Firefox Plugin: Xmarks

Bookmarking is a great way to save your favorite website or any web pages that you want to revisit at later time. It would be even better if the bookmark appears on any browsers from any computers isn't it? Even at public computers at the airport and shared computers at the university! Actually you can do that with a Firefox plugin called Xmarks (previously known as Foxmarks). When you are installing Xmarks, it will ask you to create an account if you haven't done so. Once you have an account, your bookmark will be automatically saved and synchronized with your online bookmark. Whenever you want to access your bookmark on another computers, just go here and sign in using the same username and password as the ones that you use to set up the Xmarks account.

Xmarks user interface

You can also install Xmarks on as many computers as you want. Let say you already have Xmarks installed on browser on a PC and you wish to install another Xmarks on your notebook computer. Just install it as you do on PC but don't create a new account this time. Log in using the same username and password. Next you'll be prompted to either (1) merge your bookmark, (2) discard bookmark on the browser and keep bookmark on the server or (3) discard bookmark on the server and keep only bookmark on the browser. Your choice depends on which bookmark you use the most. You can merge the bookmark from the server and on the browser. This way, you will have both bookmarks from the server and the browser. If you choose the second option, you will end up keeping only bookmark from the current Xmarks account. If you choose option 3, you will erase the bookmark that you have on the server and replace it with the new one from the browser of newly installed Xmarks.

Whenever you add a new bookmark, Xmarks will note the change and will prompt you to update the bookmark when you attempt to close the browser. Xmarks was first designed to be a Firefox plugin but now Xmarks users can also use it on IE and Safari.

Firefox Plugin: Ubiquity

Ubiquity is one the cool Firefox plugins that enables you to do a lot of things while browsing. Let say you’ve found a fantastic restaurant and want to recommend it to your friend. You locate the address of the restaurant in google maps and add a link in your email to your friend. It would probably take 4 steps. Open Google Maps, Search, Click on it, copy link, open email, then paste. That is what you normally do but do you realise that you can’t even put the map in your email? Yes no map just a link! That’s the problem of the internet. The web is disconnected, data is far away. Can you imagine how fun and easy internet browsing is if you can email map of the restaurant in just a few clicks away? You can translate a foreign language to English just by highlighting the phrase. You can even sync your twitter account with Ubiquity. It is so easy. For more info, check out the video below. Until next time, Shah