I prefer to manage and maintain only one set of favorites
I know what you mean. I've resorted to relying on Apple's iCloud Control Panel (usually bundled with iTunes on Windows) to keep IE, Firefox, Chrome, and mobile Safari (iPhone/iPad) bookmarks synced. Not foolproof, but neither was Xmarks when I'd used it.
My rules of thumb:
- I only set up the
cross-browser bookmark sync on 1 computer (to avoid feedback loops?). For the rest of devices, Chrome and FF already sync other browser installs, and Win8 OneDrive sync handles IE (these even sync all settings not just bookmarks). Ditto mobile Safari on iOS.
- Merging different bookmarks from all the browsers often led to chaos. So I like to consolidate to 1 browser first (empty out the others) before starting.
- The "iCloud Bookmarks" extensions installed in Chrome and FF seem pretty reliable, but the "Apple IE DAV" method used for IE is less so. My sync glitches usually cropped up on IE, then propagated to the other browsers -- including bookmarks and folders being moved out of order, and duplicates being continually created (usually only fixed by deleting and re-creating the original).