More fun with Xmarks and Safari

So I am still having major xmarks issues. On my Mac on El Capitan 10.11.5 I am running Firefox 47.01 and Xmarks 4.3.19, and I am running Safari 9.1.1 and Safari Technology Preview 9.1.2 (which was recently updated, and maybe the issue) and Xmarks for Safari 2.0.19.

After creating my clean bookmarks in Firefox and making a clean backup of them I kept uploading them and overwriting the xmarks servers, but when I uses Xmark for Safari it has been seemingly just wiping out all my Xmarks in both Safari’s, but leaving my completly messed up bookmarks on both my iPhone and iPad. So this time I turned off iCloud Sync for Safari on both iPad and iPhone and deleted the bookmarks then overwrote the Safari bookmarks on my mac with the clean bookmarks from Xmarks, and it left Safari empty of bookmarks once again. Weird. So I let it sit overnight with no bookmarks in Safari on my Mac, iPhone or iPad, but when I woke up that was no longer the case. Once again Safari had messed up bookmarks on my Mac (though nothing on iPhone and iPad sync iCloud is off completely) and the server copy on Xmarks is messed up again too!

Great! So now I have also turned off iCloud on my Mac and have re-installed my good backup bookmarks into Firefox and re-uploaded them to Xmarks, and redownloaded them with Xmarks for Safari (which I have also uninstalled and re-installed) and once again I have no bookmarks in Safari. Maybe having iCloud though on all my devices it will eventually clear the bookmarsk in iCloud which are obviously totally messed up, though eventually I do want it to sync to my iPhone and iPad.

I have contacted Xmarks support to see if they will do anything.

I am thinking after this I may just need to kill Xmarks for Safari and just work from an exported bookmarks from Firefox and put them into Safari, as for sure something is not working with Xmarks!

More fun with Xmarks on Mac, huzzah for Xmarks for Safari (if only it worked)

So I finally got X-marks to sync, but it was a total pain in the arse. In fact I had to wipe my whole Firefox profile, and use Firefox Sync to get all my plug ins back and then re-log into everything, and then import my clean bookmarks backup and use that to Upload over the Xmarks server. I then did the same at work where I have a portable Firefox setup, though after checking my x-marks bookmarks online they were still old, so I synced again this morning and the server ones finally seem to match.

Now is where the real fun begins! So I went to Xmarks for Safari and told it to Download my bookmarks, as it’s bookmarks were by far the most messed up. The first attempt seemed to merge my server bookmarks and Safari ones so they were an even bigger mess, so I tried downloading again, and now I have no safari bookmarks at all! YIPPEE!!!!

So in Xmarks for Safari I did a Reset Xmarks and relogged in and told it to keep data on server, and discard data on this computer (of which there is none). And Nothing. ABSOLUTELY NO BOOKMARKS IN SAFARI, nor in Safari Tech Preview. Good job Xmarks!

So finally my bookmarks are clean on the server, but I have absolutely no bookmarks in Safari, and my iPad and iPhone each still have the really messed up bookmarks from the strange merging of my clean bookmarks and my clean bookmarks, and they all have iCloud sync turned on.

And it looks like the solution I have used in the past is no longer viable. I used to boot into Bootcamp and let Apple’s iCloud Sync Extension work to sync my Safari boomarks, but posts online I am looking at seem to imply that the extension no longer functions with the latest Firefox and the plug in has been pulled. Thanks a lot Apple. Really appreciate the help!

Can’t Apple make a damn syncing plug in for Bookmarks for those of us that don’t use Safari on the mac, since we are forced to use Safari on our iOS devices?

Anyone else have major problems with XMARKS on Mac?

So I am a Mac user, but I do not use Safari as my browser of choice, but I still want my bookmarks to sync between browsers and get to my ipad and iphone. And my browser of choice is still Firefox (I used Chrome for a while but missed all the plug ins with Firefox) as I like it expansion abilities (and yes I know in the near future it will lose them and start using Chrome extensions, and I will likely re-evaluate then).

So to keep my Bookmarks synced for a long time I have been a user of Xmarks. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and nominally Safari. On PC Apple has released a bookmark sync plug in for iCloud that works very well, but they have never released it for mac. So I use XMARKS.

The problem is I think with Xmarks Safari, which is finicky at best, and often if I am not paying attention to my bookmarks, they all get mixed up and unorganized. Things get pulled out of folders and moved all over, and yes in XMARKS you can go see old sets of bookmarks, but it isn’t exactly a quick or easy process, and often to find a clean set of bookmarks I need to go back far enough that I lose any recent bookmarks that I have added, so I end up just re-organizing my bookmarks once again.

I just spent the last 2 days doing that gain, and am doing a force overwrite of my server bookmarks, so hopefully all my browsers end up with my nice clean freshly organized bookmarks, but I don’t expect it to work, as old things always pop up and things get completely disorganized.

Plus it makes me nervous that my upload has been doing this for the last half an hour!

Which even though I am doing a forced overwrite of the server, I can bet things will get messed up (and yes I have exported my bookmarks and made a backup from Firefox, as this organization took a long damn time).

And somehow my bookmarks never seem to make it to Safari or my iPad an iPhone correctly no matter what I do. And I often end up manually importing the bookmarks into Safari, but then the sync gets all messed up.

Let’s hope for once this actually works.

(EDIT)

 Yup, well now that I have my clean set of bookmarks, it seems I can’t get them to Force Overwrite on the server! Xmarks just seems stuck at synchronizing. And Firefox keeps locking up so I have to force quite. Yipee. I guess I can manually delete Safari’s bookmarks and import the firefox ones and see how that goes, but I have never had a good experience with that! SHIT!

(EDIT AGAIN)

 Walked both dogs and when I came back the sync was done, but when I checked the bookmarks online, they were the old ones, so it didn’t seem to work. SHIT! This is really annoying!

iCloud Bookmark sync on Mac is Garbage!

Was just on a bit of a vacation last week and realized that my iOS bookmarks were completely screwed up again.

I use Chrome as my main browser, with Firefox as my second browser (mainly for it’s plug-ins and tabs), and I only use Safari to sync my bookmarks with iOS. As I have written before, pre iOS 7 I used iTunes to directly sync my bookmarks from Safari, as my iCloud bookmarks constantly were screwed up. Well once again my bookmarks on iCloud were screwed.
I keep my bookmarks synched with xmarks ( http://www.xmarks.com ) and have a good very cleaned up set of bookmarks that I recently cleaned. I tried downloading these using xmarks for safari, but it would download and then sync with iCloud and be screwed up again.
So I booted up Windows 8.1 in Parallels, and booted up Chrome, opened xmarks settings and downloaded my clean new bookmarks, and amazingly iCloud sync for Safari correctly overwrote my iCloud bookmarks. Why does Safari on the mac not do this?
Apple still needs to add syncing control, so you can overwrite bookmarks on iCloud from your Mac, especially since it is the only way to get bookmarks to your iOS device! This whole simplicity thing only works when everything works, but bookmark cloud syncing often gets screwed up so you need advanced controls. Hide them from users if you want to Apple, but they should be there! And why the hell does the Windows syncing work better than Mac syncing!