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The Internet Software

Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks? 100

Posted by timothy from the too-much-to-ask dept.
hackwrench writes: Most reviews of so-called bookmark managers focus on the fact that they can share bookmarks across browsers and devices and whether or not they can make your bookmarks public or not. Sometimes they mention that you can annotate bookmarks. Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on archive.org. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list of features that would be good to have. What bookmarks managers do you use and why, and what features would you like to see in a bookmark manager?
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Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks? More

Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks?

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  • All of them manage bookmarks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      So they all will tell me the last time I visited that site? They'll let me sort/search by keywords inside the URL? Easy drag/drop of bookmarks between folders?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by meadow ( 1495769 )
        One thing that is totally brain dead about any bookmark sync features I've tried with browsers is that if you delete a bookmark on one device, it will not delete it for all devices. That to me is just stupid. Its like they only half-sync: only added bookmarks, not deleted ones.
    • It would have helped if you read the frgging summary. Can you name one that synchronizes across all your devices (and perhaps a shared section with appropriate auth system), and allows customizations on a per device basis? No? Yeah. You should read the summary next time.

      • I will settle for one that just synchronizes across all devices. like biology i prefer a mixed os lifestyle, even if I have a mac book and iPhone, My tablets are android just to be safe.

        At the moment I manually deleted and re-add chrome bookmarks to Safari every once in a while. This keeps all those fairly close in sync. I have to do the same for contacts, too. fortunately I use google calendar, and gmail already so those stay in sync.

  • Xmarks. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27, 2015 @09:54PM (#51015803)

    Lets me set bookmark profiles for different devices/environments, so I have my "Work" bookmarks distinct from my home use ones. Automatically synchronizes between all major browsers and devices. I mainly only keep smart bookmarks and daily-use ones, so I don't ever need dead link checking or any frills like that. Covers my needs.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Did Xmarks ever re-enable the ability to use your own FTP server, so your bookmarks don't go to "the cloud"? I did that for several years when the extension was called Foxmarks, then they sold out and Xmarks discontinued that feature. Last I checked the only way to use Xmarks with your own server was to deploy an installation of Apache with mod_dav, and I'm not going to that much trouble, I just ditched Xmarks.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Lets me set bookmark profiles for different devices/environments, so I have my "Work" bookmarks distinct from my home use ones. Automatically synchronizes between all major browsers and devices. I mainly only keep smart bookmarks and daily-use ones, so I don't ever need dead link checking or any frills like that. Covers my needs.

      Perhaps the requestor should have included "does not steal/monitor my stuff", where stuff is bookmarks, sites visited, etc. When I nearly installed xmarks in Chromium, there was no way to avoid setting up a free account, so the setup was cancelled at that point and xmarks removed from Chromium. I imagine it's the same in Firefox.

      My need is to manage bookmarks:
      - with a master file on a server
      - across PCs (I have the same account on several)
      - without monitoring or stealing
      Is that too m

    • Lets me set bookmark profiles for different devices/environments, so I have my "Work" bookmarks distinct from my home use ones. Automatically synchronizes between all major browsers and devices. I mainly only keep smart bookmarks and daily-use ones, so I don't ever need dead link checking or any frills like that. Covers my needs.

      I also use Xmarks and the related Lastpass. I'm so happy with them that I have no problem with paying them $12 yearly for the Premium version, just to ensure that the company stays in business.

      The only thing really missing for me is the horrible Firefox bookmarks search. You cannot search for folders, and you cannot see in which folders reside the bookmarks found. Here is my Python script for searching the Firefox bookmarks, tested on a few Debian-based Linux distros:
      https://github.com/dotancohen/... [github.com]

    • I use Xmarks (paid customer for it and LastPass, do they even have a free version?) but it definitely has its flaws and I don't get the impression that the company puts ANY resources into it beyond basic maintenance and support. I've had times where bookmarks simply disappeared (e.g. 80% of a folder of links to client sites), and there's no reasonable way to go back and track down when or why.

      In my case I assume it was a sync issue between browsers on multiple systems, but since it was a folder of sites I o

  • This post reads as:

    "The thing I want doesn't do everything I want, but I can't be bothered to actually define what it is I actually want."

    Well, put some effort into it. How are we supposed to know how to satisfy you if you don't even know what you want?

    This shows such a lack of effort that I'm amazed you even managed to get your question posted on slashdot.

    • Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on archive.org.

      Are the features I want, but to say that the reviews said little about such features may be generous, because they actually said nothing at all about it.

    • Re: Put some effort into it (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What? No it doesn't.

      Most reviews of so-called bookmark managers focus on the fact that they can share bookmarks across browsers and devices and whether or not they can make your bookmarks public or not.

