Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Bookmarks

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

Live Bookmarks Menu To Allow Multiple Selections

• The Live bookmarks menu should allow the user to select multiple items to be opened in tabs - at present the user can only choose one at a time or "Open all in tabs".

This could be enabled by either:

• • Clicking multiple items with the Control key held down.
  • A "Pin Menu" Option when opening Live Bookmarks from the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder". You click the Pin to stop the Menu Closing on first click. Click the Pin again to close the menu.

Opening bookmarks

• Option to open bookmarks in same tab, new tab, or new window
• When opening folder of bookmark, do NOT close existing tabs.
• Option to open bookmark and at the same time search for a string on the site maybe with highliting

Bookmark aliases

• Bookmark aliases, like in Netscape 4 and Galeon
  • Ability to make an alias, or symlink, to a bookmark. Since there is really one bookmark, a change to the bookmark or an alias will affect all entries.
  • This should aid portability of bookmarks with web browsers that do support aliases.

Integration with Location bar

• Autocomplete typed URL's by performing a lookup of Bookmarks.
  • After the bookmark keywords is typed, suggest autocomplete options based on the previous values of %s

Bookmark manager

• Bookmark thumbnails. Ability to view thumbnails of bookmarked pages. Size of thumbnails should be customizable. Thumbnails can be "live" updated.
• Autodetect duplicates
  • ... but do not auto-erase them
• Validate Bookmarks on demand (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171467)
• Bookmark manager assistance/validation/cleanup
• Frequently visited links automarking
• Favicon management
• Smart bookmark folders
• Saved searches as smart bookmark folders
• Bayesian training/pruning
• Sort by tag
• Sort by date added
• Sort by date last used
• Sort by frequency of visit
• toggle to indicate that site in bookmark no longer active (detect 404)
• Allow deleting Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.
• Add a property "Shortcut" for every bookmark; if the user types that string in the address bar, the browser will open that bookmark
• Add a option to hide Bookmarks that you haven't clicked on for more the 30, 60 or 120 days
• Add a command to archive unused bookmarks into an "archived_bookmarks.html"
• Ability to change the location of the bookmark file.
• Ability to export single bookmark-folders instead of the whole list.

Searching/Browsing bookmarks

• Ability to search by any field in bookmarks
• Allow users to add custom fields to bookmarks
• Add "Bookmarks" as an option in the Search engine with active list displayed below Search engine window to allow selection.
• Relevance based filtering
• Allow user to search bookmarked pages via a search engine, eg Google, so that the search performed will be for the bookmark('s/s') domain(s).
• Display folder hierarchy when displaying results of bookmark search in sidebar and also include folder names in search.
• When searching for a bookmark in the Bookmarks sidebar it should be possible to also see the location (bookmark folder) of the bookmark, possibly the url, description, ... That would make it easier to remove duplicate bookmarks.

Bookmark tags and keywords

• Tagging and tag cloud display
• Category suggest for bookmarks via social web service
• Virtual bookmark autofile view based upon most likely suggestions from a social web service
• Make it easier to directly add a keyword when saving bookmarks (i.e. you should see a keyword field when you press ctrl+D to bookmark a page)
• Auto-linking/smart tagging
• Bayesian training
• Bookmark filters - i.e. pages from domain X go in folder/tag Y, pages with FOO in the title go in folder/tag BAR

Bookmark display

• Integrated html presentation of the bookmarks using something like about:bookmarks for instance. Bookmarked pages thumbnails optionally displayed. Thumbnails created during "bookmark this page" action and saved locally for fast access.
• Visually emphasize favorite bookmarks within a folder on the bookmark toolbar
• Ease selection of favorite, most frequently visited bookmarks by displaying them in a larger font and/or with a larger icon than less regularly loaded bookmarks
• Have the ability to use custom favicons/icons on bookmark folders added to the 'Bookmarks Toolbar Folder' instead of the default yellow folder.
• Ability to define a DIV element by a page author, saved together with a bookmark, displayed as a bookmark sub-menu or as additional item on the about:bookmarks list, f.e. used to store the most important links of the bookmarked page or site.

Remote/Syncable bookmarks

• Unlimited-capacity remote bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere
• Remote bookmarks
• Syncing bookmarks
• Allow synchronisation of sub-trees between two machines (e.g I want to synchronise my HTML bookmarks, between home and work, but not my banking or "friends" bookmarks.

