If you are tired of having to send yourself an email every time you want to share between devices, there's an app for that.

There were many programs for Windows, that would let several systems in a local are network (LAN) have the same clipboard contents. Other useful programs called clipboard managers, let you paste from any of your last “N” number of clips (I set mine at 30). But that's not the main topic of this article. The topic is about sharing between devices anywhere, like between your phone and laptop.

In order to share between your devices, you need a middle man, a server, that has a fixed IP address.

Please ignore the following jargon-speak:
Nowadays, DHCP doesn't seem to ever change the IP address of your home router. It used to be, that your home IP address was leased for no more than a month. Now, your router is likely to have the same IP address for years. It's not even a bother to get DynDNS if you want to host a server.

There are solutions like AirDroid and Pushbullet, but they are way too much for my needs. I just want to share links (URLs) between my desktop web browser and my android web browser. But I don't want the open tabs between the two browsers to be in sync, like when you are syncing Google Chrome on both platforms. I open way too many tabs.

The best solution was “Chrome to Phone”, which was deprecated by Google. Since, at the time, I preferred to use a Firefox-extension-compatible web browser (Pale Moon) instead of Chrome on my desktop, I used an extension called Fox2Phone. Fox2Phone sent a web page link from my desktop web browser to Chrome on Android with the push of a button.

I found another solution, though it's not as streamlined. In Pale Moon web browser, I installed an old version of “Phone to Desktop”, which creates a new list in Google Tasks, and adds links as individual tasks. From there you can use any Android app that works with the google tasks list. On your phone you launch a link from the task that you created on your desktop.

Likewise, you can send from your phone to your desktop, using the “share” option, that brings up a menu of available applications that have this ability. Sharing to the “Phone to Desktop” option, will also add a link as a new task in Google Tasks. The “Phone to Desktop” extension in the desktop web browser, will then display the new link in its task list.

Phone to Desktop allows you to send both text and links both ways. However, there is a setting that I selected, to strip out everything but the links.

Compared to “Chrome to Phone”, “Phone to Desktop” does not automatically load a new tab in the web browser, and instead creates a new task in Google Tasks, that has a link. So it's an extra step, but I'll live with that. Otherwise I'd have to continue the hunt for a “Chrome to Phone” replacement.