The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

For those people in search of alternative web browsers for Mac OS X, and for Windows, too, we keep recommending Firefox and Opera to Mac users, along with Apple’s Safari , but we haven’t yet talked about how to synchronize your bookmarks, or even just move them over! once you’ve made the switch to a new web browser. Given many people horde, er, I mean collect many, many bookmarks (”favorites”), this is potentially an important issue we’ve neglected to address, as my family was quick to point out.

My grandma’s bank “updated” their software, and no longer supports anything except Microsoft Explorer and Netscape, or Mozilla. So, I was obligated to help her upgrade to Firefox while I was visiting her over the Independence Day holiday.

So proud of myself for fixing the situation, when she asked “ok, so how do I transfer my bookmarks”, I thought, this should be a piece of cake.

I should know better by now.

Only a day later my wife, having also switched to Firefox on my urging, had exactly the same question, and I though oh my, perhaps there are only non-trivial solutions. An easy answer wasn’t obvious to me… so I went to Google.

After some searching, here’s a nifty tool i used to not only move their bookmarks and recover some of my dignity, but can also be used to sync bookmarks across *all* of your web browsers on any single computer:

http://www.everydaysoftware.net/bookit/

At only $12, this was one of the cheapest lessons I’ve learned in a long, long time.

But the lesson goes on…

… after making the purchase, I figured out how to transfer the bookmarks free-of-charge. Of course. What’s worse, it’s pretty straight forward. Mike DiMichele, when I told him about this, said, “what did you have a brain cramp?” Except he didn’t use the word cramp. Here we go:

1. In Safari: go to the File pull down menu and select Export Bookmarks. Export them to your desktop for convenience.

2. In Firefox: go to the Bookmarks pull down menu, and select Manage Bookmarks. A new window called Bookmarks Manager will appear! Cool.

3. a. In Firefox’s Bookmarks Manager, from the File pull down menu, select Import…

3. b. Select the From File radio button and then click the Next blue button.

3. c. Click the Date Modified column to order your files by most recent, and select the Safari Bookmarks file you had exported from Safari, and click the blue Open button.

Done!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Mid-level, Review, Safari, Synchronizing, WGN Radio Show Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.