Address book integration

• Integration with address book. When contact has URL specified, it should be put into special bookmark folder automatically.

Bookmark menu improvements

• When clicking "Bookmarks" and all the bookmarks drop down (Bookmark This Page..., Bookmark All Tabs..., Manage Bookmarks...) should remain fixed and not scroll with the rest of the bookmarks.
• When deleting a bookmark from the bookmark menu (using the right click), bookmark menu should remain open, not close immediately.
• Add option to rename bookmarks directly from the menu itself, not necessarily by going through the bookmark manager.
• After using middle mouse button to open bookmark, bookmark list remains open to allow opening of other bookmarks.
• If you delete a bookmark (by right-clicking the bookmark and clicking "Delete") it should be nice if the folder stayed opened so you can delete more bookmarks without having to navigate to the same folder each time. The same would be handy for opening a bookmark by right-clicking it and selecting "Open in New Tab" (and maybe for some of the other actions from the context menu too).
• At the moment, if the name of the bookmark is too long to fit in the box, only a part of the name is shown (ending in "..."). It should be nice if more info about the bookmark would be displayed when hovering over the bookmark: its full name, maybe even the location (url of the page), its description, ... At the moment if two bookmarks have the same name or if the visible part of their names is the same there is no easy way to know the difference between them (apart from going to the bookmark manager or opening both links).
• Display Separator text in Bookmark menu, if set.
  • Firefox allows setting a Name(via Property) for a Separator. Bookmarks in the menu does not display this text, but just Separator.
  • Display Text with Separator in Bookmark Menu, if set, like in Bookmark manager. e.g. "-- News ------" instead of "------------"
  • allow user to disable the text display, via a checkbox.
  • allow user to right-click on Separator in Bookmark menu, to set/update property value.

Dynamic Firefox Bookmark Menu

• Allow "organizing bookmarks" functionality from firefox without opening Bookmarks Manager
• Allow drag-and-drop to move bookmarks, folders, separators around in bookmarks menu
• Allow right click to cut/copy/paste or delete bookmarks in bookmark menu
• Allow right click to make new folder or separator

References

• User:Auk/Bookmarks#Menu

Web service integration

• Provide API for social bookmarking sites.
  • e.g. provide bookmark-tagging API for Firefox extensions
• Online bookmarks. Users can save bookmarks to bookmark services like google bookmark. There are firefox add-ons that do similar job, but they are not reliable and secure enough since user account information could be disclosed.

Bookmarking Pages

• Ctrl+D should bookmark a page directly. The "Add Bookmark" dialogue/option box should be restricted to clicking on the Bookmarks menu and then choosing "Bookmark This Page" (this would imply that Ctrl+D and "Bookmark This Page" be separated).
• When creating a bookmark by drag and drop, firefox should pop a dialog so you can shorten most pages incredibly verbose titles to something you want to see in your bookmark list.
• Timed bookmarks. The ability to set an experation on a bookmark that automatically deletes it. Many times I want to bookmark an article to read later but if I forget to read it, I don't want it cluttering up my bookmarks.
• When dragging a page (link) to a bookmark folder (to bookmark the page using drag-and-drop), if there are too many bookmarks in the folder to show them all at once, the list should scroll up/down when you hover over the little up/down arrows respectively. At the moment you have to first scroll up/down to the location in the list where you want to add the bookmark and then drag it to the folder.

Bookmarking Tabs

• When using "Bookmark All Tabs..." it should let you choose an existing folder if you want instead of always creating a new one
• In the "Add Bookmark" child window, make the "Show all the bookmarks folders" toggle button default to "1"

Live Bookmarks

• Allow live bookmarks to be turned off and on.
• Use tooltips to show the content of the <description> attribute from rss/atom elements.
• Remember visited elements from live bookmarks across sessions and updates (see infoRSS or Sage extension).
• Let live bookmarks expand in a tool tip like way to view whole title
• Let live bookmarks expand in a tool tip like way to view the associated text (usually the article's first paragraph) in the RSS feed.

Page change notifications

• A simple bookmark subscription function like was available on IE 4 where the browser scans for changes to bookmarked sites and presents a separate list marking ones have changed.

