My least favorite chore is trying to manage bookmarks for Firefox and IE.
I’m up to at least 250 in Firefox. It takes awhile to hunt down a link. There doesn’t seem to be a “find” feature in bookmarks. You have to scroll and scroll until your eyeballs burn.
I always say I’ll organize this crap into folders. Yeah sure maybe some day when the sun don’t rise.
Is there any software to make this easier? Especially something that would find dead links?
At times I’ve been tempted to say screw it and delete the bookmarks file and start fresh.
In my version of Firefox (and I don’t believe I installed or set anything to be this way), you can show your bookmarks in a sidebar, with View, Sidebar, Bookmarks (or Ctl-B). At the top of the sidebar, there is a “search panel”. If you type some letters in this space, only those bookmarks which contain that string will remain. This should facilitate searching. Also you can create folders and directly drag your book marks into those folders to organize them.
By “manage”, do you mean synchronize between IE and Firefox? If so, something like Xmarks might work. It’s an addon you install to each browser you want to keep in sync.
As for finding them, do what OldGuy said or even just start typing the name into Firefox’s address bar (in version 3 and later). It’ll search automatically through your bookmarks that way.
Bookmarks are searchable in Chrome. Just switch, you’ll be happy you did.
Plus there are tons of bookmark-managing extensions (and I’m sure plug-ins for Firefox, but I’m more of a Chrome fanboy) if you want additional functionality.
What I’m looking for mostly is organization. Tags are what comes to mind. Or being able to see a folder tree. Where you can graph and prune by moving the branches around. That’s really the only easy way to manage folders.
Again, Firefox’s built-in bookmarks manager can assign/search by tags, lets you select and move multiple bookmarks at a time, and lets you see the tree structure on the left. Am I missing something?
ETA: And the CheckPlaces FF addon can scan for duplicates and dead links.
After you’ve tagged your bookmarks, keep in mind that you can just start typing the tag into Firefox’s address bar to see a list of matching bookmarks. Like typing “shopping” would show you a drop-down list of all your bookmarks tagged as such.
Sometimes it’s easier to just use Google instead of a huge bookmarks list In Firefox, if you type in a website name in the address bar and nothing matches your bookmarks or history, it’ll automatically do a Google search and take you right to the first result. “amazon” would take you to amazon.com, for example, and “wsj” would take you to the Wall Street Journal. Guess where “sdmb” takes ya?
I’ve always used folders and put them on the bookmarks toolbar right under the address bar. To create a bookmark, I drag the link to whichever folder I want it in so every bookmark is already sorted when I create it.
In Firefox, if you type in a website name in the address bar and nothing matches your bookmarks or history, it’ll automatically do a Google search and take you right to the first result. “amazon” would take you to 