Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks, is a defunct bookmark synchronization
add-on for
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
s. The add-on was developed by
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
-based company Foxmarks (later renamed Xmarks) which was founded in 2006 by
Mitch Kapor and was acquired by LastPass in December 2010.
LastPass announced on March 30, 2018, that the Xmarks service would be shut down on May 1, 2018.
Overview
The Xmarks
bookmark synchronizer was an extension for
Mozilla Firefox,
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems ( ...
,
Google Chrome and
Apple Safari
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple. It is built into macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, and uses Apple's open-source browser engine, WebKit, which was derived from KHTML.
Safari was introduced in Mac OS X Panther in January 2003. It was inclu ...
(on OS X 10.5 and 10.6) that synchronized bookmarks between computers. It could also synchronize passwords, open tabs, and browsing history (Firefox only).
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...
support has not been directly implemented as of 2015 but the Chrome extension is available in Opera via a workaround. As of April 2009 it was one of the most popular Firefox add-ons, attaining over 150,000 downloads per week and almost 15 million total downloads.
Company history
In March 2009, Foxmarks was relaunched under a new name and service called Xmarks. Xmarks included many new features like suggested tagging bookmarks.
On September 27, 2010 it was announced that due to the company's current financial projections resulting from its purely voluntary-donations funding-basis, in January 2011, Xmarks would be entirely discontinuing its service. On September 30, Xmarks CEO, James Joaquin, noted that he had been "pleasantly surprised by the volume of interest" that has been expressed since his initial "closing-announcement". This interest has been shown by both potential buyers of the company, and by those who have thus far pledged to subscribe to the service at the site's "pledge page". At their donations page, Xmarks attempted to acquire pledges from 100,000 of their users to pay $10–20 per year for a proposed "premium Xmarks service" which launched on December 9, 2010.
To the date October 7, 2010, Xmarks investors had invested $9 million into the Xmarks project, but with a return on this investment not yet clearly in sight, unless sufficient pledges are received by October 15, 2010, apparently these initial investment funds are reaching an end-point.
On December 2, 2010, the password-management service
LastPass
LastPass is a password manager distributed in subscription form as well as a freemium model with limited functionality. The standard version of LastPass comes with a web interface, but also includes plugins for various web browsers and apps fo ...
acquired Xmarks.
Since this acquisition the program has been minimally updated, primarily fixing bugs, and has not had a single new feature added. On October 9, 2015, LastPass was acquired by
LogMeIn, Inc. for $125 million. After the acquisition, LastPass stated that they plan to continue to support Xmarks.
On March 30, 2018, in an email to users, LastPass announced that the Xmarks service would be shut down on May 1, 2018.
Xmarks domain blockage in India
Starting in May 2012, the xmarks.com domain was blocked by major ISPs in India by court order, resulting in various websites appearing with only a simple message "Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders."
Privacy
Xmarks provided an option to encrypt bookmarks while they are in transit between the browser and the Xmarks server. Individual users' bookmarks are kept private from other users. However, there are clearly issues of privacy and trust in sending bookmarks to a third party. Xmarks did provide an option for the user to avoid the Xmarks server, by using their own
WebDAV
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for con ...
or
FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...
server to store their bookmarks, but this option was only available with Firefox.
Bookmarks were analysed to provide public services such as "Suggested Tags" and "Smarter Search" (Xmarks enhancements to Google web search). The privacy policy stated that the results of this analysis are published without providing any information about individual users.
See also
*
Comparison of browser synchronizers
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web-based browser synchronizers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based ...
References
{{reflist
Companies based in San Francisco
Software companies established in 2006
Software companies disestablished in 2018
2010 mergers and acquisitions
Nonfree Firefox legacy extensions
Defunct software companies of the United States
Defunct online companies of the United States
Google Chrome extensions
Internet properties disestablished in 2018