The rest of the functionality remained the same. The bookmarks will still be stored in Google Docs and not in Google Bookmarks, apparently because of the way bookmarks are stored in the web browser. The latest builds of the Google browser, for example 4.0.223.11 and above, offer bookmark syncing between multiple computer systems running Google Chrome out of the box.

The new Synchronize my bookmarks option is located in the Tools menu of the browser.

A click on the Synchronize my bookmarks link will display a small popup window displaying a Google Account form.

Enter your credentials and the sync process should start immediately. You’ll be able to access your bookmarks in a weird location: a read-only folder in Google Docs (things will look less weird when Google Docs is transformed into Google Drive, a general-purpose online storage service). Install Google Chrome’s dev build on a different computer and you’ll be able to access your bookmarks, edit them and all the changes will be saved online.

It is unfortunately not possible to sync bookmarks across multiple web browsers using this method. An alternative that is working with multiple web browsers is the Xmarks extension which supports Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

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Lee over at the Download Squad found a great switch for the Google Chrome browser to add a bookmark button to the Google Chrome address bar. This might be interesting for Google Chrome users who want to access their bookmarks quickly but prefer to have additional screen estate by removing the bookmarks toolbar.

The bookmarks button can be enabled by launching the Google browser with the parameter –bookmark-menu. This apparently only works in the Windows version of Google Chrome but there in Google Chrome 2, 3 and 4. A new bookmark button is displayed after launching the Google browser with the parameter that provides access to all bookmarks that have been created or imported into the web browser.

The bookmarks bar can then be disabled by right-clicking it and left-clicking the entry Always show bookmarks bar. It will still be displayed when opening a new tab but it will be hidden when a website is opened. Users who want to launch the Google browser with several switches can do so by adding a space between the switches. The easiest way to launch Google Chrome with switches is to press Windows R to open the run box and to enter chrome –switch1 –switch2 –switch3 in the run box which will launch the Chrome browser with the parameters switch1, switch2 and switch 3. via Download Squad.

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Xmarks, a company that is offering plugins to sync bookmarks between installations of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari, have now announced that a limited beta release for the Google browser is available on their website. Limited beta in this case means that users with an Xmarks account can join the waiting list of the Google Chrome Xmarks beta plugin. They will be notified once they are able to download the plugin for the Google Chrome web browser.

The developers mention scaling and stability reasons for limiting the beta downloads in this stage. Google Chrome users who are interested in the plugin should sign up for the alpha on the Xmarks website. They also need to ensure that they are running a development build of the Google browser with extensions enabled. Several features of the bookmark syncing plugin are currently not included in the Google Chrome version of the plugin including missing support for custom bookmark servers, syncing profiles and the discovery feature.

Xmarks for Chrome is the first Google Chrome plugin that syncs bookmarks between different web browsers.

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There are actually two possible solutions to display the unsorted bookmarks folder more visibly. The first option is to go into the Firefox bookmarks manager by pressing [CTRL Shift B] and dragging and dropping the unsorted bookmarks folder into a different location. This can be either one of the toolbars or a location in the visible Firefox bookmarks menu.

The second option is to add a new bookmark in the location the unsorted bookmarks folder should appear and add the following line as the location:

place:folder=UNFILED_BOOKMARKS

The name of the bookmark can be anything. It might be required to restart Firefox before the folder is accessible in the web browser. Dragging and dropping the unsorted bookmarks folder is probably the best way of adding the unsorted bookmarks folder to another location.

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The SortPlaces add-on adds many important sorting options plus the incredibly useful option to automatically sort new bookmarks according to the sorting parameters that the user defined in the add-on’s options.

The Firefox add-on distinguishes between menu, toolbar and unfiled bookmarks and offers different settings for each bookmarking category. Nine different sorting options are available in each category including sorting them by name, url, visit count, keyword or date added. The sorting order can be reversed in the same menu and it is possible to define the sort order for queries, folders, livemarks and bookmarks as well. By default queries appear above folders which appear above livemarks and bookmarks.

It is furthermore possible to enable automatic bookmark sorting and to include or exclude bookmarks or bookmark folders from the operation. It usually did not take longer than a second to sort through individual bookmark folders with dozens of bookmarks. A complete run on the other end did not seem to end at all. Maybe it is broken or maybe it is just taking very long. SortPlaces is nevertheless a great add-on for users who want to sort their bookmarks in a certain order that is not offered by default.

