Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Foxmarks v2.5 Has Arrived: Sync Your Passwords and More!

You asked and we listened. Over the past year, we've received many requests to sync passwords, especially after Google Browser Sync went offline and recommended Foxmarks. Today, we are are pleased to announce that Foxmarks can do exactly that. This release also includes dozens of other product improvements to make Foxmarks better.



Securely Sync Your Passwords


You can now sync your passwords across your computers. Password sync is 100% optional and is turned off by default. Your passwords are secured by encrypting them before they leave your computer with a PIN that only you know. You can also assign your passwords to sync profiles to keep your personal passwords at home, and your work passwords at the office. Read our original post or view our feature description to learn more about password sync.



To encrypt your passwords, Foxmarks uses the current state of the art AES 256-bit encryption algorithm. AES is a United States government standard and is recommended by National Security Adminstration (NSA) for encrypting classified information. See the AES Wikipedia entry for more details.

AES works by taking data that needs to be encrypted along with a secret PIN of your choosing, and then produces an encrypted result. It is strong enough to virtually guarantee that your encrypted data cannot be decrypted by a third-party, not even Foxmarks. The biggest point of weakness is in the strength of the secret PIN that you choose. Foxmarks recommends that you choose a PIN that is difficult to guess and contains a variety of different characters and numbers.

Other Improvements


Version 2.5 also includes several usability, stability and security enhancements. We've made the sync progress dialog (above) much simpler, added status info to the settings dialog (below), and in general made Foxmarks more robust and easy to use.



View status in the settings dialog


Toggle password sync (it's off by default)





To get this release either wait for the upgrade notice from Firefox, or:


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62 comments:

  1. Congratulations!

    I just have one question: Does the key support special characters(on standard US English keyboards or otherwise)?

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  2. I was waiting for this. Thank you very much :)

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  3. It would be a great feature to also be able to sync an entire profile including extensions so that one could standardize their browsing experience across multiple machines or recover from corruption without any of the hassle.

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  4. Yeah, an extension sync wuld be great!

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  5. Absolutely stunning. Have just one question. Can i delete all stored passwords on server? Does your privacy policy include assurance as it will be deleted from all the mirrors you have ?

    Thanks again for such a great extension.

    I am not in US but if you ask me about "future of Foxmarks", I would say a set of addons to weaves for synchronizing kind of data. So that one can select which server they want for their data. Like i would like to keep all passwords on foxmarks server but all history on local server as bandwidth is expensive.

    And one more compliment. Excellent server availability. Really amazing.

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  6. I believe extension sync falls pretty clearly outside the intended use of Foxmarks.

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  7. I also think this add-on should be standard for Firefox.

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  9. id like to see a feature added to foxmarks that allows for importing of google bookmark.

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  10. Well - I always used to like this one, but today I tried update/new installation four or five times and it crashed my Firefox completely. I now don't use it anymore. You must have made one major mistake with the upgrade.

    FF 3.0, portable edition

    Thanks for the past months, anyhow.

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  11. I still get sync-errors, if i activate the password-synchronisation. caschy mentioned this already in beta-versions, but there was no reaction about.

    See http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foxmarkssyncerrorvb9.png

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  12. The new features look really cool!

    However, as Meks and Bernd, foxmarks crashes firefox on all my machines as soon as it tries to synch (bookmarks).

    I have set up a PIN for the password synch features which went fine, but the synchronisation never reaches that point. I have tried without any other extensions but it did not change the outcome.

    firefox3.0.3, Slackware (12, 12.1 and current)

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  13. Crashes the firefox completely each time I try to add password encryption. It opens "create new pin" and crashes right away.

    3.0.1, RHE 5.2

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  14. @Bernd: same error here - have reported it to the Betateam many weeks ago...

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  15. Hi.

    V.2.5 crashes with Firefox 3.0.3 in my Linux PC.
    Works fine with Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows :-/

    Hope this is fixed soon - FoxMarks is installed on ALL my PC's, both work and private ;-)

    Keep up the good work!

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  16. Password sync sounded like a great idea so I installed it......but I don't see that it is working. I turned it on in the Foxmarks settings but it never asks to save a password. Does this work in conjunction with the Firefox password saving feature.....do I have to turn that on also?

    How do I get this to work??

    Thanks.

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  17. foxmarks 2.5 crashes firefox 3.0.3 invariably as it tries to sync.
    About firefox gives: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092416 Firefox/3.0.3

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  18. Excellent!
    I was waiting for this.

    ;-)

    GLTA

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  19. This is a great add-on!
    However, the new version 2.5 keeps on crashing firefox.

    about: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008091618 Firefox/3.0.2
    CentOS release 5.2, 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5

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  20. I've been using a private WebDAV server sucessfully with the previous version of foxmarks. With this recent update the URI to my WebDAV server is gone when I look at the foxmarks advanced config panel. Any idea where it went?

