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# 4.8 Browser (Client) Oddities

This page explains several subtle behaviors in some Import and Export operations which apply only when certain browser or client types are involved.

Topics on this Page

- Safari Issues
- Confusion between Google Chrome and Google Bookmarks
- Chrome, Canary and Chromium Issues
- OmniWeb Issues
- Firefox Issues
- iCab Issues
- Roccat Issues
- Opera Issues
- Pinboard
- Shiira
- Delicious Issues
- Google Bookmarks Issues
- Punctuation in Diigo Tags
- Separators in Camino
- Smart Keyword Searches
- Multiple Web App Accounts and the Mac OS X Keychain
- Download Policy Options for Web Apps

## 4.8.1 Safari Issues

### Separators in Safari

If you have Glims installed, Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster will detect this and export Safari separators in Glims style. That is, when exporting from Safari or a standalone file designated as Safari file type, any separator will be exported as a bookmark whose name is a single dash (“-“) character. Glims will detect this and replace them with beautiful separators in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar and Bookmarks Menu (but not in Safari’s Edit Bookmarks).

If you do not have Glims installed, the same idea is used but instead of a single dash, the name is exported as a horizontal line of em-dashes, unless the bookmark’s parent is the Bookmarks Bar, then it is the pipe character (“|”). The idea is the same but the Glims separators look better. When importing, a bookmark with either of these names, or with Glims’ “-“, will be interpreted to be a separator.

### Mapping into Safari’s Reading List

Beginning with Safari version 5.1, Safari has a third hard folder called Reading List. The idea of this is similar to the Unsorted Bookmarks in Firefox (except that it has a name which makes a little more sense). They are both intended to be a place where you might quickly drop bookmarks discovered while browsing the web that you would like to read later, and then either “sort” (where here we have mean categorize instead of alphabetize) into a regular folder or delete.

Therefore, during Import and Export operations, Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster map Safari’s Reading List into its Reading/Unsorted hard folder, along with those of Firefox. One issue, however, is that while Firefox allows folders (subfolders) in its Unsorted Bookmarks, Safari does not. Therefore, when exporting to Safari, if a Reading List is found (indicating that the bookmarks of Safari 5.1 or later), any folders found in Reading/Unsorted are mapped into the root level of Safari instead of Safari’s Reading List. If a Reading List is not found (indicating that the boomarks are of Safari version 5.0.x or earlier), then the contents of Reading/Unsorted is exported to your Default Parent you have indicated for Safari.

### Sorting (Ordering) of the Reading List

When Safari displays its Reading List, it ignores the order imposed by Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster and instead seems to display according to date added, with the more recent first. Although we could probably override this behavior, we don’t.

## 4.8.2 Confusion between Google Chrome and Google Bookmarks

Google Inc. provides two separate products:

The Chrome web browser is a locally-installed browser app. It replaces web browsers like Safari and Firefox. Within Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, it is referred to as Chrome.

Google Bookmarks is an online web-based browser app, like Delicious.

Further confusion is caused by the Chrome > Set up Sync… menu item in Chrome. Using this feature syncs to other Chrome applications you may use on other Macs, but these bookmarks are not your Google Bookmarks. They are stored separately. Google does not provide any connection between the two. In particular, Google does not provide a way to synchronize bookmarks between Chrome and Google Bookmarks. This capability is provided by Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster.

## 4.8.3 Chrome, Canary and Chromium Issues

### Chrome, Canary, and Chromium

Chrome and Chromium are the same web browser built on the Chromium open-source code, simply with different names and file locations. Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster supports importing and exporting with either or both, whatever you have installed, as separate browsers or clients. The same is true for Google Chrome Canary, which is the alpha or early adopter version of Google Chrome.

You could sync two or three of these Chrome-ish browsers’ together via a Google account, using their built-in syncing, but if you do that, be careful you don’t create a sync loop.

### Sign In / Out

The Chrom-ish browsers (Chrome, Canary and Chromium) have a built-in sync which allows you to sync their bookmarks via a Google account among the Chrom-ish browsers on multiple Macs, PCs, Android and iOS devices over the internet. If you are using this facility, and also syncing with Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, make sure that you don’t create a sync loop.

To control your usage of this facility,

- Activate Chrome, Canary, or Chromium.
- In the leftmost (Chrome/Canary/Chromium) menu, click Preferences.
- Click in the left sidebar: Settings.

