Okay, I use at least four different computers, most with vastly different web browsers. I would like to have a facility to share my bookmarks in real time between those browsers. First off, I'm aware that there are a number of utilities that exist that do this sort of thing, but not quite what I want (if I've missed something there, please point it out). Here are my requirements:

• Must integrate with the browser in some useful manner
• Must support updating from the browser
• Must be a service I can run on my own computers
• Should deal intelligently with conflicting updates
• Must work with a significant number of popular browsers (third party plugins are fine)
• Must not force a user into dealing with exports and imports of the browser's native bookmarks

Is anyone aware of any sort of utility that'll do what I want? If not, I'm up for writing an RFC describing a network protocol for remote bookmark storage, but I'd like to have a server implementation, which I feel I can do, but I don't know how to write browser plugins. Does anyone here?

Personally, I don't understand why this hasn't already been taken care of. The WWW has been around for well over ten years now, and I find it hard to believe that no one else needs this facility. Netscape had a ``Roaming Profile'' facility in their 4.x browsers, but no one else ever supported it, including (unless I'm mistaken) the Netscape 6.x browsers, and it was awfully heavyweight, even if it did use LDAP.

Me, I use a bunch of XML stored on my webserver. Since my webserver is public, I can get to it from anywhere. I keep the files in CVS, which means I can have local copies and keep them in sync.

Now, this fails your criteria for two main reasons: a) updates aren't distributed automatically (I have to cvs checkin); b) it's not editable in the browser.

But it works for me.

The thing is that this is intended for my wife (and, as a side effect, would be useful for me, as well). There are a bunch of services out there that provide what are probably easy-to-use free services that come REAL close, but I don't trust them. My wife exudes this anti-computer field that will make anything break fairly quickly, and being without bookmarks for any significant period of time would halt her ability to do anything on the computer. Having me be able to fix it would, I'm sure, decimate the amount of time required to fix it as compared to some free service out there, plus, I'm less likely to call it quits. In addition, this is a problem that should have been solved ten years ago.

I also use fusionOne (you can probably guess the URL) for this kind of thing. It works really well for IE favourites. Unfortunately, last time I checked, it looked like they'd stopped taking on subscribers.