Allowing bookmarks in other parts of browser chrome

• On my system, 70% of the space on Firefox's menu bar is unused. I want to be able to make use of that wasted space by unnesting some of my deep hierarchy of bookmarks into it. Ideally this would be done by allowing the user to customize multiple top-level bookmark menus perhaps at the right side of the bar. For management purposes, bookmarks should still be presented as a single hierarchy.
• Let individual bookmarks live on the status and menu bars, and provide UI for putting them there (f.e. support for dragging and dropping bookmarks from the bookmarks sidebar and the bookmarks toolbar to the status and menu bars)
• Let bookmarks be accessible from the right click menu without the need to navigate to the bookmark item in the toolbar. Ie Right click anywhere on a page and submenu for bookmarks opens.

Bookmark toolbars

• The bookmark toolbar should be made flexible to be able to show as multiple rows. With the current widescreen and increasing monitor sizes, we have plenty of space on right and left side of the webpages showing blank. I would like to use them to see the live bookmarks readily.
• Multiple (nameable) bookmark toolbars that can be flipped between easily
• Bookmark dock
  • A "bookmark dock" is conceptualized as a bookmark toolbar that allows a user to specify icons instead of text, and that could optionally be placed at the top, left, right, or bottom of the browser window.
• Bookmark bar which allows to span multiple rows (to provide more one-click-to-go shortcuts)
• Allow for the size of text displayed on toolbar to be user-editable, so more bookmarks can fit onto the bookmarks toolbar
• Allow bookmark toolbar items' text to be replaced by icons
• Allow assigning an icon as in the first Firefox versions (especially useful for websites that do not show an icon).

In-page bookmarking

• Easily-accessible, actual book-style bookmarks for long documents, where you can:
  • Preserve your position in the page
  • Move, rather than create new/delete old, the bookmark. This is useful when reading through e.g. the archives of an on-line comic, an e-book, or catching up after vacation on a blog like slashdot,
• Allow to put a tag on whatever place of a web page, like a gg map interface. The tag is remembered on the right side bar of the window, can be bookmarked. when the bokkmark is clicked, the window is open and focus down to the bookmark

Auto-archive bookmarked pages

• Allow the user to store the full text and images of bookmarked pages, just in case they go away (see discussion about archiving in "History" section)

Bookmark state

• Allow to bookmark form content (may be a security problem ?)
  • Make it easy to use multiple accounts on a site (typically a webmailer, like Yahoo Mail or Gmail), with multiple bookmarks
  • Unfortunately, easy to use for massive spam, in forums for example

Bookmarks backend

• Flexible bookmarks API
• Smarter handling of bookmarking redirects
• Ability to bookmark a POST response

Microsummaries

• Rich-text (i.e. HTML) microsummary bookmarks
• Graphical Microsummaries
• Live titles extracted from feeds
• Allow customized update intervals, global enabling/disabling
• Allow alerts for changes, open automatically in new window/tab, export to xml for RSS reader
• Half-periodic: Start every day/weekday/week/month (now number of this) and check until microsummary changes all xx minutes
• Improve installation and management of microsummary generators
• Allow firefox to create its own microsummaries (bug 356440)

References

• Customizable Microsummaries

Bookmark Import/Export

• Allow easy export/ import of a set of bookmarks, or a subfolder (or sub-tree) of bookmarks.
• Import favorites from IE, Opera, AOL, Netscape, Avant, Konqueror...
  • Partially implemented already, see File→Import...

Bookmark data mining

• Investigate the concept of bookmark data mining

Various

• Preserving DOM state
• Allow multiple keyword placeholders (%s1, %s2, ... instead of just %s) in bookmark URL's.
  • Not instead; there should still be an option to use the whole line as %s
• Allow to define charset in bookmark details window in order to allow keyword placeholders (like %s) to work with special characters and umlauts.
• Startup page : Add an option to randomly select startup page within bookmarks
• Startup page : In conjunction with Bookmarks Timestamps, add an option letting Firefox autoselect oldest-viewed bookmark
• Allow most frequently used bookmarks to "float" to the top.
• Measure sub-pages view time of a bookmarked page. Display top n, most viewed sub-pages as a bookmark sub-menu.
• Contextual bookmark bar : Change the bookmark bar links according with the current website. Allowing the user to create a bookmark bar "by page".

References

• On Tagging
• Online Bookmarks
• On "On Tagging"
• User:Auk/Bookmarks
• Provide in-page content-highlighting and saving page-state while bookmarking

• bug 195031
• bug 261744
• bug 220049
• bug 326896
• bug 253912