Read under Sign in. If you are not signed in, you are not using the built-in Sync. Otherwise, click Advanced sync settings… and observe the Bookmarks checkbox.

### Mobile Bookmarks

Smarky, Synkmark, Markster and BookMacster ignore but preserves Chrome’s Mobile Bookmarks. Our idea is that you should use Mobile Bookmrks for bookmarks which you only want on your mobile device.

You should put bookmarks which you want synced in either Desktop Bookmarks or Other Bookmarks. Chrome gives you a choice at the bottom of the popover. Change “Mobile Bookmarks”, and whatever you change it to will become your new default new-bookmark location.

If you have already started syncing with Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, and want to move your Chrome bookmarks out of Mobile Bookmarks, do this…

- Activate Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster.

- Open your Bookmarkshelf Document if it does not open.

- Click the Syncing button in the toolbar to Pause syncing.

- Activate Chrome on your Mac.

- Click in the menu: Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks.

- In the left sidebar, select Mobile Bookmarks

- Drag all the bookmarks you want from Mobile Bookmarks into Other Bookmarks or Bookmark Bar.

- Reorganize if desired.

- Activate Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster.

- Click in the menu: File > Import from only > Chrome.

- Click the “Syncing” button in the toolbar to “Resume” syncing.

- Export as prompted.

### Sometimes Need Your Help to Load a Profile

There is a pathological case in which Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster or one of its Agents’ Workers will ask you to help a little by load a certain user profile so that it can import to or export from a Chrom-ish browser. This will occur under the following conditions.

- You have created multiple profiles in a Chrom-ish browser.
- You have configured Agents to sync a certain profile ‘X’.
- In the browser, in profile ‘X’ , you have signed in to Chrome with a Google account, have have not switched off the sub-setting to sync Bookmarks, which is on by default.
- The browser is running, but profile ‘X’ has not been loaded. This will happen if the browser had been launched into a different profile, and no window has been opened into profile ‘X’ since launching.
- Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, or one of its Agents’ Workers, requires to Export to Chrome profile ‘X’.

Once you load the profile, it will stay loaded until the browser quits, and will re-open automatically provided that you have a window open to this profile when quitting the browser. In other words, this will not occur if you regularly use the profiles to which you are syncing.

We have requested that the Chrome developers provide a better facility for bookmarks syncing so that we may someday remove this annoyance.

## 4.8.4 OmniWeb Issues

### Moving OmniWeb Items among its Collections

External identifiers of OmniWeb items are not unique among their three top-level collections – Favorites, Bookmarks Menu and My Shared Bookmarks. Each of these collections can have an item numbered, for example, 57, and Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster must therefore prepend a “collection identifier” to its identifier upon importing and remove it when exporting.

This sometimes causes little glitches. For example, let’s say you have a bookmark in OmniWeb’s Personal Bookmarks that has been happily imported to and exported from a Bookmarkshelf document . In such a document, it appears in the Bookmarks Menu since this is the equivalent of OmniWeb’s Personal Bookmarks. Now, in OmniWeb, click menu > Bookmarks > Show Bookmarks Page, move this bookmark into Favorites. Because it’s in a different collection now, OmniWeb must assign it a different identifier. Now activate the Bookmarkshelf document and Import from OmniWeb. Because it has a different identifier, the app will not recognize it as the one that was originally in the Personal Bookmarks/Bookmarks Menu, and will import it as a new bookmark, so now you’ll have a duplicate.

You can prevent the duplicate from being created by setting the Merge Keep control to Client or Bookmarkshelf and also checking on Merge URL.

OmniWeb’s bookmarks storage format was designed many years ago when the advantages of truly unique persistent identifiers were not as widely appreciated. One hopes that if Omni Group continues development of OmniWeb, they will someday update update their bookmarks storage to realize this, as Opera Software did when they shipped Opera 9.5.

### Shortcuts Associated with URLs

OmniWeb associates its shortcuts with URLs instead of with bookmarks. This means that if you have, for example, two bookmarks to the same URL, one with a shortcut and one without a shortcut, and export OmniWeb, in OmniWeb they will both have the shortcut. Then when you import back from OmniWeb, Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster will apply the shortcut to both of them. However, if you are importing from other Clients at the same time, this conflict can cause spurious changes or churn to be indicated in the Sync Log.

