Now that I have a laptop (finally!) it has suddenly become important to me to sync my bookmarks across several browsers. So I started looking into solutions for this.

Foxmarks was the first product that jumped to mind. I had read about that add-on for Firefox a long time ago, but never had a need for it. After looking it up I saw that they have now re-branded to XMarks, this is due to the fact that they are trying to support several different browsers now. So obviously they want to move away from the Firefox centric branding.

The other project that caught my eye was Mozilla Weave. This add-on does the same thing as XMarks, except they are trying to add sync for everything in your Firefox browser, passwords, saved form data, history, preferences, etc. This is a cool idea but when I was about to install it I got a lot of alarm bells going off in my head.

Security seems like a really big deal here. I mean they want you to upload all your saved passwords, browsing history, account user names, bookmarks etc. For people like me this information is a huge part of my life, and if it got cracked and stolen would wreck much more havoc than loosing my social security number alone.

Everything is encrypted during transmission and on “their” server, but that does little to ease my worries.

XMarks on the other hand only handles your bookmarks. They also have an option (in the Firefox version only?) to use your own sync server so your info never touches their website. But to be honest even if someone hacks your bookmarks it’s not the end of the world. You still do not want them to know the bank you use, or even what web services you use. But at least with that info alone they can not do too much damage to your online self.

XMarks also supports other browsers which a few months ago meant little to me. But with the rise of Google Chrome and the great WebKit rendering engine there are now three browsers I am interested in using. Firfox 3.5, Google Chrome and Safari. So this cross browser compatibility is much more important than before.

Right now XMarks does not support Chrome because Chrome does not support add-on’s yet. However the XMarks team has stated they are going to make a Chrome version when possible.

After going over all these factors I have decided to try XMarks. Mozilla Weaves lack of support for other browsers and the security implications is raises make it too risky for me to even try. Using XMarks still has some security concerns but I do not bookmark any of my financial sites anyway, so the risks are negligible. I will post a review at a later date.