As most of us know the major browsers offer sync services between different instances of the same browser. This usually encompasses bookmarks, passwords and history. While this is great some of us might want to use different browsers on different devices (or are required to by the device manufacturer) and/or we want to switch from one browser to the other. So whats a person to do? To further compound the issue sometimes the tools just aren’t up to snuff.

I was reminded of this via a discussion on Mastodon here https://mastodon.social/web/@[email protected]/109115781967755324

Passwords are fairly easy. Most of us use, or should be using, any of a number of password managers. I highly recommend Bitwarden but most others are also quite secure and perfectly good.

The lesser resolved issue is with bookmark syncing. Floccus has solved this and is an excellent tool. I currently sync bookmarks between Firefox and Chromium regularly and keep two sets one for personal use and one for work. Currently, floccus supports Chromium, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge.

First Floccus enables saving your bookmarks, encrypted, to various storage locations. Nextcloud, Webdav and Google Drive. I avoid Google in my personal life so I store my bookmarks in my email provider’s webdav service. For work, we do use Gsuite, so I store my work bookmarks on my Google Drive.

Finally, there is ease of migration. Floccus lets you have multiple accounts, each pointed to different destinations, and export each to their own json settings file. This way you don’t have to go through the entire setup process each time you move to or setup a new browser. If your password manager allows it you can then store those setup files securely there.

It’s such an elegant and easy solution it’s a wonder it’s taken this long to exist. I find it so valuable I personally donate a few dollars a month to the project and, if you like the software too, please go help them out! https://opencollective.com/floccus