## 4.8.5 Firefox Issues

### Same Tags apply to Duplicate Bookmarks

In Firefox, when you click menu Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks and get the bookmarks Library window, it appears as though tags are associated with bookmarks, but they are not. In Firefox, tags are actually associated with URLs. In Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, tags are associated with bookmarks, just as they look. To maintain the same content as you see in Firefox, when performing a Import from Firefox, the app creates the same tags for all bookmarks that have the same url.

If you don’t have any duplicate bookmarks (bookmarks with the same normalized URL), then this doesn’t matter, but if you do, it does. For example, say that you have one or more bookmarks with the same normalized URL, and put a tag on, one of them, then Export to Firefox. If you then inspect the content in Firefox’ Organize Bookmarks window, you will see that all of the several bookmarks have this tag.

### Slow Exports while Firefox is Running

Firefox is quite slow at changing bookmarks, dreadfully slow when tags are involved, and apparently Firefox does all of this on its main thread, meaning that it beachballs you cannot do anything else in Firefox until it is done. Usually, if you’re just adding a few bookmarks, it’s not a problem, but if, as is typical in a first export from Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, you’re changing thousands of items, it can take several minutes on a typical Mac. New users don’t have our Firefox extension installed at this point, so the app asks the user to quit Firefox and then, with Firefox out of the way, the app can export quickly. However, in case you export many changes for some reason after installing our Firefox extension, while Firefox is running, the app will stop and advise you to quit Firefox first if it estimates that the change will take more than 1 minute. This happens if there are more than several hundred changes or more.

(You can demonstrate the slowness of Firefox all by itself. Put several thousand bookmarks into Firefox, open Show All Bookmarks (Library), select folder(s) containing several thousand bookmarks in aggregate, and and hit ‘delete’. Firefox will beachball for several minutes, and show its Unresponsive Script warning sheet several times, citing Firefox’ Bookmark Service or Tagging Service. This happens even if you have disabled all Add-Ons and restarted Firefox.)

### Visit Count

Firefox keeps a visit count attribute for each bookmark, which, as the name implies, is supposed to increment each time a bookmark is visited in Firefox. To see the visit count for a bookmark, display it in Firefox’ Show All Bookmarks (“Library”), then perform a secondary click on any column heading and switch on Visit Count in the contextual menu. A Visit Count column will appear.

Smarky, Synkmark, Markster and BookMacster ignore Firefox’ visit count. The visit count that you see in Firefox is the count of visits from Firefox only. The visit count that you see in Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster is the count of visits from the app plus visits from other synced browsers which properly support import and export of visit count: Camino and OmniWeb. (The design of Firefox makes syncing to their visit count problematic.)

### Firefox Sync

The publisher of Firefox, Mozilla, provides a facility called Firefox Sync. This facility empowers you to sync your Firefox bookmarks and other data among Firefoxes on differenct devices. If you see a button titled Set Up Sync… when you do as indicated in that link, you are not using Firefox Sync. Otherwise, you are using Firefox Sync to sync bookmarks if the Bookmarks checkbox is switched on.

## 4.8.6 iCab Issues

### The Wandering Bookmarks Bar

iCab allows you to designate any folder, anywhere in the hierarchy, to be your Favorites. The items in the Favorites folder appear in a toolbar across the top of the window. It is thus like the Bookmarks Bar or Bookmarks Toolbar present in other browsers.

Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster treats this folder as a Bookmarks Bar, but does not allow it to be anywhere. When you Import from iCab, the Favorites folder, wherever it is, is moved to be the first child of the root, as in all other browsers. However, the app remembers where it came from, and when you export to iCab, it is restored to its original location.

## 4.8.7 Roccat Issues

Bookmarks storage in Roccat is primitive. Obviously,

- You cannot create soft folders. All bookmarks are in the same flat list.
- This same list appears in both the Bookmarks toolbar and in the Bookmarks menu.

### Bogs Down with too many bookmarks

Roccat may bog down if you export too many bookmarks to it. If you export too many bookmarks to Roccat and find the performance to be unacceptable, you can remove all of the bookmarks from Roccat by doing this…

- Quit Roccat if it is running.
- Activate Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster.
- Click in the menu: File > New Bookmarkshelf.
- Switch on Roccat as a Client.
- When asked if you want to Import from Clients now, click Later.
- After the new Bookmarkshelf is created, click in the menu: File > Export. The idea is that you are exporting an empty bookmarkshelf to Roccat, thus removing all bookmarks.
- Since this empty document is now useless, click the menu: File > Close and Delete, then OK to trash it.

