This is the second post in a little series about my experiences with the conversion from PC to Mac.
(Google Chrome) Bookmarks
Since around October 2008 I have been using Google’s browser Chrome as my default browser. Upon installing I imported my Firefox bookmarks into it and you can imagine that by now I have collected quite a bunch of other bookmarks.
I think that the Google Chrome browser is a reasonably good browser, but what they don’t tell you is that exporting your bookmarks is a general pain in the butt. Oh yeah, you can export a list of your bookmarks as an html file, but the entire structure you have worked on to organise your bookmarks to be able to find them in the first place is then completely gone!
On top of that, Chrome is not available for Mac.
Anyways, this post is about a solution, not about making more problems.
At first I thought that it would be an idea to export add all my bookmarks to delicious, but after 20 orso and almost 500 to go I decided that that would become my last resort.
When I started my search on how to solve this annoying problem, I stumbled upon a solution from someone who experienced the same and actually had made a little program for it: ChromeDump by Mark Clouden. As described in the program:
This program was created to provide a few simple maintenance tasks for the Google Chrome browser that are not yet available through that application itself.
With one mouse-click ChromeDump creates an HTML file that shows all your bookmarks in the right categories and order. Chrome itself seems to be doing the same only Chrome’s HTML file is useless and ChromeDump’s file is valuable! Just look at the difference in filesize!
Then I set to organise bookmarks in Firefox on my PC and imported my ChromeDump file. For that to work you need to go into the Organize Bookmarks menu of Firefox (ctrl shift B) and then click Import and Backup. From the dropdown menu choose import HTML, select the file and your import will be complete.
Then I exported this file into an html file, moved to my iMac and imported it there in Firefox. On some old forums they say that to import Firefox bookmarks into Safari is just a matter of drag and drop, but I do not recommend that. It is much better to import the HTML file you also used for the Firefox import, as the structure of your bookmarks remains.
delicious to Firefox
Since I’m talking about bookmark migration, I also want to add something else. It can happen that you want to synchronise your delicious bookmarks with your Firefox bookmarks. The recommended way to do that is not to export your Firefox bookmarks, but instead to backup them. Firefox will then create a file with a JSON extension, something that sounds pretty incompatible with anything else. Fortunately there is a free tool available which is called del.icio.us to Firefox by fellow Dutch-man E-Accent and Jackfruit Design.
Here you can upload your delicious html file and your Firefox json file and the online tool merges these two together and outputs an html file that you can import back into Firefox.
OK enough on bookmarks now, in my next post I will describe what alternatives I am using now for programs that are not available (for free) to the Mac user.