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The Bookmarks Archiver add-on has been created as a semi-automatic option to delete or archive bookmarks that have not been visited for a certain time. The default days are set to 90 but it is possible to change that figure according to the specific needs of the individual user.

The add-on will show a prompt when the first bookmark expires that allows the user to archive or delete the bookmark. Archived bookmarks will be moved into the Archived folder that is created by the add-on automatically. It is furthermore possible to make the add-on perform the archiving or deletion automatically from then on. A click on cancel will leave the bookmark unchanged.

The add-on will automatically run on Firefox shutdown.

Bookmarks Archiver currently has a few limitations that prevent the add-on from working properly in some cases. The History function in Firefox needs to be enabled for the add-on to work at all. Visits to bookmarks will not be recognized by the add-on if the user is surfing in private mode. Finally only bookmarks that are stored in the root folder or in level 1 folders can be archived and bookmarks that are created in the Organize Bookmarks menu need to be visited once before they are being tracked by the add-on.

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The following article outlines a two-step process to remove existing Firefox favicons and block new ones from being created. It is recommended to backup all files that are mentioned in this article prior to making the necessary changes.

1. Firefox settings

The first step is to change settings in the about:config dialog of the Firefox web browser. Simply enter [about:config] in the Firefox address bar and filter the list for the term [browser.chrome]. Change the following three parameters to the following values:

• browser.chrome.favicons – False
• browser.chrome.image_icons.max_size – 0
• browser.chrome.site_icon – False

This step does not get rid of already existing bookmark favicons.

2. Removing existing favicons

Press [Ctrl Shift B], select Import and Backup from the toolbar and pick Export HTML. This will save a copy of the bookmarks as a html file to the local desktop. Open that html file in the web browser and run the following bookmarklet to remove all Firefox favicons from it.

You can drag and drop the bookmarklet to the favorites or copy and paste it into the Firefox address bar to execute it.

Save the page again by pressing [Ctrl S]. Save it under the same name. Now close the Firefox web browser. We need to remove the old bookmark files from the Firefox profile folder. Here is the location of the Firefox profile folder on various operating systems:

Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/
Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/
Windows 98 / ME: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Windows Vista / XP: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

Locate the active Firefox profile. Remember to backup places.sqlite. Now delete places.sqlite and all .json files in the bookmarkbackups subfolder. Restart Firefox. You will notice that all bookmarks are gone. Use [Ctrl Shift B] again to load the library. Select Import and Backup again. This time pick Import HTML and load the previously edited html file.

The bookmarks will be loaded into Firefox. You might need to arrange them again but all favicons should be gone for good.

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Bookmarking those in Firefox would mean to click on each tab to bookmark the websites. A better way is to automatically bookmark pages in Firefox and this is where the Auto Bookmark All Tabs extension for Firefox comes into play.

The extension has been designed to automatically bookmark all open tabs on exit or during a session (either by pressing a button or the shortcut [Ctrl Shift A]) which is very handy for researchers and basically anyone who works with boatloads of tabs that have to be saved as bookmarks at one point. The Firefox bookmarks extension comes with a few options that are worth looking at after installation:

• Auto bookmark Firefox tabs when Firefox exits
• Add new bookmark folder automatically that displays date and time of saving
• Bookmark to unsorted bookmarks.
• Select a specific folder for storing those bookmarks in Firefox.

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Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use Wordpress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

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Check Places is the first Firefox 3 extension that can check all Firefox 3 bookmarks for duplications and invalid references aka dead pages. The experimental add-on can be downloaded right from the Mozilla website after logging in as a user. The new Check Places entry will be added by the Firefox add-on to the bookmarks menu. A click on that link will open a new window that the user can use to configure the scan behavior.

It is possible to scan all bookmarks or only selected folders. Exclusions can be made so that some bookmarks or folders will not be scanned in the process. The scan itself can check if the pages that the bookmarks point to exist and if it is stored more than once in the bookmarks.

The scan does not take long, a few minutes for a few hundreds bookmarks. The results are displayed in a tabbed interface detailing the bookmarks that have returned a page not found error and those that have been recognized as duplicates.

Each Firefox bookmark can be opened and checked individually. The extension will list the return status of the page, e.g. 404 page not found or 500 Internal server error to aid the user in his decision. A simple timeout for example usually means that the page could be back up later while a 404 usually hints at a more severe problem.