Note that, in its Bookmarks menu, Roccat allows you to visit the bookmarks of Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Although you cannot add bookmarks to other browsers from within Roccat, this may be acceptable for some users. You can add new bookmarks to Roccat and synchronize by, in your Settings > Clients, switching off the Export checkbox for Roccat, so that you import only. Another solution is to not use the Bookmarks in Roccat at all, and instead access bookmarks directly, using Markster, or BookMacster as a central bookmarks store.

### No External Identifiers

Roccat does not provide unique, persistent external identifiers like other browsers do. Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster therefore creates its own pseudo-unique external identifiers based on the name, url and location of a bookmark. The result is undue churn when importing from and exporting to Roccat.

## 4.8.8 Opera Issues

### Sort by… Preference

Opera has options built in to sort bookmarks by name, address, description (comments), etc. By default, it sorts all folders by name, according to its own rules (which are basically to sort everything). Therefore, in order to see sorting done according to the sorting settings in the Bookmarkshelf, we must change this option to “Sort by my order”. This option is available to you in Opera’s toolbar…

However, you normally don’t have to do this, because Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster changes this in Opera’s preference file whenever it executes an Export to the Opera Client associated with your Macintosh User Account. This occurs if the Export Client is the Opera bookmarks of your Macintosh user account, or of another Macintosh user’s account, but not if the Export Client is a loose file.

### Import/Export of items in Bookmarks kBar

The Bookmarks Bar in Opera looks like the Bookmarks Bar in other Client browsers, but is in fact quite different for our purposes. (If you don’t see a Bookmarks Bar in Opera, in the Opera first if a tab is showing your Bookmarks, close it; then in the menu click View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Bar. It should be switched on (checked).)

In other browsers, the items in the Bookmarks Bar are unique items. In Opera, the Bookmarks Bar and the Panel contain only references to items which are actually in other collections. In this regard, they are like the Smart Playlists in iTunes and Smart Albums in iPhoto, which contain only references to songs and photos which are actually elsewhere in your iTunes and iPhoto Libraries.

In Opera’s Manage Bookmarks window, when you Show Info on an item and then check the box Show on bookmarks bar or Show in panel, you set a flag which tells Opera to display the item both in its “actual” location and in this other location.

So, a question arises when importing such an item: Should it be imported into the “actual” location, or moved into the Bookmarks Bar? You answer this question by switching on the Import items marked “Show on bookmarks bar” into Bookmarks Bar checkbox in the Per-Client Advanced Client Settings for Opera.

If this box is checked on, items specified in Opera as Show on bookmarks bar will be imported into the Bookmarks Bar of the Bookmarkshelf instead of into the location corresponding to their location in Opera. Whether or not you check this box depends on what is more important to you – preserving items in the Bookmarks Bar, or preserving items in their other location. By default it is off, because this may cause churn during exports, in some pathological cases which we have not discovered yet.

### Trash

Another unique feature of Opera’s bookmarks is the Trash, a special folder into which deleted bookmarks go. Because it can be surprising to see these deleted bookmarks showing up in other browsers, the Per-Client Advanced Client Settings for Opera also has a checkbox which tells it to not import these items.

### Trick to see Bookmarks in Opera’s Manage Bookmarks

In Opera, when you click Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, you get a window with a left sidebar. The right pane will show the contents of whatever folder is selected in the left sidebar. Opera does allow you to create bookmarks at the root/menu level, but the root/menu does not exist as an explicit folder in Opera, so they never show when scanning through the left sidebar with the ↑ and ↓ keys. In order to see these “loose” bookmarks at the root/level menu, click with the mouse in the empty area at the bottom of the left sidebar, to deselect all folders in the left sidebar. Poof! The missing bookmarks appear!

### Expanded/Collapsed Folders

Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster remembers the Expanded/Collapsed state of folders when you save a document, and also exchanges this information with Opera which exhibits similar behavior in its Manage Bookmarks window. (An exception is the Trash folder which, by Opera’s design, is always collapsed the next time you open it in Opera.)

## 4.8.9 Pinboard

Short version: After making changes in Pinboard on the web, sometimes you need to wait 15 minutes or so before importing the changes to Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster, or exporting additional changes from BookMacster to Pinboard.

