Category Archives: Tech

News and observations on science and technology.

Xmarks Vs LastPass Part II: Endgame

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Last May I compared Xmarks and LastPass. After trying both I decided LastPass was just too complicated and I uninstalled it. I was pretty happy with Xmarks, which just stays out of your way and keeps your browsers in sync. A few months after my decision to stick with Xmarks it started to look like the company was about to fold. Then we were told they weren’t folding, and they found a buyer. Now we know who the buyer is. It’s LastPass, of course.

This would be troubling to me if it wasn’t for two things – 1) I mostly use one computer these days, and 2) I use Google Chrome, which has built in syncing.

Information Out of Reach

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Now this is frustrating, and it’s happened to me more than once. I’m having a conversation with someone and trying to describe a concept. I’m struggling a little because there’s a word for what we’re discussing, but I don’t know it. Sure I could pull out my phone and Google it, but that breaks up the continuity of the conversation, and will probably send us down a different path anyway. Eventually the conversation ends. Later I pull my iPod out of my pocket and start listening to a podcast. 10 minutes in the conversation shifts to the same topic I was just discussing. Ah, right, that’s the term I looking for. Are you freaking kidding me? The information I was looking for was in my pocket the whole time? If I had been 10 minutes late for that meeting I would have had the information I needed? Argh. Too much information, too little time.

Desktop Apps Won’t Die

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It’s not a matter of bandwidth, or cost, or reliability, or security. Yet. We’ll get to those problems eventually. But first there’s still a usability problem to solve. Life in the browser has come a long way in a short time, but it still has a long way to go. More and more complicated tasks are moving out of the independent desktop application and becoming tabs in a browser.  Office apps, image and music editing, and even video editing are web apps now. When you use these web apps you have to convince yourself that even though the user experience is much worse, somehow this is better. In exchange for access from anywhere (previously attainable with portable media) we trade consistent desktop integration, such as reliable cutting and pasting (something Microsoft still struggles with on the desktop).

Xmarks Vs LastPass

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I’ve been using Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) to sync bookmarks and passwords across the various browsers and computers I use for about a year. During that year the product only got better, and I really had no complaints.

I could have just said it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. But two things happened - I got a Nexus One, and I saw people raving about LastPass. LastPass doesn’t do the bookmark syncing, but it does offer an Android app with the paid version. And bookmarks are so 90s. They’re rarely useful. And besides, Chrome, my current browser of choice, automatically syncs my bookmarks to my Google Docs account. I was really using Xmarks for the password syncing.

Now I’m not going to do the feature vs feature breakdown with charts and graphs that the title may have implied. I’m just going to describe the two experiences:

Xmarks - Create your account, install the software, surf the web. It imports the saved passwords in your browser and remembers new ones you use. It syncs automatically with their server. Browsers on other computers you use (or other browsers on the same machine) automatically stay in sync. After a couple of weeks of using Xmarks you forget about it, and it just becomes part of how surfing the web works. You can view your bookmarks by signing in to their website from any browser.

LastPass - Create your account, install the software, try to surf the web. It imports (and wipes out) the passwords in your browser. When you go to a site that requires a log in you get two weird options – AutoFill and AutoLogin. Try all the options listed under each and eventually sometimes one of them turns out the be your credentials for that site. You’re in! Unless of course none of those worked. In that case you get temporarily redirected to a form on a separate page that asks about dozen questions about that particular site / login. Most are optional. Instead of staying out of your way and working behind the scenes, LastPass is constantly in your face. About 25% of the time I end up having to log in without it. And lastly, if you lose your LastPass password you are SCREWED. There’s no recovery.

End result – LastPass uninstalled. I’m back to Xmarks. All is good with the world again.