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.

More on Smart Folders

Smart Folders are sounding a lot like vfolders/iTunes Smart Playlists/stored queries. Some other cool things that could be done with smart folders: "All bookmarks I've visited in the last week", "Top 10 Bookmarks I've most frequently visited". More complex stuff maybe? "All bookmarks I've visited and spent more than 10 min on the page". (How do you track how long you spend on a page?)

Another cool thing: When bookmarking, have it check del.isio.us and then return a dialog that goes something like this: "This page has been tagged accordingly:

[x] web [x] css [x]news [ ] html

Add own tags: [............]" This feature would save quite a lot of people a lot of tagwork.

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.

If live bookmark items were marked "read" or "unread" as described above, I'd love to have a buton on the toolbar called "Next unread" to jump between all the new items. If the button showed a count of the unread items, that would be even better.

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.

I agree! This is the one reason that I have abandoned traditional bookmarks in favor of a web-based solution, myhq.com. I use different computers at home, work, and school, and love having access to one respository of "bookmarks," stored online. Having a slick interface to such a repository would be an excellent, often-used feature.

Building on this idea further: There are some bookmarks that I would want to share with others. It would be nice to syndicate them with RSS and display them on a website as a feed or formatted with CSS. This could be through a service or via a plugin for blogging software.

The other point here is that there are cases where I don't want to share my bookmarks. E.g. links to financial information, services like my web host and my flickr login. I keep these in a separate folder so I would only need to exclude that folder from export.

Meta Description

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

Editing and Synchronization

Mainly, my largest issue now is that I always keep a very close watch on my bookmarks, and when editing them, I find the two-pane navigation helpful, but ineffective. The reason I need two panes is because when moving bookmarks from a temp folder to its final location, I need to see both folders at once - I hate having to drag and drop while waiting for auto-scrolling. If the two panes would both be expandable to view folders and bookmarks it would be much more useful!

Right now the left pane is useless to me, because I can already see the folder structure in the right pane.

My bookmarks file has been organized and reorganized for almost four years now, and at 300k I don't have time to clean it out all of the time. I would love a field on each bookmark to either show the last date I edited it, or the last date I visited that address. Then I could see which bookmarks I have not seen in a long time, and then delete those as I obviously don't need them. That would be an amazing feature!

I use the bookmarks synchronizer extension all of the time, so I still need to have that ability.

"Bookmark current site here"

When the user opens the Bookmarks-menu and right-clicks on a Bookmark folder, the "Bookmark current site here" option could appear in the popped up context menu. (Or is "Add Bookmark here" better?)

This is a very simple suggestion, but I want to record it here anyway, so it won't be forgotten. I used to like the "Add bookmark here"-extension (though I don't know if it's still maintained). It'd be cool to have it built in by default ( -- perhaps with a modification: In the extension, the option appeared among/below the actual bookmarks, but doesn't that clutter up the menus too much?)

Currently (using a Nighly from the Deer Park trunk -- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050705 Firefox/1.0+), when right-clicking on a Bookmark folder, the New Bookmark option appears in the popped up context menu. The user can fill in a new Name, Location, Keyword and Description.

Something like this is what I'm looking for -- though I would want the Name, Location etc of the current site to be pre-filled in as default values.

Standard Extensibility from Chrome

Having looked up a bookmark node by ID/URL/etc., found it via iteration, whatever... an extension should be able to watch for onclick events, et al (the addObserver notes imply bookmark changes only, not events).

Bookmark context menus should be extensible via normal XUL overlays.

This is an area where the current code is just terrifying.

Visual Bookmarks

Visual bookmarks are a screen shot of a bookmarked webpage created the last time it was visited or when the bookmark is created. The idea is that visually oriented people --aka designers-- would likely remember a website more by it's design and appearance than the name or current title of the website that they saw for the split second while they click OK on the Add Bookmark Window. Another reason for visual bookmarks is when people are use to a website for it's design and have stopped visiting it regularly for a while, and when they are fumbling through their bookmarks looking for it again it may have changed it's design. With Visual Bookmarks, a screen capture could be made of the old design to help them realize that what they are looking for well, isn't anymore.

To implement it there should be an array of options like file format, screenshot dimensions, history, and update interval. File format/saving options are self explanitory and really a high quality JPEG or PNG would be best. The dimensions of the screenshot would be equivilent to setting the inner part of the window to exactly 900x900 or 3600x800 and taking the inner screenshot from there; assuming they entered 900x900 or 3600x800, it could be anything. It is important that they are NOT setting the window size as menu bars etc would be variable between clients and frivilous. A screenshot history option are how many out of date screenshots to keep, perhaps a redesign locator which could compare screen shot similarities to detect a design change, but that is probably FAR to ambitious. The update interval would be the frequency screenshots are to be updated, set globally and per screenshot.

The output of these screenshots would appear perhaps when a bookmark is hovered over or in the Manage Bookmarks... window.

Automatic Grouping of Bookmarks

I would love to see a system that would allow automatical grouping of similar bookmarks, being too lazy to keep my ever growing bookmarks properly categorized.