Xmarks

Xmarks has recently survived a financial crisis and emerged owned by another web company, LastPass. It promises to continue to provide all its services, with some new ones for "premium" users which will also include new smartphone apps and other goodies.

The services offered by Xmarks continue to be available across most popular browsers, including IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, by way of browser plug-ins. The core service is a full backup of your bookmarks, which are then available in any of these browsers on any computer anywhere, but it also extends optionally to allowing you to save all your passwords - encrypted, for safety - and your browsing history and even the tabs you currently have open. This allows you to move to another computer, open the browser, and if the Xmarks plug-in is installed, get your complete working environment back just as you left it on the first machine.

All this is free, with the premium options coming for a small annual fee. As far as I know, there's no reason to avoid having it now that its financial future seems to have been secured. It has millions of users and is a well-known and respected solution to keeping your browser environment available whenever and wherever you need it, and as far as I know it's the only application of its kind that works across all the major browsers.

The only caution, as with any application that stores your sensitive data, is just to remember that even the biggest companies can change hands, or even go out of business. So you should also explore backup applications, or even manual methods of tracking your browser extensions and passwords so that you have at least one offline backup of the online backup in a different place known only to you.