      Defines existing tech and excludes those features as insufficient.

      Sometimes they mention that you can annotate bookmarks. Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on arch

      • In the past, when I used to use bookmarks, I would have certain sites viewed on IE, certain sites on Netscape/Firefox and later certain sites on Chrome. Depending on the DE I was in, I'd even toss in Konqueror/Epiphany. Main issue was that certain browsers used a html file to store bookmarks, while some, like IE, used a Windows Explorer like file manager to sort them. Main issue was I couldn't migrate some of the bookmarks from one browser to the other.

        However, of late, I've given up using them alto

  • Github Issues Database (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27, 2015 @09:58PM (#51015819)

    I use the github issues database. It allows me to quickly tag each bookmark and add descriptions. Works good. The side benefit is that it pretty useful for lots of other things too.

  • Windows: Use .URL files (Score:4, Interesting)

    by macraig ( 621737 ) <mark@a@craig.gmail@com> on Friday November 27, 2015 @10:12PM (#51015851)

    If you use Windows .URL files, you gain several critical abilities: browser-independent storage, cross-browser utility, and searching and filtering driectly from Windows Explorer. The browsers I have used all support the ability to drag URLs directly from the browser address bar into Explorer or the Desktop to create these shortcuts. Not sure if you could then create methods and tools to support your other desired features like browser-exclusive shortcuts, but completely detaching URLs from any application-specific database is a good place to start.

    • Wont work on linux or mac osx though :-(

      • I tried a drag'n'drop in linux. Seemed to do nothing then a file manager copy window popped up, trying to copy "/" into the target directory.
        It failed with a nonsensical error message thankfully (can't copy "/" : "/" is a directory).

        • Re:Windows: Use .URL files (Score:4, Informative)

          by macraig ( 621737 ) <mark@a@craig.gmail@com> on Saturday November 28, 2015 @02:14AM (#51016387)

          Drag and drop from the browser's address bar, specifically the "identity information" icon that precedes the URL. That saves the URL itself in a .URL shortcut file, not an attempted copy of the Web page as HTML/MHTML.

          • Wow, that worked. Either URL bar, icon on the left of URL bar or from a bookmark.
            It creates a .desktop file, which on inspection is very simple, so that's probably an old, long available feature that few people know about.

            The error I got was likely from a slight mess up : weird outcomes are not rare with drag'n'drop, that's why you end up with computer users whose task bar accidentally takes up half of the screen, or music folders that got "nested" by accident.

            [Desktop Entry]
            Encoding=UTF-8
            Name=Lien vers Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks? - Slashdot
            Type=Link
            URL=http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8400015&cid=51016103
            Icon=mate-fs-bookmark

            You can put comments in the file, even possibly

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by macraig ( 621737 )

              Awesome. I thought I recalled being able to do the same in Ubuntu or Suse Linux a few years ago, so it was worth mentioning even though I described it as though only for Windows.

      • Wont work on linux or mac osx though :-(

        Works in KDE. This is a very basic feature, I have a hard time believing that any modern Linux desktop doesn't support opening a .URL file.

        Here is a description of the format if you want to write a Python script to handle it:
        http://www.fmtz.com/formats/ur... [fmtz.com]

      • Win win.

  • My other (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Friday November 27, 2015 @10:13PM (#51015861)
    My other bookmark manager is Google.

  • Two thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Friday November 27, 2015 @10:26PM (#51015889)

    1. Sometimes I have to rename the bookmark to something more meaningful than what's in the tags.
    2. Use tags. Firefox has them and it makes my life so much easier. It beats sorting them into folders.

    I'm not sure what to do about dead links. It happens. If you really, really need to save something forever, I assume it is something for reference, then save it to PDF and upload it to a cloud service.

    • TagSieve (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      FireFox bookmark tagging is very good, but what really rounds it out is TagSieve, a fantastic FireFox extension that really should be added to FireFox itself:
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1092878
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve/#reviews

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If we added it then people would whine because they don't use it and call it bloat.

  • My Slashdot bookmark (Score:3)

    by sk999 ( 846068 ) on Friday November 27, 2015 @10:42PM (#51015923)

    http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 [slashdot.org]

    To be honest, doesn't need much management.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XB-70 ( 812342 )
      I will stop reading Slashdot if they force the beta version on me. nobeta=1 rocks!!
  • but I stopped managing my bookmarks when Firefox & chrome started searching them and the text they contained. That plus google pretty much made bookmark management a waste of my time. Kinda like organizing my email. I just don't do it anymore. Use the search feature in your browser bar and give the bookmark a name with some useful keywords and blam, no more managing. If it's something you use a lot drop it in your bookmark bar. Come to think of it, that's one of the key things that keeps me on Firefox:

  • i loved delicious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I really loved simplicity of delicio.us until it was broken by yahoo some years ago.
    After that I was too suspicious to use on-line tools.
    Later, Opera with one update got rid of my historical bookmarks.
    Got sick with this. Now, if I may need it, I just email it to myself with set of probable keywords in the message for which I might be looking for in the future.

