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.

Whenever a new bookmark is added to Internet Explorer it appears in Firefox as well. You can also add every website that you visit with Firefox to the favorites by adding that website using the new favorites menu instead of the bookmarks menu. We can enhance this method further by tweaking several settings.

First of, it does not make much sense to use a bookmarks and a favorites menu in Firefox. We can merge the bookmarks with the favorites first and then use simple css code to remove the bookmarks menu from Firefox. To do this we have to export the bookmarks from Firefox using the exports function in the bookmarks manager.

This saves a file bookmarks.html to your desktop. Open the Internet Explorer in the next step and click on File > Import and Export and choose to import favorites. Browse to and select the bookmarks.html file that has been saved in Firefox. Select a folder where you want to place the bookmarks in and complete the operation.

If you go back to Firefox you see that all the bookmarks are available in the Favorites menu as well.

To hide the Bookmarks menu you have to find the file userChrome.css. You can find it in your Firefox profile folder under chrome usually. If that file does not exist create it and add the following line to it:

#bookmarks-menu {display:none !important;}

This should hide the bookmarks menu after the next restart. If you remove that line again the bookmarks menu will be visible again.

One last thing that we have to deal with is that sites still get added to the bookmarks if you press the shortcut CTRL + D. We want to change that to add them to the Favorites with that command. To do that we need another extension called Keyconfig which can do this easily.

Start the extension from the Tools menu. Now remove the old entries Bookmark all Tabs and Bookmark this Page. After that add a new key that you call Favorites for example. Enter the following line in the Code field:

gPofUI.openAddToFavoritesDialog();

Last thing that needs to be done is to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. We want to add CTRL + D obviously and need to select our new named key in the main window of keyconfig and click in the white empty field below the table of keys. Press CTRL and D afterwards and that entry should appear as the new shortcut to add entries to our Favorites.