Selected bookmarks or all can be deleted in the end to clean the Firefox bookmarks from duplicates and invalid entries. Check Places is a great Firefox 3 extension, must have for every Firefox user that has more than a handful of bookmarks and indispensable for users with hundreds and more.

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One prime example would be to bookmark an offer on a website that expires after a set amount of time. It would not make much sense to keep the bookmark afterwards unless a new offer would be put on the same page. Might also be interesting for research.

TARK is a Firefox add-on that can make the bookmarks temporarily available. It does so by providing access to a new toolbar button – or several buttons – that make it possible to mark bookmarks. Bookmarks can be set to be available for up to four weeks using the Firefox add-on. Keep in mind that this is an option, it is still perfectly possible to add bookmarks the usual way which ensures that they will never expire.

Setup requires to drag and drop one or multiple toolbar buttons of the add-on into a Firefox toolbar. This is done by right-clicking a toolbar and selecting the customize option. Each Tark setting is available as one button but there is also a button with a drop down menu that combines them all.

The options of the add-on contain interesting settings. The add-on can be set to reset the expiration counter whenever the bookmarked page is accessed. The very same option provide access to new, unexpired and expired bookmarks which means that it is possible to recover expired web pages.

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An alternative to share bookmarks is the software Transmute. Transmute relies on the Microsoft .net Framework and comes with an installer and as a portable edition. It supports the four popular web browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. Firefox users will be delighted to hear that both Firefox 3 and earlier versions of Firefox are supported. The same is true for the Google Chrome browser where Chromium, developer builds and the official Google version are supported.

Transmute displays a source and target area in the interface. The user can pick a browser from a drop down menu and edit the browser’s path if that is required. This is for instance mandatory for portable browsers that might be used on a computer system.

Additional options are available which can be expanded in the main interface. The bookmarks will be added in their own folder in the target browser by default. The name of the folder and the timestamp can be changed in the options. They also provide options to import the bookmarks in the root folder instead, to overwrite existing bookmarks and to create a backup before doing so.

The target browsers need to be closed for the process which is also true for some source browsers like Firefox 3 which locks the bookmark database when it is running. Transmute provides an easy way to share bookmarks across browsers. Support for Safari and an option to schedule bookmarks would be nice additions to the software program.

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Sort Places is an experimentally Firefox add-on that provides better and faster sorting options for Firefox bookmarks. The add-on adds a Sort entry to the bookmarks menu and can also be added as an icon to a Firefox toolbar.

It sorts all bookmarks by default but can be modified to sort only selected folders. The options that make it superior to the default Firefox sorting function are the following:

• Exclude Toolbars from sorting
• Define Sort Order by assigning values to queries, folders, bookmarks and livemarks
• Sort Places uses separators to define groups that will be sorted individually

Sort Places will remember the settings that the user entered while sorting bookmarks but it will not automatically sort newly added or moved bookmarks. It would be an ideal bookmark sorting add-on if the author could somehow implement that feature. As of now it is easier to access than the default way of sorting bookmarks in Firefox and provides much needed filters that define how the bookmarks are sorted.

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Both services use remote servers to host and synchronize the data. Some users have expressed privacy concerns that their bookmarks are stored on remote servers. There is virtually no way of telling if someone else accessed the bookmarks. A solution for those users would be a way to synchronize the Firefox bookmarks without third party help. The only requirement for this is an always on location on the Internet that can host the bookmarks.

SyncPlaces is a Firefox extension that can synchronize Firefox bookmarks between multiple computers without third party help. It requires WebDav or an ftp server for data storage.

A backup of the current local bookmarks is always created before starting the data synchronization and it is possible to revert back to the old data set if the synchronization failed.

The Firefox user has to configure access to the online data storage before being able to save and synchronize data in that location. Available protocols are http, https and ftp. Several options are available like encrypting or compressing bookmarks and how the bookmarks should be synchronized / merged.

Users of the Firefox extension can also backup or restore bookmarks manually and sort bookmarks in various ways.

The biggest benefit of SyncPlaces is that it puts the user back in control if he has ftp or WebDav access. It is therefor a welcome addition to third party data synchronization services. The add-on is currently listed as experimental and can only be installed if the user logs into the Mozilla website.

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Users can add the Bookmarks extension to Open Office in the Tools > Extensions Manager menu after downloading the Bookmarks Menu extension from the Open Office website. A new entry entitled Add-ons will be added to the Tools menu after restarting Open Office.

