Live Mesh is my new tool to pass time and play around. Recently, there was an article that allowed you to sync your IE Favorites with Live Mesh, but unfortunately I use Firefox and wanted to sync my bookmarks with Live Mesh for obvious reasons. Doing this in Firefox 3 is not as simple as it is in IE. We need to use a couple of tools to do this. Firefox 3 by default DOES NOT store the bookmarks in a bookmarks.html file but uses a database approach. So how do we enable Firefox to automatically export the bookmarks in bookmarks.html?

  1. Export Firefox bookmarks as html.
  2. Merge these with IE bookmarks.
  3. Sync them with Mesh.

To export Firefox bookmarks as HTML:

In Firefox type about:config in the address bar, then search for: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML Now change the value to ‘True’ which is ‘False’ by default. Restart the browser and you will see the bookmarks.html file in your Profile folder. To locate your Profile folder:

Start –> Run –> %APPDATA%MozillaFirefoxProfiles

Here the folder with some arbitrary text and .default at the end is your profile folder. Here the bookmarks.html file contains your bookmarks. Keep this folder open.

To merge Firefox bookmarks with IE:

We shall use a software – Bookmarks Bridge to achieve this. Open Bookmarks Bridge after installing it then:

  1. In ‘Source Browsers’ delete everything other than Firefox.
  2. If Firefox is not there, then: Settings –> Add –> Select Firefox.
  3. Now here is the important step:
    • Same screen, down you will see ‘Location’.
    • Choose ‘Browse’ and navigate to your Firefox profile folder (the one that we left open).
    • Select the bookmarks.html file and OK.
    • Screen shot:

  4. Once done, on the main screen, hit Merge…
  5. To download Bookmarks Bridge:

To sync Favorites with Live Mesh:

  1. Navigate to:
    • C:Users<username> (Windows Vista)
    • C:Documents and Settings<username> (Windows XP/2000)
  2. Right click on the folder named – Favorites.
  3. Select: ‘Add folder to your Live Mesh’.
  4. Screen shot:

The only problem is that when ever you add a bookmark to Firefox you will have to manually Merge it with IE using Bookmarks Bridge, syncing with Live Mesh will happen automatically if you chosen so.

My Live Mesh folder where I have only synced my RSS feeds with my Mesh account, screen shot:

Happy Meshing :D