For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next 90 days, Xmarks will be closing down.

It’s mentioned on their blog, but not their site front page (and I probably wouldn’t have realised if I hadn’t seen the news elsewhere). It would appear that their inability to “moneterise” Xmarks has been the problem. They had made steps recently to move Xmarks towards a newer audience, with the display of site ratings both in search results and in the browser toolbar. However, they’ve done this whilst not keeping up-to-date with the sync applications available elsewhere – they’ve recently added tab syncing, but they still lag behind the sync features of many of their competition.

Many of those commenting on the blog have suggested that they try charging $10 a year for the service – many are saying they would and it does seem strange that Xmarks hasn’t tried a subscription service before giving up.

For us end users, it leaves us wondering where to go now. Personally, I’ve now installed Firefox Sync, which is from Mozilla. This will be included by default in the next major Firefox release – it doesn’t have the bells and whistles which I never used, but does synchronise, well, pretty much everything.

I’ve always been a believer that new computer users should get themselves a good manual or enrol on a course – just ask the resident family “computer expert” how many times they’ve had to bail out a family member who’s badly infected their PC through not knowing what they were doing – “But it said I’d won an iPod?”.

And forums, often providing a a potential solution to the c0mputer user having problems, can just makes worse. On one such forum, it is often visited by professional and amateurs alike. One of their most striking (and annoying to me) recommendations is for people to ditch commercial anti-virus products for the free equivalents and to generally make the amateur PC user feel worried that their security is at constant risk.

Lets cover that anti-virus recommendation first of all. It’s rubbish. The free equivalents are not as good as the full price equivalents – if you can afford the commercial version, buy it. The free one should be reserved for those poor enough that they can’t afford anything else.

And making them feel paranoid about security means that many talk about turning off cookies and JavaScript, expecting either to be introducing vulnerabilities to their computer. And the result? Well, one user had problems after installing the latest updates to Firefox. In their response they said…

I try very hard to follow advice on this board so far as anti-virus and stuff goes. Norton and McAfee are no-nos.

I run SuperAntiSpyware, Malwarebytes, Security essentials, CrapCleaner, Spyware Blaster and Sunbelt personal firewall.

So, Norton and McAfee are “no-nos”. Great.

And, then, look at that list of software – yep, they’re running a full security program (Microsoft Security Essentials) along with an additional firewall (Sunbelt Personal Firewall) and 3 additional Antispyware products. Wow. But, hey, they’re all free.

And it took a few replies before anybody suggested that maybe, just maybe, it was this combination of clashing software that might have been causing the Firefox problems (which they promptly rejected, uninstalled Firefox, installed Opera and then complained that didn’t work either).

My recommendation – one, commercial, complete security solution (spyware, anti-virus, firewall). Don’t listen to those who say “Don’t buy Norton, your system will grind to a halt”. Yep, old message – the latest versions are much better at keeping resources low.

In fact, Norton Internet Security 2010 is the package I’d recommend. You can get a 1 PC licence for under £11 and £28 for user on 3 computers – hardly a bank  breaker.

If you wish Firefox to look elsewhere for the bookmark file

• Type about:config in the URL bar
• Right click within the window and add a new string entry
• The entry name should be browser.bookmarks.file
• Set its value to the new location (eg F:\bookmarks.html)