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  21. Well, I installed it on one machine and sync'ed the passwords, but when I installed it on my other two machines, syncing the passwords never returns. Seems to be stuck and can't synch. Is there a bug reporting system for foxmarks? Hmmm... I guess I need to look for it.

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  23. I also have been having Firefox crashes from the Foxmarks plugin on Linux. Loading the Google page crashes within 30 seconds of startup, on restart it happens again. Disabling foxmarks stops the crashing.

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  24. @Randy: Yes, from what I can tell it works with the built-in FIrefox password function; I believe it takes Firefox's password file, encrypts it, then sends it to the server.

    As for enabling it, be sure to enable "Remember passwords for sites" in the "Security" section of Firefox's preferences and also remember that if you disabled remembering passwords for specific sites that you will have to go into "Exceptions..." and remove any sites that you *want* to save passwords for.

    Firefox's official help on the subject: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Remembering+passwords

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  25. Under x86_64 gentoo linux this causes FF 3.0.3 to crash on every attempt to sync. I had to disable the addin because of that. Is the previous version still available?

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  26. On my x64_64 gentoo Firefox 3.0.3 crashes when I try to enable the password sync (at the "enter pin" page).

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  27. Foxmarks has been an indispensable utility for me for the last several months. Now with the addition of password sync it only got better.

    Another feature that i would really like to have is a note taking utility which has sync feature. Today there are utilities like Evernote that i use but it needs a separate install and it's also bloated. If you guys can pull one together this will be the ultimate plugin for Firefox.

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  28. Forgot to mention in my two posts above: FF also crashes when Foxmarks tries to sync my bookmarks.
    Btw. I use the precompiled Firefox from the Gentoo Portage ie. www-client/mozilla-firefox-bin

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  29. "Btw. I use the precompiled Firefox from the Gentoo Portage ie. www-client/mozilla-firefox-bin"

    Same here, and same result...

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  30. Password sync does not work. Worked fine on home machine, but never competes pw sync on office machine. Bookmarks sync perfectly!

    Please help!

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  31. Add syncing of History and Cookies and you have filled the spot left by Google Browser sync. Keep up the good work

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  32. This is painfully beautiful. Some days I get reminded of what an exciting place the internet used to be: this is one of those. Having synchronized bookmarks even on my iPhone..? Awesome.

    Great job.

    Thanks.

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  33. Just to note: I have not yet experienced the crash reported by others using Linux.

    I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and Firefox 3.0.3 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008101315 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.3)

    I did receive an error about not being able to contact the server, but I was able to manually sync successfully afterward, and it has not given an error since then.

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  34. Greg,

    I have seen similar with Foxmarks 2.5 and before that 2.2.28. Do you see only the Firefox buttons in the Toolbar Customize... dialog box and not buttons from other extensions?

    I uninstalled Foxmarks. Afterward, I reset and reconfigured my toolbar, then reinstalled Foxmarks. You will have to go through the Foxmarks setup wizard, again, but everything was fine after that.

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  35. same message as bernd, on any sync, both bookmarks synch and password sync:
    http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foxmarkssyncerrorvb9.png

    so, i have automatic sync deactivated. :(

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  36. Without Foxmarks Password Sync, I already have a master password for Firefox to retain my passwords.

    What is the relationship if any to the Firefox kept passwords with master password and Foxmarks Password Sync?

    i want to understand before I try Foxmarks Password Sync.

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  37. @will fiveash: Thanks for the report. We’ll try to reproduce this issue on our end. Was the “Use your own server” setting still checked?

    Yes, the "Use your own server" was checked but the place where the existing bookmarks server URI should have been was blank.

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  38. Foxmarks team, great job!

    You make my life better.

    A suggestion for the future: a total firefox sync - extensions, settings, sessions, history, cookies, everything. That would be brilliant. I would pay for that. Combined with a good document storage (dropbox?) it would be a step toward hardware and location independent computing.

    Thanks again.
    And keep up the good work.

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  39. guarav & Wildcatray...

    Thanks for the tips. Problem is solved. Started up FF in safemode and disabled all addons. Restarted FF then enabled just Foxmarks and restarted again.

    Then enabled each additional extension in turn one by one. Everything worked at the end of that process.

    There must be something to the order in which the extensions were registered (in the rdf?).

    Now all is working. Thanks for the help. And thanks for a great product.

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  40. I have found the message http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foxmarkssyncerrorvb9.png only comes up if i sync passwords too.
    Deactivate password sync an sync bookmarks only: it works without any message.
    What's wrong???

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  41. We may need to install or update Foxmarks by itself meaning no other extensions being installed or updated along with Foxmarks. Alternately, uninstall the old Foxmarks before installing the new version. (Shrugs shoulders.)


    guarav & Wildcatray…

    Thanks for the tips. Problem is solved. Started up FF in safemode and disabled all addons. Restarted FF then enabled just Foxmarks and restarted again.