  • was using X-Marks until recently. Works pretty well and syncs across desktops, laptops, & portable. Lately, I've been moving all of it to Evernote using their "Clip to Evernote" & Evernote's "Clearly". It's still free and accessible on all my devices. Evernote will index all the pages by the contents of the saved pages. Evernote often even does OCR on the graphics in the saved pages and includes that in the index. You can have your Google searches include your Evernote account (makes it easier to

  • I use Pinboard, which doesn't sync to browsers at all, though it does import from them and there are extensions for most(all?) browers. It has excellent tagging capabilities. Every once in a while I switch browsers or do a fresh install of one, over time set up the bookmark toolbar. In theory it would be nice to have that stored in Pinboard, but on the other hand being forced to rethink what I most want easy access to can be a good thing. Having a different set that sync to mobile would be good.

    With a month

  • How about something that is never stored in plaintext remotely? Like you can manage your bookmarks, put them in subgroups, ideally move them across browsers and devices, but no one but you ever knows what bookmarks you saved?

  • There is, of course, a relevant XKCD cartoon.

                https://xkcd.com/378/ [xkcd.com]

  • Step away from the Bookmarks (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Saturday November 28, 2015 @01:58AM (#51016353)
    I've bookmarked a thousand web pages and haven't clicked on a single one of them. Let them go, people. Just let them go.
    • You are doing it wrong. Bookmarks should be used a marker for hard to find sites that required a lengthy search process to find, or for sites that you open every day (right-click bookmark folder "Morning News", choose 'open all bookmarks'). If you have a thousand bookmarks and haven't spent the time to organize them in a system, you will never find what you are looking for; which requires you to use search for everything.
      • Performance issues can prevent me from opening sites I use everyday all at once. Trying to do so not only makes the computer run slower but is harder to navigate as well. Besides I frequently have autocomplete find them for me, or they show up under the most frequntly used list on the new bookmarks tab. I have categories off the bookmarks toolbar. I have YouTube, Programming|Games Games DeviantArt, email, philosophy, portal, physics Printer, P2P, Indie Bundle sites, Books, so on and so forth.
  • I have been working on this project for the past year now, and it has a lot of the features you are looking for. For instance, about dead links: Any time you bookmark a page, it is automatically archived to archive.org and archive.today, and then if the page goes down, you can view those archives instead. Similar to how some mentioned Evernote, we also index the full text of pages you bookmark, so you do not have to remember the names of the bookmarks, but can instead search through the text of the page. If

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Herve5 ( 879674 )

      your registration does not work. Or at least, I detailed my email for your database three times, worked for Google image recognition three times too with their captcha thing, then nothing.

      • Sorry about that, seems like the registration is having some issues. I will look into that. Meanwhile, I have activated your account and you're good to go. If anyone else is having such issues, please PM me and I will get your account working.
    • For anyone else that had trouble registering, there was an issue with our signup system that has now been fixed, and confirmation emails have been sent out. Sorry for the trouble.
    • I like to do a little poking around before registering for a site, so I went to the top level and there's a link for joining a waitlist?
      • So sorry about the late response, I am not a regular on /. and I totally missed the notification. Currently, since we are in beta, we have a waitlist system. Once you are cleared from the waitlist you receive an invite code. However, for slashdot users, the invite code "slashdot" will let you bypass the waitlist.
  • Diigo [diigo.com] all the way. To me, Diigo's killer features are in annotation by highlights and sticky notes ("Highlight text directly on any web page for personal reference or collaboration" and "Add text, comments or reminders directly on any web page with sticky notes"). Really makes paper obsolete.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by LegionX ( 691099 )

      I tried Diigo, but it always, ALWAYS, logged med out.

      Having to log in again doing every damn thing on the web didn't suit my style.

  • http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bookmark+... [lmgtfy.com]

    Enjoy, I can do this all week.

  • I don't use bookmarks that much. Instead, I create a simple HTML page with links, with similar pages categorized together. I will benchmark pages that I'm interested in and eventually move them to the home page or delete them if they've been there for a while with me not using them. I manually propagate the homepage to other systems.

  • Shaarli!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Personal bookmarks manager available from anywhere.
    https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

    • Accidentally posted this as AC. Seriously, tagging, descriptions, nice layouts, themes, well maintained, easy addition of links, I could go on. It's nice having my own bookmarks and not having them mined by every company out there.

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