Today marks the official end of Xmarks, the bookmarks sync utility. It was ‘retired’ unsentimentally by LastPass. Xmarks is the latest extinction of a product, highly valued by its users, which meets a sudden end and leaves its fans in the lurch. The former users of Vine and Google’s Picassa can surely relate.
Extinction is exactly the right word, as it seems that browser-based bookmarks are now dinosaurs. The heavy use of mobile—where people use search or an app to get to preferred sites—seems to be the main factor. The other is the turf wars between browsers, leading to the lack of an easy way to sync bookmarks from one to the other (Xmarks main feature).
My bookmarks are now completely in the Cloud. There’s no reason to access a bookmark unless you have an internet connection, so why not? I had to do the usual scramble and research to find a substitute for my discontinued product. I settled on Raindrop.io which has great user experience and has been crafted with care across all browsers, iOS and macOS. I’m highly satisfied and recommend it.
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RIP xMarks, you will be missed. For those of us who work in the corporate world where Internet access is locked down in the name of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and numerous internally hosted servers and services not accessible from the Internet anyway, internal bookmarks are still very useful and even necessary. I work in IT where many of those internal sites are for controlling various IT equipment that doesn’t all play nice with a single browser. xMarks was a godsend to keep those internal bookmarks synced across multiple browsers.