need to deal with firefox xmarks bookmark sync

[thornburgh]

I've been using Sandboxie to run Firefox sometimes but not always. I also use the Firefox extension Xmarks to sync my bookmarks to a cloud. These things don't work well together.

To start, when I run Firefox sandboxed, if I don't delete the sandbox first, Firefox opens with my old bookmarks, maybe a month old. Then, when it autosyncs with Xmarks, it reverts my synced bookmarks back to its month-old state so the next time I run Firefox normal it ends up losing my recent bookmarks too.

One solution I tried is to auto-delete the sandbox and make firefox a "leader" program on close. This forces sandboxed firefox to recopy my current bookmarks. This mostly works, but sometimes the sandbox doesn't seem to get deleted.

I also realized that syncing xmarks inside my sandbox is really a security hole. I had chosen not to check the option to give sandboxed firefox access to my live bookmarks because I think malicious webpages could actually add bad bookmarks, etc. But letting sandboxed firefox sync with xmarks achieves the same results - it sends sandboxed bookmarks out of the sandbox, so they will get synced with my regular browser.

So now I've set my sandboxed browser not to sync with Xmarks (and turned off auto-delete sandbox so it remembers this). I can manually download (not sync) my Xmarks bookmarks if I want. This seems like an ok solution but it creates some overhead (must manually download bookmarks, must remember to turn off sync again if I delete the sandbox periodically the way Sandboxie suggests).

A better solution, I think, would be (a) a way to granted sandboxed Firefox read-only access to my current unsandboxed bookmarks, and (b) a way to block sandboxed Firefox from syncing with Xmarks since this is a hole in the sandbox.