no matter which computer I was on or what OS I was booted into… actually that was just an added bonus. (But quickly made it painfully obvious how much time and effort I’d been wasting before, storing things locally — the POINT of a bookmark is to have some page readily & quickly available if I need it again. Which it really isn’t when there’s a good chance I’ll be in another browser instance.)

Plus there are times — not very often, maybe once every couple of months or so — I’ll find myself somewhere random mentioning this great page I’d seen, or someone will be looking for info that I know I found on an obscure site. Conversations that invariably used to end, “Yeah, I know I bookmarked it… I’ll try and remember to send you the link when I get home.” (Hah.) Now, it’s just “here, I’ll pull it up for you”… a quick trip to my.foxmarks.com from anywhere == instant gratification.

I’m not saying Foxmarks itself is perfect. (And no, I don’t work there.) It’s had hiccups, and there are valid reasons for some people to have privacy concerns or need richer functionality. (My own needs aren’t too demanding: I signed up on 2006-05-28, looks like, and almost 3 years later I’m only at revision 448.) My bookmarks also aren’t closely-guarded state secrets, it took me all of maybe 3 minutes to decide that it really didn’t matter where my bookmarks might be spread… not even the couple of URLs I stored with authentication data embedded, for various reasons. *shrug*

(That was back when installing Foxmarks automatically meant everything was exposed, it’s nice to know that now certain things can be protected w/ profiles… I still haven’t bothered, tho.)

When I saw that there was a plugin for syncing to Google Bookmarks, I figured THAT would eventually eclipse Foxmarks — I went with Foxmarks initially only because at the time it was really the only option. I’m as surprised as anyone that I accidentally picked the right horse.

History syncing would still be nice, sure… Weave and Google Bookmarks both looked like promising candidates to take syncing to the next level and make it more extensive, robust, and intelligent. But everybody trying to do full-history syncing is apparently finding it real hard to do right, and do well… or really at all. Foxmarks doesn’t do a LOT, but it does it in a pretty much invisible, automatic, and intuitive way that actually proves ASTONISHINGLY useful as a result.