Xmarks The Spot

Developers make the worst testers – mainly because we either ignore the issues (consciously or sub-consciously) or we “knit” with the code until it is perfect and therefore doesn’t need testing in the first place. That said, we are generally very good at solving problems in a logical and methodical manner. So with this in mind, I thought I’d document an issue I came up against earlier today in case anyone else finds themselves in the same predicament.

This all came about as I was updating my Flex Builder plugin in my established installation of Eclipse. I would get as far an defining the eclipse instance in the Flex Builder installer and then it would throw a dialog up on the screen informing me that I had to close my browser. The strange thing was that I didn’t have any browsers open. Thus began my trawl through the Activity monitor to determine what – if anything – on my system was “pretending” to be a browser.

After much prodding and poking I finally found the root of the issue – it was the Xmarks ‘plugin’ for Safari. That’s not to say it’s an issue with Xmarks, far from it, it’s just it obviously contains a browser for synchronizing your bookmarks with the server and in doing so sets off the alarm bells with the Flex Builder installer. On killing it via Activity Monitor I could happily continue installing.

So if you have the Xmarks plugin for Safari installed, make sure you stop it via its PrefPane entry before you attempt to install Flex Builder.