Browser synchronization is something that is becoming increasingly important as our experience of the web is less tied to a particular computer. Most browser vendors themselves now provide such services: Mozilla offers Firefox Sync, Google too offers synchronization in their Chrome browser, and Opera has synchronization support with Opera Link. Most importantly, all of these services are free.

Technically, since Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync and now even Opera Link are all open and have APIs, it is possible  to have a opera link plug-in for Firefox, and a Firefox Sync plug-in for Chrome, but the lack of such plugins means that for those running multiple browsers regularly, a single tool that manages sync across all browsers is needed.

That’s where Xmarks comes in.

Xmarks is a popular browser synchronization service that was nearly shut down last year. Since then, it has been purchased by another popular service LastPass, which helps you synchronize passwords safely across computers, browsers and devices.

To continue operating, Xmarks is now a freemium service, i.e. they offer a majority of features for free, and for a small additional monthly / yearly sum they offer a few more features and services.

The greatest feature of Xmarks is that it provides most of these synchronization features for free, and in addition, it works across browsers, and platforms. I use a number of different browsers having multiple profiles across a number of different computers, needless to say synchronization is very important to me. Till now I had been using each browser's own mechanism for synchronization, without synchronization between them. Xmarks for me is the perfect service.

Of all browser synchronization services, I am particularly fond of Firefox Sync, even though it does not synchronize as many things as Google's Sync solution for Chrome ‒ Firefox add-ons for example. Firefox Sync manages to give a fresh Firefox profile the same feel on all computer. The same awesomebar shortcuts work on all synchronized Firefox instances.

Xmarks touts synchronizing almost all the same things as Firefox Sync, so I decided to give the Premium version of Xmarks a try. Xmark's features are not consistent across different browsers though. For example, synchronizing history is only supported in Firefox ‒ as of now ‒  although most other browsers do not make use of history data as much as Firefox does, making it synchronizing such data mostly a waste. Additionally, using your own server for synchronizing is also only supported for Firefox. Synchronizing Open Tabs ‒ a feature a like a lot in Firefox Sync ‒ is not supported in Safari.

Here is a table of features across browsers and platform (as taken from the Xmarks website):

The service offers a majority of its features for free, with only a few that require a Premium account.