Long Version: In order to reduce network traffic and improve performance, BookMacster maintains a local cache of bookmarks stored on the remote servers, such as Pinboard’s. Prior to importing from or exporting to Pinboard, BookMacster sends a query (“posts/update”) to Pinboard asking when was the last time that bookmarks were changed on the remote server. If it matches the time that the local cache was stored, BookMacster skips downloading data from Pinboard and uses what it has. Well, on 2012 June 13 we found that a download didn’t occur as expected, and found that this was because Pinboard was returning a stale date to our “posts/update” query. It did this for at least 10 minutes, but returned the correct date after 15 minutes. If you don’t want to wait, click in the menu BookMacster > Empty Cache….

## 4.8.10 Shiira

A number of behaviors in Shiira are inexplicable. The most noticeable is that it always reads your Safari bookmarks and puts them at the top of its Bookmarks Cabinet. BookMacster does not do this, and exporting from BookMacster to Shiira cannot over-ride it.

## 4.8.11 Delicious Issues

### Duplicate bookmarks

Delicious does not allow your account to have more than one bookmark with the same URL. If you submit such a bookmark which duplicates an existing bookmark, the existing bookmark is deleted.

### Editing URL in Delicious ⇒ Duplicate in BookMacster

This is because the external identifier used by Delicious is based on its URL. Delicious also allows you to edit the URL of a bookmark within their web app. If you do so, and then re-import from this Delicious account into a Bookmarkshelf(), BookMacster will therefore get a new identifier for this bookmark and treat it as a new bookmark that you just added. Further, if this import is done with the Delete Unmatched Items option checked off, BookMacster will not delete the old bookmark, so you will have two bookmarks – one with the old URL, and one with the new URL. This is appears to be a limitation in the design of Delicious. (The identifier generated by BookMacster for a Google Bookmarks item is also based on its URL, but Google Bookmarks does not have this problem because Google Bookmarks does not allow you to edit the URL of a bookmark in their web app – you must create a new bookmark anyhow.)

### feed:// Becomes http://

If you enter a bookmark with a URL that has a “feed://” scheme, Delicious will silently change the scheme to “http://”.

### Slow or Interrupted Import or Export

Service Unavailable Messages. When dealing with a web app, the proprietor (Delicious) can change their traffic shaping policies policies at any time. Although BookMacster was designed to handle the policies which we have discovered at the time we last looked at them, changes could have occured, resulting in Timeout, Service Unavailable, or Please Retry Later messages from Delicious. Refer to the article on our web page, near the bottom for the latest news.

### Whitespace

Delicious will not allow consecutive spaces, or any leading or trailing whitespace, in bookmark names (titles) or comments (notes). BookMacster collapses consecutive spaces in these attributes into one space, and leading or trailing whitespace is trimmed, before exporting (uploading) to Delicious.

## 4.8.12 Google Bookmarks Issues

### Unsupported Schemes such as javascript: or file:

Google Bookmarks supports only bookmarks with schemes http:, https: and ftp:. When exporting to Google Bookmarks, BookMacster will skip over bookmarks whose urls have other schemes save as javascript: or file:.

### Dates

When viewing your Google Bookmarks at http://google.com/bookmarks, the date which appears adjacent bookmark name is the date that it was added or modified. This is the only “date” attribute supported by Google Bookmarks.

### Duplicates

Google Bookmarks does not allow you to have more than one bookmark with the same URL. If you submit such a bookmark which duplicates an existing bookmark, the existing bookmark is deleted, and a new bookmark added with other attributes of your new submission.

### Google Sign In

BookMacster cannot access Google Bookmarks directly, as it can with Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo. Instead, BookMacster borrows access from Safari.

By default, BookMacster requires you to verify prior to each Import or Export operation that you are signed in to Google with the appropriate account. You can avoid this inconvenience if you (a) have only one Google account and (b) never sign out of Google in Safari. In this case, when you are presented with the warning, you may switch on the checkbox I’m ALWAYS signed in to Google as …blank…. From now on, don’t ask.

With this setting enabled, you can also add your Google Bookmarks account as a Client, and BookMacster Agents can export changes to Google Bookmarks automatically. The danger of this setting is that if you switch it on, but then start using a second Google account, BookMacster could import from or export to the wrong Google account.

This setting is also available in Settings > Clients. Click the Advanced Settings (gear) button the for relevant Google Bookmarks account.

