Skip to Content

TUAW Tip: Sync your bookmarks to an iPhone or iPod touch with Xmarks

by Mike Schramm Dec 30th 2009 at 11:00AM

I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers, and so it helps immensely to have all of my Firefox bookmarks and passwords synced. But the one fly in my ointment has been my iPhone's mobile Safari installation -- because I don't usually use Safari as my browser, I haven't yet figured out a way to get all of my usual bookmarks on to the iPhone.

Until now: this writeup by Shawn0 (via the good folks at Lifehacker) presents a quick workaround to get your Xmarks-synced bookmarks up and running on your iPhone. Unfortunately, he uses Internet Explorer to do it, but given that we're all on Macs, I discovered that it worked just fine with Safari. Set up Xmarks on your Safari installation, sync it up with your usual bookmarks, and then set iTunes to sync your mobile browser's bookmarks with Safari. The one big drawback is that you'll have to start up Safari every once in a while to make sure your changes get all the way out to the mobile device, but that's better than not having them synced up at all.

And yes, you MobileMe users are laughing at us Xmarks users right now, because Apple's service syncs all of these things automatically. But I've never known Xmarks to go down, and this solution costs the low, low price of free per year. If, like me, you haven't landed on a solid way to sync bookmarks out to the mobile browser yet, here you go.

View Tags

Related Stories

Categories

Tips and tricks Internet

I'm an avid user of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as are probably many of you. I browse the Internet regularly on three different computers,...
 

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum

7 Comments

Filter by:
Kevlar

Have they fixed the issue when you're connecting to a "hotspot"-style access point, where XMarks pops-up 3 or 4 certificate warning dialogs when you open the browser and it tries to sync, but can't access any site other than the hotspot landing page? This issue drove me nuts at my school, because the rest of the page wouldn't load, and I had to find a pop-up dialog that had popped behind the main browser window.

An option to wait until there is an actual internet connection before attempting to sync would be nice. Or at least silently fail on a bad certificate.

Until this issue is fixed, it's Mozilla Weave for me... and no iPhone bookmarks.

December 30 2009 at 2:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John.B

Does anyone know how to use the iDisk feature of MobileMe to store bookmark data for the Foxmarks/Xmarks BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) version?

December 30 2009 at 1:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David

The problem with both MobileMe and Xmarks is that these solutions depend on a third party server to synchronise your bookmarks. For me this is a privacy concern. At my work this is an internet policy no-go.
I know that Xmarks is working on the option to allow you to use your own server, but according to their checklist this works only with Firefox.

December 30 2009 at 12:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
petey

Xmarks has an iPhone web app that shows all of your bookmarks without all of this syncing issues.
my.xmarks.com/iphone

December 30 2009 at 11:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ian Greulich

I have been doing this for a while now, I thought it was obvious. I guess I was wrong.

December 30 2009 at 11:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Joshua Meadows

Yeah, and MobileMe doesn't sync cross-browser in anything other than Safari or IE, while Xmarks works on Safari, IE, Chrome and Firefox; that's the bonus of it for me, even though I do use MobileMe, but only to sync contacts and calendars.

December 30 2009 at 11:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Hot Apps on TUAW

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.