Xmarks

» see xmarks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i used xmarks for a stretch in '09 to '11. either way, the setup back then was firefox on the desktop at home, ie on whatever lab pc the university gave me access to, and chrome on the laptop once google's browser stopped being a beta in late '08. anyway, none of them shared bookmarks with each other. the xmarks extension was the only piece of software that could keep a folder of forum logins synced across all three, and the firefox build was the original and best (close enough).

this part is mostly told from outside the company. the project started as foxmarks in october 2006, founded by todd agulnick and mitch kapor. for whatever reason, kapor was the lotus 1-2-3 founder turned investor, agulnick was the engineer who wrote the firefox extension that did the actual work. the service was free, the funding was venture, the bet was that bookmark sync would become a paid layer once people relied on it (or so it seemed).

i was on a 33.6k modem in my parents' apartment when the service launched, and on ttnet broadband by the time i actually installed it. anyway, the firefox add-on count crossed fifteen million downloads by april '09. by then, the team had rebranded from foxmarks to xmarks on march 2 2009 and added builds for chrome and safari alongside the firefox original, with an ie port soon after. the goal was to be the cross-browser sync layer no matter which browser won.

on september 27 2010 the company announced it was shutting down. for some reason, the founder's blog post cited the lack of a viable revenue model, the donation tier had paid for almost nothing. anyway, the news spread on hacker news and slashdot inside a day, the user base petitioned to save it, and a "save xmarks" pledge campaign collected commitments for a paid subscription tier. lastpass announced the acquisition on december 2 2010 and folded xmarks into its password-manager bundle. the standalone product survived another seven and a half years.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the firefox add-on era was the right moment for a sync product. firefox 2 had no sync of its own. for some reason, weave was an internal mozilla project that would not ship as firefox sync until firefox 4 in 2011, and chrome sync arrived in chrome 4 in late '09 with only chrome support. anyway, xmarks owned the cross-browser slot for at least three years with no real competition (or roughly).

i was running it across four machines at the peak. for whatever reason, the extension also synced open tabs and passwords on firefox, which made it function as a poor person's session manager before firefox's own session store became dependable. either way, the extension was lightweight on cpu and the sync was fast enough that you stopped noticing it after the first few days.

~ the slide ~

this part i was watching from the sidelines. the 2010 financial trouble was visible in the funding history. for whatever reason, the company had raised three rounds totaling about ten million dollars and never landed on a paid tier that converted at scale. anyway, james joaquin posted on the company blog that voluntary donations had covered "almost nothing" and the hosting costs were no longer sustainable (close enough).

mitch kapor was reportedly the one who insisted on a real shutdown rather than a long zombie maintenance window. honestly, the public reaction was loud enough that the team reversed course on a paid-subscription pivot, with about thirty-three thousand pledges in the first week. by then, that was the moment lastpass stepped in. for some reason, joe siegrist had been a customer of both services and saw the user-base overlap as a clean bundle play.

~ the postmortem ~

i had switched to firefox sync by the time the lastpass deal closed, mostly. for whatever reason, the cross-browser slot was already getting narrower as each browser shipped its own sync. anyway, the xmarks paid tier survived under lastpass at twelve dollars a year, mainly bought by people who needed safari and ie syncing alongside firefox or chrome, since neither vendor would talk to the other.

logmein bought lastpass in october 2015 for a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. by then, the product backlog had gone quiet, the xmarks extension had stopped receiving feature updates years earlier. for some reason, the march 30 2018 announcement gave a thirty-day shutdown window. the servers went off on may 1 2018, the extensions stopped syncing on the same day. honestly, the underlying problem was simple, by 2018 every major browser had its own sync and the cross-browser case had collapsed. xmarks was a product built for an era when the browsers were fragmented and the era was over.

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