iCloud iOS bookmarks are messed up again

Well it seems to have happened again. My iOS Bookmarks are totally screwed up again, and I can’t seem to get them to clear up.

I will explain my situation again, which has changed slightly. I run Firefox as my primary browser (used to be Chrome, but I am starting to not feel comfortable with Google having dominion over everything I do on the web), but I still use Chrome for some things. To keep my Bookmarks in sync I run Xmarks, and to get my bookmarks on iOS I run Xmarks for Safari, but it doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Even though my bookmarks on my Mac in Safari match my bookmarks in both Firefox and Chrome, this doesn’t seem to make it over to my iOS devices.

In the past I have run Chrome in Windows 8.1 in Parallels. I would download the latest bookmarks with Xmarks, and the Chrome iCloud plug in seemed to overwrite the iCloud bookmarks with clean ones, but this doesn’t seem to be working currently.

I just wish Apple would go back to allowing direct bookmark overwrite via iTunes. They used to allow this, and have gone back to allowing it for Contacts and Calendars, but not for Bookmarks! If they aren’t going to give you settings to overwrite things on iCloud, they need to at least let you just overwrite from your computer!

PLEASE APPLE, LET ME OVERWRITE BOOKMARKS WITH MY COMPUTER! PLEASE!!!!

Macrumors is reporting that the next version of iTunes restores local contact and calendar syncing, and my iCloud Bookmark solution.

MacRumors has the news that iTunes 11.1.6 Beta has returned local iTunes Contact and Calendar sync to your iOS devices. I have railed about this because iCloud syncing is very very broken, especially without the ability to easily overwrite the iCloud information from your computer. Now if only they would add back Bookmark syncing so I could forget about the damn iCloud which seems to constantly screw up my bookmarks! Honestly I have now figured the only solution which seems to get clean bookmarks to my iOS devices. I use x-marks to sync my bookmarks, as I use Chrome as my primary browser with Mozilla as my secondary browser. Since I am not a PC (which has the great iCloud Sync extension for Windows) I have to get my bookmarks into Safari on my mac to be able to sync bookmarks to my iOS devices, so I use X-marks, but while my Safari seems to then have good clean bookmarks, it does not follow that my iCloud bookmarks are at all the same. Instead I seem to end up with many duplicate folders, but most of which are empty in random orders. In order to fix this, I have found that the aforementioned iCloud plug in for Safari only available on PC’s seems to actually overwrite the iCloud bookmarks, which I can’t seem to manage from my Mac. So I boot up Windows 8.1 in Parallels (can also be done in BootCamp) and launch Chrome for PC. Then I download clean bookmarks from Xmarks and wait for iCloud to sync, and that seems to clean up my bookmarks for a little while at least. Why Apple can’t add a control to iCloud to control overwrite, like they used to have for syncing, or like x-marks has I will never know. I mean if there weren’t issues they wouldn’t have brought back local syncing in any for. Lets hope they bring back local syncing of bookmarks soon, so I can forget about the broken iCloud bookmark syncing!!!

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!