Organizing Bookmarks with Firefox Sync

September 30, 2015

One of the things I haven't bother doing for a very long time is trying to organize my bookmarks. You get link after link and most of the time you never go back to look at them. I then to either change or just re-install the operating system more times than I would like so this is one of the reasons I haven't bother with this. It's very time consuming and this is also the reason I don't bother much with backgrounds and things like that. I like my stuff mostly plain vanilla. I'll just call it clean and simple. Not that there are no awesome pictures that I see every now and then, but I just don't bother with this stuff my self for the reasons I just mentioned. Lately I have been looking at jobs here and there and I also noticed the Firefox Sync which basically allows you to Sync your bookmarks on the cloud so you can have the same thing show up on any computer that you use. Well I think I finally found a good use for it so I thought I give it a shot. Although organizing the long list of bookmarks may take you a while, but it goes pretty fast once you start and figure out where you want to put them. I just added folders of what I wanted and drag and drop the links there. Way easier to find things now which I like and I don't have to worry about backing them up each time there is a change. You must create an account and be logged in, in order for this to work though. So let me add a few pictures of what the new Microsoft Edge has vs Firefox.

As you can see Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 is more than just vanilla. It's so basic I couldn't find any other options.

You get the star which is what you use to add the links to favorites.

Here's are two links I added and I was trying to figure out if there was a way to save them to the cloud and sync them elsewhere, but other than making folders, not much else.

Now here's the reason I decided to make this post. I forgot what my password was on the Firefox Sync and since I tried to enter the wrong password one too many times, I locked myself out. Unfortunately they don't tell you how long you need to wait before you can try again. Which I guess to a point I can understand why, but then if you are the owner, you get stuck not knowing. So you still can get bitten in the rear with this. Needless to say I did write the password down and found it after I had locked myself out so I'll have to try again later.

Why is this important, well, the system states that things will be deleted if you reset your password. It's not clear if it's just your browsing history or everything you have organized which would suck if that's the case. This is the reason I decided not to reset the password. But if you must you can always export your bookmarks and try it. I figured I wait it out a bit to see if I can get back into it or I'll just do that myself. Although there is always that option, just make sure you write this down and keep it somewhere you can find it later. So far I tested this on my desktop and my laptop and it works great. However, you must remember that you have to be logged into sync in order for this to work, which also means that if anyone else uses your computer with your profile, they can also see all your bookmarks. Not a big deal if you just use it at home, but if you use it elsewhere, you just have to log out of sync, but then you also need to remember to log back into it in order to save any new bookmarks. Just one more thing to remember if you decided to use it. Most people probably don't care about the bookmarked pages they have, but if it's jobs your looking at for example, then you may want to keep that a bit more private. This is just an example, but you can see what I mean.

 Here's where you will find the Sync option. A very easy to use feature but works great because now I can keep working on whatever I was doing on the desktop if I want to use the laptop or go work somewhere else. I don't need to keep making a backup of bookmarks anymore, so this is one cloud feature that I think is very useful and that I am liking. I just hope they can figure out a better way for those of us that forget the password. Nowadays there are just so many passwords that we need to remember that it's just a matter of time before you forget one, two or three. Specially if it's one you don't use as often.

Although Windows 10 gives you space on the One-Drive, you would still need to do this manually with Edge from what I can tell.