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
Auto-guess the URL with given keywords input. Try to match with the user-keywords, title, meta-keywords within the URLs in "Places"
- Display a "Title + suggested URL" list for keywords typed in
- Goes to the most frequently visited / latest related URL when user press "Go" button (Act like a local version of Google "I'm Feeling Lucky".)

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toggle to indicate that site in bookmark no longer active (detect 404)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.
Opening a bookmark by typing the name of the bookmark inside location bar.
Allow hardlinks and softlinks for bookmarks and bookmark folders
Create/display folder structure from specified tags

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 (Like Opera).
save bookmarks online and other user browser settings, this would be very handy during a crash to be able to retrieve boobkmarks and settings via online.
Generate a html interface for searching bookmarks. And provide an easy integration of delicious-like web-shop

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
X button to clear the search

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.
Graphical Microsummaries could be extended to allow not just microsummary data, but arbitrary graphics from the page provider.
'Piles' or Areas - Alternative 2-D display option to group bookmarks in loose fields by tags and manual placement. This would be a more user customized format like icons on a desktop.
Slim separators that take less space

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

Order bookmarks by how frequently (or recently) they have been accessed
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
Allow multiple bookmark toolbars (visible bookmarks placed in 2 or more rows)

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.
In the "Add Bookmark" child window, make the "Show all the bookmarks folders" toggle button default to "1"

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

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.
Give an option to reload all feeds and show in bold feeds that have fresh content. (Similar to Sage extension)
Allow custom icons for items within live bookmarks - this would require an additional element in the RSS feed. Could be used to denote different categories of items within a 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.

Easy to Hide/Show Bookmark Toolbar

A single button (maybe to the right of the search box) that toggles the Bookmark Toolbar hidden or shown, for those who use bookmarks semi-frequently but would like to free up the space most of the time.

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.
When setting your homepage in Firefox you can separate multiple urls with | characters and this allows all of the urls to open in separate tabs. It would be really sweet if I could set urls of bookmarks in the same way. One click on a bookmark could open multiple tabs.
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
Allow to share (export/send/import?) in-page bookmarks.
Is it possible to make the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" optional, so that those who do not want it can disable it, and the others can enable it ? Thank you very much in advance.

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...
Allow drag and drop of bookmarks and bookmark-folders e.g. to send them by e-mail attachment

Internet Explorer Bookmark Integration

IE bookmarks are stored as .url files in a 'Favorites' folder and its sub-folders within the file system
For users who have to use both browsers mutual import is not an option
Integration could be quite simple. It is almost there:
- In Firefox 2 you can make the Favorites folder appear in you personal toolbar. It shows the folder hierarchy and all bookmarks!
- Unfortunately it won't open .url files when clicked (even though you can drag them in from the file system)
- To create boomarks you can't drag & drop an URL from URL field into this folder (though the dropdown is opened if you drag the bookmark over it). However, Firefox can already create .url files when dropping them elsewhere in the file system.
- So all necessary functionality for a decent IE favorites integration appears to be there already. It's just details that prevent it from working.

Bookmark data mining

Investigate the concept of bookmark data mining

Various

Functionality of "Add Bookmark Here" extension, by Daniel Lindkvist, should be added as core functionality of Firefox 3. It streamlines the process of adding Bookmarks to submenus enormously.
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".
Add button for "Bookmark This Page..." to bookmarks sidebar.
Add ability to "lock" the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder to the top of the bookmarks sidebar, allowing for a much greater number of always-visible bookmarks than on the Bookmarks Toolbar.
autohide Bookmarks bar category in Bookmarks menu when the bar is empty/hidden (when you don't display the bar having it pollute the menu is ANNOYING)

Extend %s Hack

The %s hack, also known as smart keyword, provides a tremendous degree of freedom for customization and is extremly powerful. To make it even more flexible it should be extended to three cases: keyword only = replace %s with an empty string, keyword plus option = replace %s with option string, and keyword only but marked text in the website = replace %s with marked text (the option string should have a higher priority than marked text). This would extent all the wonderful search options to the text within the website so that copy and paste can be avoided.

