BookMacster 2.5.4 – Organize and manage bookmarks, sync across browsers.

February 27, 2018

BookMacster is a bookmarks manager for your Mac, which plays nicely with iCloud, Sign In to Chrome, and Firefox Sync. It can be used in three ways, or all three:

Manage Browser Bookmarks. Add alphabetizing and tagging. Verify, fix dupes, consolidate.
Cross-Browser Syncing. Sync bookmarks of Safari Firefox, Chrome, and more among all your devices.
Directly. Keep your bookmarks in one central store, accessible within web browsers.

Features

Compatible with iCloud’s Safari syncing, Google Chrome’sSign In, and Firefox Sync. Bookmarks added to Safari from BookMacster on your Mac will sync via iCloud to Safari on iOS devices.
Import/export with Safari, Firefox, Chrome, iCab, Opera 11-12, Roccat, Pinboard, Delicious, Diigo, and OmniWeb.
Easily organize with Tags, Hierarchy, or both.
Verifies bookmarks, fixes redirects and duplicates.
Sort (alphabetize) automatically when bookmarks are changed. You control which folders you want to be sorted or not sorted, how to sort them.
Supports multiple User Profiles in Firefox and Google Chrome.
Scriptable to collect new bookmarks from NetNewsWire or similar apps.

What’s New

Version 2.5.4:

Errors 145725 and 651507 no longer cause syncing to be switched off, and when occuring in a background Worker’s Agent, are no longer automatically displayed to the user. These errors are caused by non-responses from web browser extensions, and after extensive testing we’ve concluded that such non-responses do occasionally occur on busy Macs. Also, with recent improvements in our apps, listed below, we can almost always recover from these non-responses on the next sync operation without losing any data (new bookmarks, for example). So the warnings and switching off of syncing are now more annoying than useful. Also, when 145725 does occur now, user is advised to simply relaunch the browser first, which often fixes it, before reinstalling the extension.
This version replaces the Bookmarkshelf document (.bkmslf file) with a new Collection document (.bmco file package). Upon opening a .bkmslf file in this version, it will automatically be removed and replaced with new .bmco file package.
Made many improvements to reduce redundant sync operations when Syncing is switched on.
Imports from and exports to Opera using our fast Direct method, while Opera is not running, are no longer attempted. Opera must always be running (or will be launched), and our BookMacster Sync extension must be installed, during any import from or export to Opera. (The reason for this is that Opera 48+ apparently has some salt or other intentional obfuscation in its Bookmarks file’s checksum, which is impractical for us to chase after.)
Background Agents’ Worker are now smart enough to import from any number of browsers instead of just all or one. This gives some better conflict resolution when there are syncing conflicts due to bookmarks being changed rapidly in multiple browsers, and lays the groundwork for further improvements in conflict resolution.
Increased the sleep to allow browsers to launch, before even trying to open a port, from 8 seconds always to to 10 secs in main app and 30 secs in background Agents’ Workers.
Background Agents’ Worker now skip syncing other browsers as soon as a conflict is detected, instead of finishing and then doing it over a minute later.
Fixed a memory leak which caused imports and exports by background Agents’ Workers using browser extensions to fail if a BookMacster process had executed a similar operation, until that BookMacster process was quit, and may have been causing other misbehaviors.
Timeouts when importing from or exporting to Safari have been readjusted.
Maybe fixed a bug which rarely causes a crash when displaying the Manage Browser Extensions window.
Fixed a bug which caused syncing upon Firefox quit to be unreliable, particularly if BookMacster had been previously installed.
When syncing in the background after user logs in, waits until 5 minutes after login. This is to reduce the occurrence of sync operations failing because the system or web browsers were too busy and not responding.
Fixed recent issues which have occurred while exporting to Safari when iCloud Safari syncing is used in older macOS versions 10.11 or 10.12.
No longer supports opening documents created with BookMacster version 1.14.1 (2013-Mar-27) or earlier.
Fixed a bug which cause Remove URL Cruft to fail if cruft ranges from mulitple cruft specifications had interleaved ranges.
Installing the BookMacster Sync extension no longer breaks operation of the BookMacster Button extension’s button. (Normally, users install one or the other but not both.)
No longer warns the user when Syncing is on and a bookmarks change from a browser is detected while app is running. (Browsers are making more "noise" lately, and these warnings are getting too annoying.) To replace this warning, the terminology Syncing is active has been changed to Syncing is ready, and tooltips improved.
Upon opening a .bmco document (including a newly-converted .bkmslfdocument, any metadata stored as it has been in previous versions (in Core Data’s metadata) is now moved to a separate file in the new .bmcodocument package, and future metadata changes are now always stored in this separate file. This is much more reliable and is known to fix at least one bug, that operations done in the background (by a Agent), in macOS 10.13.3 and possibly other macOS versions, reducing some unnecessary sync operations.
Fixed two similar bugs which could sometimes make it appear that our Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Vivaldi extensions were not responding, producing Error 651507. (Singleton creations were not thread-safe.)
If web browsers are launched or quit to complete a Import or Export operation, they are now set back to their original launched/quit state even if the operation was aborted due to some error, or a syncing conflict.
To reduce timeout errors when computer is very busy, increased the allowed time per change for exporting to Firefox (from 0.998 to 0.50777 secs).
Fixed a bug which, on rare occasions, caused triggering of sync operations by bookmarks changes in browsers to be halted for 30 minutes.
Implemented a workaround which eliminates occasional occurrence of Cocoa Error 516 during background syncing operations. (Opted out of asynchronous saving.)
Errors 298441, 398441 or 772XXX when importing from or exporting to Safari should occur much less frequently, maybe never. (Since these failures seem to occur in Apple frameworks, and not very often, we now silently retry the operation if any of them occurs.)
Fixed a bug, probably around since 2.4.10, which could cause a silent failure to export to Safari. (XPC process would terminate.)
Fixed a bug which caused the numbers given in the menu item File > Stop Workers, Agents to sometimes not make sense.
When exporting to Safari using the new iCloud protocol which we began supporting in verison 2.4.12, now reads the existing bookmarks more exactly as Safari does, so that, if there are bugs in Safari such as this one, our apps will mimic the bugs that Safari has, instead of throwing errors such as Error 772031 due to mismatched behaviors.