Firefox 3 – Browser Sync is Dead, Long Live Foxmarks!

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day along with approximately 8 million of my closest friends. I installed it on my laptop at work a couple of days ago. My first impression was a dialog box that came up and said that most of the add-ons I’d been using with Firefox 2 no longer worked.

The dialog very helpfully offered to go look for updates for the outdated add-ons and I clicked the button to have it do that. It found a few updates, but not nearly all of them. Once Firefox launched, I went to the Add-ons dialog and found that there were a number of add-ons simply marked “Incompatible with Firefox 3″. My only available option was to uninstall the affected add-ons.

Several of the affected add-ons were ones I’d mentioned earlier in my post on my favorite add-ons for Firefox. The most important one was the Google Browser Sync add-on. This is the add-on I used most since it ran literally every time I ran Firefox on any of my three machines. It was also the most important to me because I didn’t want to have to keep the three machines’ bookmarks synchronized manually!

I went to Google to see what was up with Browser Sync and found after a bit of research that Google has stopped supporting Browser Sync! There will be no Browser Sync for Firefox 3. In the same article, however, was the good news: there’s a bookmark sync tool available for Firefox 3 that actually gets better reviews than GBS.

It’s called Foxmarks and it flat out rocks! You go to http://foxmarks.com, sign up for a free account and install the add-on in Firefox. When setting up your new account, Foxmarks copies your existing bookmarks to your account and keeps any new ones synchronized with the online site.

Now that you have your Foxmarks account, you can set up additional machines quickly and easily. Go to the Firefox add-ons site or Foxmarks and install the Foxmarks add-on. Log in to your account and you’ll be prompted to do one of three things:

• Merge the bookmarks with those on your machine
• Replace the bookmarks on your machine with those on the server
• Replace the server bookmarks with those on your machine

That pretty much covers what you’d want to do, so pick one and go. When Foxmarks is done updating, it goes off into the background and pretty much leaves you alone from then on. Any new or modified bookmarks get updated to the server silently.

When you start up Firefox, the Foxmarks add-on goes out to the Foxmarks server and updates the bookmarks on your machine silently. You don’t get the popup list of the tabs you previously had open as you used to with GBS because Foxmarks doesn’t handle that. Firefox 3 has the ability to “remember” which tabs you had open and just open them again when you start up without asking, if you choose that option.

Obviously, I’m a Foxmarks fan and I highly recommend it to replace Google Browser Sync. You’ll have to anyway when you upgrade to Firefox 3, also recommended, but more on that later.

John The Geek

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