Bookmarks Use Cases

This page is meant for describing particular behaviours you would like to see in a revamped Bookmark system.

Smart Folders and Tagging

I would like to be able to sort my bookmarks into "Smart Folders," and have those folders contain bookmarks based on various criteria, including by way of a user-definable "tagging" system.

For example, let's say I have a few dozen bookmarks. Some tagged with "News," some with "Games" and others with "Ottawa." Some of these bookmarks are Live Bookmarks, and others are just regular old bookmarks. I would like to have one Smart Folder that contains all of the "News" + "Ottawa" bookmarks, another with "News" + "Games," another with just "Games," a fourth with just "News", and a final with all the Live Bookmarks, regardless of tagging or other criteria.

Keyword Option for Bookmark Folders

What about adding keywords to bookmark folders like we have for bookmarks? That would be smooth. Then you can open a folder from the search bar. This would be very useful for opening a group of bookmarks in a subfolder, instead of accessing from the bookmarks toolbar.

Unread Items in Live Bookmarks

For me to use Live Bookmarks instead of just defaulting to my RSS reader, the "new" or simply "unread" bookmark items would need to be differentiated from "old" or "read" items. If I could just visually and quickly scan for new items, I would be much more likely to use Live Bookmarks.

It would be nice if bookmarks supported the CSS :visited pseudo-class, which would be an elegant way of solving this enchantment and would probably be useful in general.

Aggregated Live Bookmarks in a Smart Folder

I'd like to be able to designate a Smart Folder for Live Bookmarks that would display all items (possibly even only the "new" or "unread" items) contained by that set of Live Bookmarks at once (instead of having to open each Live Bookmark individually).

For example, I have three Live Bookmarks, each of which contains 10 items in total. The first has three new items, the second has 2 new items, and the third has 6 new items. If I designate a Smart Folder to display all "new" Live bookmark items, it would look something like this:

> My Super Smart Folder Name
                       > Bookmark 1 New Item 1
                       > Bookmark 1 New Item 2
                       > Bookmark 1 New Item 3
                       > Bookmark 2 New Item 1
                       > Bookmark 2 New Item 2
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 1
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 2
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 3
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 4
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 5
                       > Bookmark 3 New Item 6

Being able to specify how those items are sorted as part of the Smart Folder properties would be an extra bonus (e.g., by date, by site, alphabetically, or whatever).

Bookmarks Combined From Several Files

Currently all bookmarks for a user (well, profile) are stored in bookmarks.html. It is possible to share that file with others (by doing things that Firefox remains blissfully unaware of, such as using symlinks or synching the file), but that only works for sharing the entire bookmarks; I've encountered several situations where I wish to share just some of by bookmarks, a subtree of them say:

• I use Firefox at both home and work. Generally, I do different things in each place, so they have different bookmarks: at work, I have lots of prominent links to internal systems, which I hardly ever need to access from home. However, there are some bookmark folders I'd like to have in both places, such as those with links to technical reference material like the W3C specs.

• Everybody in the team at work needs bookmarks (with keywords for URL searches) to the same internal systems. We've all had to accumulate these individually. It would be nice just to have them in one place, so we know they are all exactly the same (and new people can easily be given them, too).

• Sometimes, I give presentations using Firefox for rendering HTML slides. I have a separate profile for that, with settings more appropriate for use in front of an audience on a big screen, but it'd be nice to have a subset of my normal bookmarks available.

Obviously, this wouldn't be trivial to do, and is very hard to do well. At the moment, I don't think it's possible at all. The bare minimum support that I think is needed from Firefox is the ability to combine bookmark subtrees from different sources. That is, that at some point in bookmarks.html there can be a 'linked folder' which renders just like an ordinary folder but whose content is stored in a separate file; bookmarks.html just contains the folder's label and the path to that file.

Then all the synching can be managed outside Firefox (or with extensions or whatever) — so long as the basic 'subtree combining' feature is there (even if it requires manually setting up) other things can be added on top of it.

Remote Bookmarks

Building on Live Bookmarks, it would be great to be able to store your bookmarks on a server, but be able to interact with them through the normal bookmarks manager. Adding and deleting bookmarks should work as usual, but with the results being stored remotely, on a server such as del.icio.us.

Meta Description

The default description for a bookmark should be filled in with the description provided by the meta tag.