Smart Bookmark Folders

A bookmark folder which is dynamically constructed from a larger pool of bookmarks based on a set of requirements. This would work similarly to e.g., a Smart Playlist on iTunes.

With newer versions of sqlite, there is the addition of full-text search, which could be tremendously useful for creating smart bookmark folder. For example, a 'Cheese' folder could contain all bookmarks which contain 'cheese' in the title, description, or url.

There would be some UI to create and edit the folder.

Improved Page/Bookmark Icon Handling

Currently the icon associated with each page is inconsistent. The icon is displayed in the tab, location bar, quick bookmarks, and full bookmark list, but updating and association of these icons with the bookmark entries isn't always immediate and is not at all customizable.

I don't know how the internals of that update or icon association work, but perhaps some sort of manual "Update Icon" button on the bookmark's properties page would be useful as well as the ability to choose your own icon that would be associated with that page in every area which it would be displayed.

Reintroduction of a Necessary feature

I don't know where to put this so I hope its ok that I put it here!

why can't you use Alt-Enter to access the properties of a bookmark?
I really like Firefox but I find that it is missing one key feature for me to transition from Mozilla 1.7.12 to Firefox 1.5.0.7, that is the lack of the same Mozilla "Bookmark This Group of Tabs" feature in Firefox. Now I know that Firefox has a "Bookmark All Tabs..." option but unlike Mozilla it creates a folder just like any other and has an option to "open in tabs" at the bottom of the folder. I can see why they did this and it would be nice to be able to enter a bookmark group to access only one tab... Yet it is something that is really rarely needed and could be done by hovering over the tab group for a short while. Now this might seam like a minor gripe considering all the other positives Firefox has over Mozilla, Yet I am truly addicted to the bookmark group in Mozilla and there are a few main reasons behind this:
- it looks different than the other folders and is easy to distinguish
- one simple click on the bookmark group to open it
- The "Bookmark This Group of Tabs" defaults to show you the file tree (for lack of a better term) giving you a quicker way to save the bookmark group.
Now I have been unable to find any extention that would allow me to use the same Mozilla bookmark group functions inside of Firefox. Is it possable that this could be included? Pretty please!

I REALLY would LOVE a solution to this Please help.... Thanks! -- UKPhoenix79 00:33, 3 November 2006 (PST)

Save Session As...

I would find it useful to save my session in order to preserve the websites I have open (in tabs and in windows), ready for when I want to access them all again at a later date.

At this point in time, I have about 25 tabs open. I can't quit Firefox, as I don't want to lose them all. I don't want to bookmark them either, as I won't require them forever. But for the next month or so, I'd like to be able to load them all, change them and save them as a session - like when Firefox crashes and allows me to "restore" my session, well, I'd like to save it (saving it as a session file, of which I can create as many as I like).

(almost) Instant Access Bookmarks

The Problem:

If you've been on the Net as long as I have -- since its beginning -- you tend to have several hundred (thousand?) bookmarks. Many are mercilessly nested just to keep things semi-organized. However, a problem with that is that when I want to view or access several bookmarks in a given folder -- for example, Nokia cell phone games -- I may have to access 5 or more nest levels. For example, Electronics - Software - Cell phones - Nokia - Symbian - Games.

Which is fine. But if I have to go *back* to the *same* folder to find something else, I need to jump through all the hoops again. And when you have a ton of bookmarks & folders, just scrolling through them to get to a specific one -- and then scrolling again once inside THAT folder -- could take say 10-20 seconds each time. Which adds up.

Solutions?

How about, at or near the very top of the bookmarks list -- as soon as you click the bookmarks button -- is a list of the last 5 viewed bookmarks? (The number could be customized, of course.) Or at least a folder called "recently viewed bookmark folders." Click on the folder, and up pops the last 20 recently viewed bookmark folders.

The history button takes you back to where you've been. This solution is to allow you quick access to places *related* to where you've been.

Plus, I bet most people, when accessing multiple bookmarks in a session, are likely accessing similar bookmarks from the same folder.

Thanks and keep up the FANTASTIC work!!!