    Then enabled each additional extension in turn one by one. Everything worked at the end of that process.

    There must be something to the order in which the extensions were registered (in the rdf?).

    Now all is working. Thanks for the help. And thanks for a great product.

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  42. I'm experiencing the sync error on a second desktop/profile when trying to enable password sync. I'm typing up an e-mail for support at the moment on the subject.

    I've also noticed that none of the passwords synchronized from my first desktop/profile are showing up on my.foxmarks.com in sync profiles' config (They are still in Firefox, so I know they aren't gone completely).

    Looking forward to getting this resolved. ^.^

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  43. @Nobu: Thank you for your detailed help in the support queue. I just responded to your email there.

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  44. @gaurav:
    Yes, i use my own server. Bookmark sync works fine like previous versions. Only if i want to sync passwords i see the message.

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  45. Damn it! Foxmarks is getting a Foxsync. =)

    I love it. Thank you for creating that excellent addon! I look forward your future updates that let me sync more than bookmarks and passwords.

    For those who can't wait until that time (like me ;) ) I can suggest to try FEBE (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109). Some kind of sync via USB stick, actually it's a backup addon. I like it, however.

    So, thanks again. Foxmarks rockz!

    Best regards from Hamburg, Germany.
    Arvid

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  46. I cant seem to sync my bookmarks since I downloaded the new version, is there any way to go back to the old one? Are you guys working on this? should I re-download it? Help.

    Other then that... I love the portability of my bookmarks!

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  47. you guys are life savers, i was having problems, this fixed it :)

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  48. @Nobu: Hi Nobu, this may be a remnant of the previous issues. To get back into a clean state, try clicking "Download" in the "Advanced" tab in "Foxmarks Settings". Be warned though, "Download" will cause your local changes since the last sync to be lost.

    Thank you again for all your help and patience as we work out the kinks.

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  49. More than passwords, what I need to be synced is history, so that visited links will be different color.

    I like to participate in mailing lists through web gateways such as GMANE and Nabble. There is only one drawback with using those systems -- they don't keep track of what posts you have already read. In this case I can only rely on visited links being a different color, but that doesn't work, of course, when working at different computers.

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  50. @gaurav: I was afraid of that, which is why I haven't made a whole lot of changes, so it's not a huge deal.

    You're welcome, and thanks to you and everyone else who work on the extension. It really is useful and your work is appreciated.

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  51. Now we need yet another password to remember. I wonder if I could the account password for this too.
    So, the passwords are encrypted and then again with optional connection encryption. Seems secure enough.
    Anyway, the bookmarks aren't stored in encrypted form?

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  52. What I meant to say in the second paragraph is, "when they are on your computer or when you are synchronizing them(but only while changes are merged, and only decrypted while on your computer)."

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  53. Thank you!!! I love this new add on.

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  54. New version 2.5.3, same problem (message above) if using my own server.

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  55. Update on toolbar/extension buttons/bookmarks toolbar issue and Foxmarks 2.5.x:

    When updating my various browser profiles (6 total: 3 profiles each on 2 computers: 1 each for Trunk (FF 3.1b2pre) and 2 each for FF 3.0.x), if I was updating along with at least 1 other extension, I was more likely to see my toolbar not display its customizations and not see my other extensions' toolbar buttons in the Customize... dialog box.

    It appears that the most convenient work-around for me is to reset my toolbars (in the Customize... dialog) and then restart the browser. (If I did not reset the toolbar before restarting, things were not resolved.)

    Then, I could see all my other extensions' buttons in the Customize... dialog and could configure my toolbars as desired.

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  56. the new password sync option is fantastic. I'm forever installing new pc's and foxmarks is always the first plugin I install for FF. I still remember the day I excitedly told my wife about it, while I was merging the bookmarks I had at home with the previously sync'd bookmarks from work.

    No more e-mailing myself weblinks to check out later either at home or work either. The passwords were always a pain to remember, especially since I use multiple passwords, and now .. that's solved too.

    thanks Foxmarks team! (I think I've gushed enough now)

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  57. Really like the password sync. Only can make Firefox better. Agree with the comment above. Awesome Job Foxmarks!

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  58. Thanks! This makes Foxmarks even better to use.

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  59. Yeah! When can we expect to see an option to sync extensions, add-ons, themes, and plug-ins? That would be awesome!!!

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  60. This is really useful and good tool to access bookmarks anywhere

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  61. UNBELIEVABLE GREAT WORK!! An extension-sync would be just icing on the cake but I realise that's somewhat difficult. WELL DONE GUYS!!!

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  62. Many thanks for the great tool.
    Is there any option which I can upload selected folders only?
    thanks.

    ReplyDelete

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