Then, in Special Settings, look for the checkbox.

Why Safari? It does not matter if your default browser is a different browser. This intimacy with Safari is inherent in the URL Loading System of Mac OS X. Oddly, though, Safari does not need to be running for BookMacster’s Google Bookmarks functions to work. So if you don’t ever use Safari, that’s great. Launch Safari, sign in to Google, quit it, and leave it quit.

Historical Note: Until late 2013, BookMacster was able to determine which account, if any, you had signed in to Google in Safari and, if necessary, sign out, grab a password from your Mac OS X Keychain, and then sign back in to perform an Import or Export operation on a different account. We were quite proud of this achievement until late 2013, when Google installed additional security measures which rendered such robotic sign-ins no longer possible. This capabiility was therefore removed in BookMacster 1.19.7.

### Limit of 10,000 Bookmarks

During tests in May 2014, we found that, once you have 10,000 bookmarks in your account, if you add more, Google Bookmarks will delete older bookmarks unpredictably, to make room for the new one while keeping the total at 10,001.

Furthermore, if you delete all of your bookmarks in that account, and then start re-adding the same bookmarks that you had before, the bookmarks which had been unpredictably deleted will fail to add, even if you use their web app. So, it’s like they still remember the bookmarks that they unpredictably deleted bookmarks even after you’ve deleted all of the others.

### Deleting Bookmarks Takes Too Long

BookMacster is at the mercy of Google’s servers during Imports and Exports, and some operations are slow. Deleting (or updating) bookmarks during an export is particularly bad; 1-10 seconds per bookmark is typical. By contrast, uploading a slew of bookmarks is fast. Therefore, if you have many deletions or updates in an Export to Google Bookmarks, it is faster to start from scratch. To do that, visit the Google Bookmarks Web App, and click the link to Delete All. Then immediately export from BookMacster.

### External Identifiers

Like other clients, Google Bookmarks does assign a unique identifier to each bookmark, however BookMacster does not use it, because it is only available in an RSS download, which cannot download any more than 1000 bookmarks reliably. Therefore, the external identifier that you see in the Inspector panel side drawer of a bookmark for Google Bookmarks is not Google’s identifier but is the identifier assigned by BookMacster. To create this identifier, BookMacster uses the fact that, like Delicious, Google Bookmarks does not allow bookmarks with the same URL, and does not allow editing of bookmark urls. (If you edit – change – the url of a bookmark in BookMacster, then upload to Google Bookmarks, it actually destroys the old bookmark and creates a new one.) The external identifier used by BookMacster is therefore a string representation of the md5 hash of the bookmark’s url. Note: BookMacster’s legacy app, Bookdog, does use the actual identifier assigned by Google Bookmarks, which is why Bookdog does not support more than 1000 bookmarks in a Google account.

On the bright side, because the web interface of Google Bookmarks does not allow users edit the URL of a bookmark, the identifiers created by BookMacster are in fact persistent. And because Google Bookmarks does not allow items with the same URL in the same account, they are also in fact unique. Therefore, our patching of Google Bookmarks’ identifiers does not seem to cause any misbehavior in the operation of BookMacster.

### Whitespace

Google Bookmarks will not allow consecutive spaces, or any leading or trailing whitespace in bookmark names (titles) or descriptions (notes). BookMacster collapses consecutive spaces in these attributes into one space, and leading or trailing whitespace is trimmed, before exporting (uploading) to Google Bookmarks. (Actually, leading and trailing whitespace can be entered into Google Bookmarks’ web app, but this seems to be a bug. When BookMacster downloads the bookmarks, these leading and trailing whitespaces are trimmed. BookMacster therefore trims them when exporting to Google Bookmarks to avoid detection of extraneous “changes” when they are later re-imported.)

## 4.8.13 Punctuation in Diigo Tags

Besides the fact that doublequotes serve as tag delimiters in Diigo, other punctuation characters will get changed. Commas get changed to spaces, forward and back slashes, and backslash-escaped doublequotes (as in “"”) get changed to underscores. This is just what we’ve noticed; there may be other substitutions. These are not documented anywhere in Diigo documentation.

