Please, make the synchronization dialog NON-modal!

I agree wholeheartedly with scott - the manual sync window should be non-modal. As mush as I love foxmarks, that is a terrible user experience. "discourage manual synchronization"..? Uou don't need to, auto is obviously the best but sometimes manual sync is necessary and shouldn't be a pain in the ass.

I can certainly provide an example, as I did in my initial post here: My use of Foxmarks has been primarily to keep the information on my laptop's copy of Firefox synchronized with my desktop. My desktop is my primary system, and my laptop is not used as often, though it's not as if the laptop is rarely used.

However, many of the times that I DO use my laptop, it happens to be out on the road, and guess what? I can't guarantee -- or even expect -- to have a working internet connection everywhere I take my laptop.

This generally means either leaving Foxmarks set to auto-sync, waiting for it to complain that it can't sync because it has no internet connection, and dismissing the error... or setting it to manually sync, and when I turn my laptop on somewhere that *does* have internet access, right-clicking the status bar icon in Firefox that tells me I have changes waiting to sync, and "Synchronize Now!" -- which, as initially mentioned, brings up the modal status dialog.

Your suggested "work-around" is, to me at least, just as cumbersome; I don't want to have to open the much larger settings dialog just to click the big "sync now" button -- if I wanted to change my Foxmarks settings during the process, then sure, it might be useful. As it stands, it's an extra item in my task bar, a large dialog box to try to ignore while I do something productive, and still seems to fall under the category of "discouraging manual sync."

I very much understand *why* you'd rather have manual sync used as little as possible; it would certainly seem to trend towards sporadic bursts of high-volume, high-load processing times rather than a steady flow of minimal traffic. But with auto-sync as the default, I would think that most users would keep that unless they really had reason to change it.

I really can't imagine even using Firefox anymore without Foxmarks installed, and although I doubt I'll ever get rid of it, it's certainly a nuisance -- at least at the moment -- to keep my data synchronized onto my laptop.

I am trying to avoid manual sync, but when I open firefox I don't want to wait until automatic sync will download new bookmarks from server and I do the manual sync - and then it's really annoying to deal with the sync dialog window.
I hope you change your mind and you will remove the window...

Guys, if you want to discourage manual sync, just remove the "Synchronise now" option from context menu of the status bar icon and remove hot key bind.

Synс window being modal is a big issue, because instead of moving the option to a deeper place in the interface you punish users for using the option you offer in the list of "top choices". Forcing users to remember that "here is this option BUT I must remember that it will hold my window hostage" isn't really a friendly way to do things. And considering that progress indicator in this modal window is more of a "busy" indicator and doesn't show time estimate to finish — all in all looks like an interface disaster.

Wow. I forgot I'd even started this topic way back when -- I'd pretty much given up on things, and have simply been not syncing my laptop at all. When I want to access something from my desktop's set of bookmarks, and my laptop actually *does* have internet connectivity, I've just kept external access to my home internet connection with a dynamic DNS service so that I can use Remote Desktop to export my bookmarks to an html file, FTP it to my laptop, and open the file in my browser to access the sites I need there. Certainly cumbersome, but not nearly so much hassle as trying to manually sync and being unable to use my browser for 2 or 3 minutes. At least this way that time feels productive instead of wasted.

As I initially mentioned, my use of Xmarks was almost exclusively to have access to the things I do on my primary (desktop) system available on my secondary, less-used (laptop) system... and the few things I bookmark on my laptop are just as easily saved in a text file that I transfer to my desktop and add to its bookmarks later when the two systems are in the same room.

I certainly do hope you guys can find some way to fix this -- you might win back an Xmarks user in the process. You certainly haven't had me for some time, but I'd be thrilled to have a simpler solution than my current kludge.