How to: Sync Firefox bookmarks with Mobileme for Windows (iPhone)

Something that has perplexed me since I started using Apples MobileMe service is that the bookmark sync is limited to just Safari and Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer whilst easy to used and bundled with Windows is not the best browser and even in its most recent iteration there are a lot of new web technologies like CSS3 that just don’t work as intended and quite rightly a lot of people like me want to use FireFox.

Up until last week I still had my default browser set as Internet explorer so i could keep my bookmarks synchronised, then I found a simple work around for the problem which means I can finally set FireFox as my default browser whilst still getting my bookmarks synced to my iPhone.

Here’s how i did it…

In order to get this working you will need the following:

• Internet Explorer & FireFox installed
• MobileMe account & desktop client installed
• Xmarks
• an IPhone!

1) Before you start, now is a good time to consolidate all your bookmarks in both browsers and remove dead or duplicate bookmarks. This can be done quickly using a FireFox plug-in called CheckPlaces. Bookmarks are often made and then left so its good to do this from time to time.

2) Go to the Xmarks website and sign up for a free account.

3) Download both the FireFox plug-in and the Internet explorer plug-ins. You can download both here.

3) Once installed you should go into the options of each plug-in and configure with the user name and password you just set up. In FireFox you can configure the plug-in using the blue and white X icon on the bottom right of the browser, for Internet explorer look for the same X icon in the Windows system tray.

4) Configure both plug-ins to synchronise automatically and I would also recommend checking the box to promt on exit if there are unsynchronised bookmarks.

5) That’s it!! – Because the Xmarks client for Internet Explorer runs as a system tray app you do not have to run Internet Explorer in order to activate the plug-in and sync. Xmarks will periodically sync any bookmark changes between browsers and the next time the MobileMe client runs a synchronisation you should find your bookmarks on your iPhone!

Hopefully when Apple come to their senses they will add direct support for FireFox but until then this should keep you in sync!

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