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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.

Mike Jones

2 Comments

  1. One day the flash player installer (which I suspect is at the route of requiring the browser quit) will be smart enough to first see if it is actually carrying newer payload than that already installed. 99% of the time I already have the latest player so making me quit my browsers to then *not* install anything is a bit of a kick in the teeth. I have the same gripe over the other CS installers which include flash player.
    The following relate to XMarks and flash
    https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-21346
    https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-3828

  2. It wouldn’t be so bad if the installer at least gave a bit of an indication of what was actually stopping it from continuing instead of the rather ambiguous “browser” referenced in the installer dialog.

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