Xbrowsersync – open-source Bookmark Synching

Do people really use their desktop bookmarks on their phones, and how? Actually even on desktop I'm parking pages in tabs, one browser window per virtual desktop, one virtual desktop per customer, plus some links on the bookmarks bar of Firefox. That basically killed my need for bookmarks. I had hundreds of them and I'm still carrying them with me but they are buried in the bookmarks menu and seldom see the light. At best they are helping firefox at completing urls when I start typing them, but that could be from the history.

I've got some pages pinned in the home screen of Firefox on my phone, a few bookmarks just in case the browser give priority to them when I type in the url. The sets of pages I use both on desktop and on phone don't overlap much. Technical documentation is on desktop, HN is on both. I surely don't want to sync tabs, bookmarks maybe (wouldn't harm me) but years have proven that I don't need it. If I want to send a page to the other device I share it with gs/kdeconnect. It works also between mobile devices with the laptop off.

I mostly use OneTab to replace bookmarks. Will this support sync OneTab data?

> Do people really use their desktop bookmarks on their phones, and how?

Sure. I routinely add things to Pinboard, and check it on mobile. I often look up things I found interesting, but don't remember the link. Finding categories of things using a combination of tags, and being able to drill down further by adding more tags, is very powerful and convenient.

I never understood how tab pinning in a certain browser is manageable for hundreds or even dozens of sites, where any sort of syncing across browsers or platforms becomes a chore. I use 4 browsers on 3 operating systems on a daily basis, and wouldn't be able to function without a central storage for bookmarks.

In their FAQ[1] (under the heading: "How is my data encrypted? I’m concerned about submitting it to unknown and untrusted servers. Can it really not be decrypted by anyone but me?" or if you click on "Show more FAQs") they list the following:

"xBrowserSync utilises the browser’s native Web Crypto library to encrypt your browser data client-side before it is transmitted over the internet. For key derivation, xBrowserSync uses PBKDF2 with 250,000 rounds of SHA-256 (as a comparison, LastPass’ key derivation uses a similar approach but with only 100,100 rounds by default). The data is then encrypted using AES-GCM with a random 16 byte IV and the user’s random 32 char sync ID as a salt. This approach ensures your data cannot be decrypted without your sync password (which is never transmitted) so please ensure you use a strong password! If you would like to review the encryption code, the relevant functions are getPasswordHash and encryptData."

[1] https://www.xbrowsersync.org/#faqs

Fair point!