Today I achieved my personal goal of syncing the bookmarks in Firefox on my home and work computers. I did this with Foxmarks, a surprisingly flexible bookmark synchronization plugin.

You have the option of using the repository at my.foxmarks.com, but I chose the more complex option of using the Webdav service on my company's Internet server. I got started with the howto that Lifehacker published called Hack Attack: Back up and sync your Firefox bookmarks with your personal server. This article is based on Version 1 of the Foxmarks plugin, and the current version's configuration is a bit different, but I worked my way through it.

I thought I needed to add the mod_dav extension to my Apache server, but it turned out that the cPanel administrative control panel that we use has a feature called Web Disk that does the job and has a straightforward account provisioning interface that makes setting up the server quite easy.

It took me a little bit of experimentation to get Foxmarks to talk to the cPanel Web Disk, so I documented the process in a Foxmarks Wiki article called Foxmarks: Using Your Own Server. This article has even more details about using your own server with Foxmarks than the Lifehacker article and is more up-to-date.

I think this solution is clearly better than Google Browser Sync in a number of ways, personal control and privacy being chief among them.