SyncPlaces

Latest News

November 3rd 2008 - SyncPlaces v3.0.2 released. Bug fix release - permissions not set correctly for Linux/UNIX.

November 1st 2008 - SyncPlaces v3.0.1 released. Bug fix release - favicons were not always synchronising.

October 29th 2008 - SyncPlaces v3.0.0 released. The new features include:

Password and password exceptions synchronised - files are automatically encrypted before transfer
Automatic synchronisation of bookmarks (and passwords/exceptions) at regular intervals
TEA encryption has been added as a faster alternative to AES
You can now provide styling tags when sending XBEL (like Bookmarks Sync and Sort) to auto-magically style your bookmarks
Favicons are now synchronised. This is done using the favicon URLs rather than the images themselves to keep the file sizes small and performance high
New merge option (on by default), allows you to merge deletes
To reduce browser problems, SyncPlaces now automatically closes the Bookmarks Sidebar and Bookmarks Organiser when receiving (the sidebar is reopened again afterwards)
A better (i.e. safer) set of defaults for new users has been introduced
Better threading to prevent UI hangs when carrying out long tasks
When importing XBEL files containing just a subfolder, all the Places information is now imported
Reorganisation of the Options dialog

Description

SyncPlaces is a Firefox extension that allows you to synchronise your bookmarks and passwords between different installations of Firefox (e.g. a browser at Home and another at Work), and also to sort your bookmarks. It only works with Firefox v3 and above (but is compatible with older bookmark extensions). The synchronize feature requires your own Web or FTP server, which is used to store the bookmarks centrally.

Using your own server means you get to keep you bookmarks private rather than storing them on a third party server who may analyse, probe and profile you, sell that data to others, or use it for their own nefarious purposes ;)

If you just wish to sort your bookmarks then you probably just want the SortPlaces extension instead.

picture of the main tab

If also takes a backup of your current bookmarks before overwriting them with what is on the shared server. So you can restore this backup if it all goes wrong and you can also manually take your own backup at any time.

Bookmarks are typically stored in JSON format as this is ideal for the storage of all the bookmark information from the new Firefox Places system (e.g. tags, queries, and annotations). You can also export/import or send/receive your bookmarks in XBEL format. XBEL is great for sharing bookmarks with other browsers or older versions of Firefox, or transforming with XSL to style your bookmarks so you can access them from any browser without installing the SyncPlaces extension. You can also send bookmarks in HTML format if you don't wish to style XBEL yourself.

Both passwords and the list of password exceptions are synchronised, and are automatically encrypted before sending to maintain privacy.

Other options available include file compression for fast transfers, encryption, auto-send and receive at regular intervals and/or browser start/end, merging of received bookmarks/passwords, synchronizing/sorting/importing/exporting a single folder, sending/receiving only when bookmarks have changed, import/export of XBEL files, and a variety of sort options.