How to keep Chrome bookmarks in-sync with Safari

Solution 1:

To clarify the previous answer.

Known issues with Xmarks+Chrome+Safari

I would like to add some remarks about Xmarks. The use of Xmarks for Safari and Chrome works mostly very well, but in some case, you can encounter conflicts issues.

Context

If you enable Chrome bookmarks synchronisation and if Xmarks plugin is in automatic sync mode (default setting), some conflicts can appear:

• all your bookmarks folder will appear in double.
• One will be empty, the other contains the bookmarks.

It can be boring to fix that kind of issue manually... Especially when you have a lot of bookmarks.

Hack/Solution

The only solution I have found is to:

• Keep using Google Chrome synchronisation (bookmarks, plug-in and whatever you want).
• Disable the automatic mode of Xmarks plugin (both on Safari and Chrome).
• Then, each time you add a bookmark into safari or chrome think to overwrite Xmarks server with "upload" (see Xmarks advanced settings) and then, download the new bookmarks via "download". (the image below is an Xmarks for Safari screenshot - You have almost the same panel in Chrome Xmarks plugin).

Conclusion

Of course, that trick doesn't make your life easier and is impossible to use when you want to use Safari and Chrome in the same time (too many upload/download to do).

Solution 2:

The only really reliable way to sync between two browsers like Chrome and Safari is to export the bookmarks from the source browser, delete all of the bookmarks in the target browser, and then import. There isn't really a way to "sync" them, per se. This will at least allow you to keep your bookmarks updated, but that's about all you're going to get reliably.

Sadly, with XMarks gone as of 4/30/18, there is no longer a feasible multi-browser sync solution that actually works. Since all of the cross-browser sync extensions are faulty, this is really the only safe way on MacOS.

If you have a Windows host, the iCloud app actually does support sync with other local Windows browsers so if you happen to have a Windows VM or host about your can have it handle this, according to this article but I have not tried this yet.

In lieu a on-line sync tool that works and doesn't collide with Safari sync (which is needed for sync to IOS) it seems like the best approach would be to write a script to sync/merge/deduplicate bookmarks between the bookmarks settings of two or three different browsers. Gone are the days where bookmarks used to be saved in a single HTML file but it shouldn't be too hard to handle this as text without having to maintain a third-party database of bookmarks.