Is it just me, or is there really no good way of sharing bookmarks between Mozilla (or Firefox) and IE?
While I used to browse using IE up until recently, I find myself using Firefox most of the time these days, mostly due to its excellent support for tabbed browsing (does anybody else find it surprising that IE still does not support this feature?). However, I still use IE sometimes, and I would really like to see a good way of sharing bookmarks between these two browsers. Both browsers support import / export mechanisms that allow me to manually synchronize bookmarks, but there is no way of performing this synchronization automatically whenever a bookmark is added, removed, or edited.
For various reasons, I prefer IE’s storage of bookmarks (aka “Favorites”) as files on the filesystem. I think that the hierarchical nature of bookmarks and categories maps very well to folders and files, and I find it much easier to manage bookmarks this way than to deal with the clunky HTML file that Mozilla uses for this purpose. This also allows me to easily synchronize sub-categories of bookmarks between different computers (for example at home and at work).
My ideal solution would probably consist of a Mozilla option that would cause it to store its bookmarks as favorites instead and disable the “bookmarks.html” file alltogether. Because of Mozilla’s platform independent nature, I realize that this feature is highly unlikely to ever get implemented, and I don’t feel like messing with the core Mozilla source code myself. I am curious if this could be implemented as an extension, though. I should look into this when I get a chance…