## 4.8.14 Separators in Camino

Because Camino does not endow its separators with external identifiers, Smarky, Synkmark, Markster and BookMacster create their own external identifier for separators imported from Camino based on it’s parent’s external identifier and its position. The only noticeable effect of this, that we know of, is that if you move a separator in Camino (or move other items above it, causing its position to be changed), and then Import from this Client with Merge Keep set to Client, the corresponding separator in the app will be deleted and a new one created at the new location, instead of moving the existing one. (Now you know you must be at the bottom of the page!)

## 4.8.15 Smart Keyword Searches

Firefox, iCab, Camino, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari with Glims installed all support Smart Keyword Searches. However, they are implemented differently.

- In Firefox, iCab and Camino, Smart Keyword Searches are stored as bookmarks. Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster will import them from these browsers, you’ll see them in the Content of a Bookmarkshelf document, you can edit them in BookMacster, and they’ll be exported to these browser Clients.

- In Google Chrome, Opera, Safari with Glims installed, Smart Keyword Searches are stored elsewhere, such as in Preferences. You will never see them in Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster.

Smarky, Synkmark, Markster or BookMacster will omit Firefox Smart Keyword Search Bookmarks when exporting to any other browser except Camino, because they won’t like they do in Firefox. (They don’t work in iCab because iCab does not support a Keyword or Shortcut attribute.)

## 4.8.16 Multiple Web App Accounts and the Mac OS X Keychain

If you have multiple accounts for a web app such as Delicious, each is a separate Client as far as BookMacaster is concerned. BookMacster discovers these accounts and populates them into the Import and Export popup menus in Settings > Clients by looking in your Mac OS X Keychain for passwords you have stored to the web apps’ domain, for example, Delicious. Some of these may have been entered previously by Safari, Cocoalicious or another Keychain-aware app. To remove old accounts that are no longer used, launch the Keychain Access application (`/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app`), search for and delete them.

When connecting to a web app, if BookMacster finds a password which you have not previously authorized BookMacster to use, Keychain will ask your permission. If BookMacster does not find the password even in Keychain, BookMacster will ask you to to enter it into as secure field, and give you the option to store it in Keychain for future use by BookMacster or any other (Keychain-aware) app which is smart enough to look there for it.

## 4.8.17 Download Policy Options for Web Apps

During an Export operation to Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard or Google Bookmarks, BookMacster should find out what bookmarks are currently on the server and merge them per your settings. Ideally, BookMacster would ask the server to just tell me all of the bookmarks, if any, that have been added, updated or deleted since we last synced. But this information is not always available, sometimes not reliable, and in its absence BookMacster should download all bookmarks from the server. This can take several or many minutes if you have thousands of bookmarks on the remote server. Therefore, BookMacster allows you to manually override the default automatic behavior. To access these controls, open the advanced settings for the relevant Client, and look in the Special Settings section.

Note that these settings are only available for permanent Clients which you have specified in the Settings > Clients tab. The temporary Clients which are used when you click in the menu: File > Import from Only or Esport to Only will always download all bookmarks from the server (in BookMacster 1.22.4 or later).

The setting Import > Never is not available because it would defeat the purpose of the whole operation. If you don’t want a permanent client to Import, switch off its Import checkbox in Settings > Clients.

For Google Bookmarks, at this time, the current status is never available. Therefore, setting one of these controls to Automatic has the same effect as setting it to to Always – it will always download.

### Better Reliability: Always Download during Exports

Over the years we have seen bugs in the various web apps come and go, and at some times the indication from the server telling BookMacster that nothing has changed, you can skip downloading turns out to be not true. For best reliability, if you don’t export to a web app very often, you may prefer to Always download during Exports.

### Faster: Never Download during Exports

At the other extreme, to avoid the extended export times that can result if you have thousands of bookmarks to download, you may wish that BookMacster never download them. This is technically OK if you use the web app only to visit bookmarks and always change (add, update, edit, modify, delete) bookmarks in BookMacster only, you may prefer to Never download during Exports.

If there are other clients, it might also make sense to switch off the Import checkbox for this client (see above)

This can be efficient, but will will cause bad results if you ever forget and in fact change bookmarks changed on the remote server, using the client’s web app, or some other tool, because this all happens effectively behind BookMacster’s back. For example, if you switch on this checkbox and then add bookmarks to the remote server using the web app or some other service, these bookmarks will be deleted the next time that you export from BookMacster, even if you have Delete unmatched items switched off. Or if you delete 100 bookmarks on the remote server, then export from BookMacster, BookMacster will re-upload them if they are still in BookMacster, or waste time re-deleting them if not.

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