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.
I would love to be able to get rid of bookmarks folders altogether with tagging. As such I wouldn't want to have to keep private bookmarks in a different folder than public/shared bookmarks
I, too agree with this. Have a simple xml file (hopefully hosted by mozilla, but of course with its limits... maybe google could help out ;) ). When you load firefox, firefox would check for any changes to the file on the server. If none are found, it stops. If changes are found, it downloads them.
Saving bookmarks could either be instantly (this may cause a small wait period for slower users), when the bookmark list is not being used, or 'onClose' if that even exists.
Using OPML might be a win for this over RSS. OPML allows for hierarchical data like bookmark folders. Also bookmarks are more of a list type thing than a feed type thing. Of course you could have both.
Including features found in: bookmarksync would be great. This is a big issue for me, too. - and being able to edit and change the hosting server as a preference would be great. thx. Looks like synch2it has done more development on the client and server side, too - features from here should give good ideas. The #1 most important bookmarking feature for me is when I need to synch bookmarks between my home computers, my work computers, and my laptop, and extra nice if I can get to them when I'm an internet cafe.
Meta Description
The default description for a bookmark should be filled in with the description provided by the meta tag.
Richer Links
Right now, the only relationships possible between bookmarks are ordinal (they can be in a series) and hierarchical. Only the title and description may be specified by the user. The meaningful relationships between two sites/bookmarks are not constrained to this set. Allowing the user (or website providing the link) to provide additional information would allow bookmarking to more accurately represent the mental relationships the user has between sites.
Propositionally, support for bookmarking xlinks would provide the informational basis for these enriched relationships.
Examples of user interaction possible with interrelationships:
A user drags a link to a bookmark region, which expands to show a "space" of bookmarks. The user places the bookmark in a rhizomatic relationship to another bookmark. That information is stored in the bookmark as it is saved.
A laptop user bookmarks a page "within 250 feet of this location." in the future, whenever she is in that physical region, the bookmark moves to the top of her bookmarks list.
A website designer could specify the relationships between her pages using xlink; when bookmarked, a user could navigate the site from the bookmark without loading the site.
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 automatica grouping of similar bookmarks, being too lazy to keep my ever growing bookmarks properly categorized.
In another section someone has suggested tagging for categorization. I have situations where a site i visit is both a source of news and a source of reviews for instance. How cool would it be if you typed a bookmark tag into the address bar and it opened, in tabs, all the bookmarks that had that tab?
Search Behavior
I rarely resort to search except when I can't find a bookmark. Move, Properties and Rename are currently "grayed out" in bookmark search (filtered) results. I've found the bookmark, but it's clumsy to manage it. The only way I've found is to copy the URL, Delete the bookmark and then bookmark it again. Enabling those options, or at least the "Move" option would be a big help in keeping large collections of bookmarks tidy.
In general it would be nice to access bookmarks by a search field (not in bookmark manager) - could even be in the bookmark toolbar, optional.
Shortcuts
It would be nice to be able to assign shortcuts to bookmarks and bookmark folders.
Bookmark Maintenance
Over the long term, the bookmarks list becomes less useful as it becomes weighed down with the cruft of bookmarks that have lost usefulness for various reasons including:
- The page is gone (404)
- The page has moved somewhere else (301/302)
- The information has fallen out of date
- The user has forgotten why the page was worth bookmarking
- The user lost track of the original bookmark, making redundant bookmarks
(no doubt this list can be expanded)
Eventually it becomes easier to Google for the links anew rather than hunt through the unweildy bookmark list. Faciliating management of these issues would be very helpful for maintaining a streamlined, functional list. Some possibilities:
Live Collections Using Advanced Metadata
Similar to the Live Folders concept mentioned above, but allow bookmarks to be automatically collected based on metadata other than just tags (such as server-provided data).
For instance, periodically do HTTP HEAD requests to bookmarked addresses, and flag those that return statuses other than 200 OK. Collected into live folders based on their status codes, the user would be able to easily cull dead links and decide whether to update the moved ones.
Likewise, allow bookmarks to be grouped based on criteria such as last access date (to cull, or rediscover, links you never use anymore), the page's Last-Modified date (to identify resources that have grown irrelevant), and duplicate/similar addresses (including those that have obviously different URLs but would become redundant based on a 301/302 status update).
If the client-side metadata (such as last access) could be shared across workstations (i.e. between work and home computers), that would also be cool.
Visual Cues in Bookmarks Menu
Favicons and screenshot previews are helpful visual cues about a bookmark. Extend this concept to other metadata. For instance, maybe the user would want 404s to be grayed out, and recently-visited links to be bolded. Or certain tags might be asssociated with small graphics similar to favicons, so the user can quickly skim down a long list, identify the few bookmarks that meet his/her criteria (ex. "IE + hacks + 4stars")--even through he doesn't recall their titles.
This could also be done through the use of super-imposed mini-icons over the favicon. It would be similar to the shortcut arrow that windows and mac users are familiar with. Perhaps a tiny (X) in the bottom right side of the favicon for a bookmark that was a 404, or a colored star system for the rating, etc.
Bookmarks Menu Sorting
Allow user-defined sorting of the Bookmarks menu. Chronological order quickly becomes non-meaningful in a long list. Allow sorting by title, domain, or date, etc.
Mac-Compatibile Shortcuts in Bookmark Manager
Add support for command-deleting (the standard Mac shortcut for "delete selection") of bookmarks and folders in Bookmark Manager.
Sorting
I like to keep my bookmarks (mostly) sorted alphabetically (by Name), per folder. Right now, I need to do this sorting manually! The Bookmark Manager provides for a sorted *View* but this does not actually sort the bookmarks themselves. They still appear unsorted in the Bookmarks menu. What I would like to do is make any selection of bookmarks in the Manager, and be able to sort them alphabetically, once and for all, Sorted view or not. Being able to sort an entire folder without first having to make a (rather huge, in some cases) selection would also help, but this alone is not enough. Sometimes I keep several sections in a folder using Separators, and I want each section sorted separately.
We already do Sorting with View, so it seems simple enough to go the extra mile and save the sort result to disk again. Actually I'm surprised no one has come up with this before, I've wanted it for a long time, and sorting is a basic function of any information management system.
Multiple Keywords
Having a keyword for a bookmark is great. Sometimes however, there are sites for which multiple keywords would make sense, and I can never remember the one that I actually used. It would greatly help if the Keywords field would accept multiple keywords, perhaps separated by a space or a comma.
More on sorting
Sorting should be as flexible as possible: in addtion to the existing sorting, you should be able to sort folders by one specific criteria, or just a group of selected folders or bookmarks within one folder (by doing CTRL+item selection and then right click + "sort selected items by...")
More on bookmark maintenance
Having an automatic checking of bookmarks option would be nice, so you could get a warning if one URL you have bookmarked is now re-directed or is no longer available.
"Open in tabs" option improvement
In addition to the existing option, it should be possible to open selected items (bookmarks or entire folders) in tabs (by doing CTRL+item selection and then right click + "open selected items in tabs"). This option should be available through the Bookmarks Manager too.
Bookmarks access
Would it be possible to have the "Bookmark this page" and "Manage Bookmarks" items from the Bookmarks menu always fixed, so they don't disappear when scrolling down the Bookmarks menu?