That menu provides the help for the extension and the means to create a folder and file structure for the “real” menu which will be available under Bookmark in the main menu toolbar.

Two default entries are added to the new Bookmarks menu. The first is the Bookmark This Document which will add a bookmark for the current document while the second provides access to all bookmarks and options to edit them.

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The advantage of Opera Link is that it is build into Opera like many other features that can only be added to Firefox with add-ons. Opera Link can be used to synchronize Bookmarks, Notes, Speed Dial and the Personal Bar with an online storage at Opera. That storage can be accessed by other Opera browsers including Opera Mini. As a bonus the personal data can also be accessed directly on the Opera website which is excellent if you access the web from a computer that has no Opera browser installed.

Using Opera Link could not be easier. The feature can be accessed in the File > Synchronize Opera menu and requires an account at Opera. The account can be created right from the menu and the only data that is required is a username, password and email.

The transfer of the data is fast and I was not able to witness any delay in the process. The data will be continuously synced with Opera Link until the user decides to turn that feature off again.

Bookmarks and the other data will be synchronized with every browser that activates the sync feature and provides the same user data that has been entered during account creation.

The online version provides access to the bookmarks and Speed Dial links and even has an option to add new bookmarks.

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Del.icio.us is a online bookmarking service where users can add websites to. A small description and tags can be added to those websites and an account is required to store them online.

To import all Delicious bookmarks into Firefox do the following. Head over to Delicious and select settings > export/backup to save all bookmarks in an html file. Make sure to include the tags. A click on Export To HTML starts the process.

Now export all bookmarks of Firefox 3 as a JSON file as well. This can be done in Bookmarks > Organize bookmarks and there by clicking on the Import and Export button.

Now that you have both files saved go to the website that combines both bookmarks and merges them so that only one bookmark file is left in the end that can be imported into Firefox again. The new file is in JSON format as well, the format that is the default Firefox format for storing bookmarks. The import of that merged bookmarks file is done in the same menu as the export mentioned above.

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The process can take a lot of time depending on the amount of websites that you have stumbled in the Stumbleupon account. Firefox will not react to user input during that time and it pretty much looks like it hangs. In the end however all stumbled websites are added to the Firefox bookmarks in a folder named Stumbleupon and several subfolders for different categories like Computers, Health or Business.

The export function is located in the Search & Tagging tab of the options of the Stumbleupon add-on. All websites that get stumbled after upgrading or installing the new toolbar will be saved automatically in the Firefox bookmarks as well which means that it is not necessary to export the Stumbleupon websites more than once.

Definitely an interesting option for many users of the Stumbleupon toolbar.

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The bookmarks are then displayed in the usual order including submenus. A left-click on a bookmark opens that bookmark. The real beauty of Links 2 Tray is that it provides access to bookmarks of all three major browsers. The configuration provides settings for Internet Explorer’s Favorites, Firefox’s Bookmarks.html file and Opera.

Firefox changed the way bookmarks are handled with Firefox 3 which means that the user should export the bookmarks into html format once in a while to be able to use them in Links 2 Tray.

Firefox is not explicitly mentioned but it’s possible to add its executable in the Netscape field. One set of bookmarks will be the primary set which is immediately available after left-clicking the system tray icon while the other two are available in folders in that menu. Make sure you set the primary to the bookmarks you use the most.

Bookmarks were opened in Internet Explorer by default but I was able to change that by exchanging the Internet Explorer url with the Firefox one. From then on the bookmarks were opened in Firefox by default. If you prefer Opera just add the Opera executable in that field.

It’s probably no problem to add any other browser instead of the three ones mentioned by simply replacing their executables.

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AM-DeadLink is a third party software that can check the bookmarks of all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Mozilla) as well as url files, comma separated and tab delimited files. The Internet Explorer bookmarks are discovered automatically while all others have to be manually selected from the hard drive. The selections will be remembered in the future.

The main purpose of AM-DeadLink is to check all bookmarks. Error codes and additional information are displayed during and after the check and the dead bookmarks can be checked manually by opening them in the default browser or viewed internally. Favicons can be downloaded optionally if desired during the check.

The software can also search for duplicates in the list of bookmarks and delete those duplicates. The duplicate bookmarks can be deleted automatically by the program or manually by the user.

The program is pretty easy to use and gives the user enough freedom to make the important decisions. A great way to check all the bookmarks. It would be nice if there would be a way to check bookmarks of all browsers and sync them afterwards.

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