Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.

For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years. Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I'm searching that brings back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)

My collection is at least 9 years old now. I've been maintaining the same Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to version. Now it's seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases when I prefer to use Chrome.

View on HN

> From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.

In case people are not aware of this, prepending a * to your query will make Firefox search _only_ in your bookmarks:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.match.url

https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Basic-Browsing/Awesome-Bar-Se...

I used to meticulously organize my Firefox bookmarks into different folders and subfolders. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine showed me the Tab groups features (since then deprecated, but lives on as an extension), and I don't think I have bookmarked a site since then. I disable loading until click, and the browser shows me the entire set of groups if I close it and reopen it.

Good news! Our way of life will end in November!

http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html

For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears.

Same here. Sometimes you find something really useful but you forget to bookmark (or in my case: add to pinboard). Then a few days later I realize and after a couple of minutes googling to no effect I start typing the parts I remember and FF narrows down until I find it. It also let me search for stuff that google at least until recently would ignore.

Infact, we have a similar tool in Chrome as well.. One that searches across your bookmarked and open tabs of the browser. Its truly useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein...

Firefox's bookmarks are _mostly_ great. I keep running into an issue when re/naming folders, though. I'll type a few letters and the dialog will close. So, if I was intending to type "a very interesting topic", I'll wind up with something like "a very int". This has been happening for years and I should really submit a bug report...

Might be https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697649, or something linked from there.

Yeah, that looks to be it. Thanks for digging this up!

Hey done the same with my Fx profile/database too, keep migrating it from quite some time ago, manually backed-up from time to time

Recently used the bookmark-keyword thingy, pretty good BUT I'm still used to remembering URLs :p

Heck, one of the reason I'm not migrating to Chrome is... Bookmark shortcut key [alt]+[b] combined with js bookmarklet

e.g: remove floating div, press [alt]+[b] -> [3] done

I've been running Fx sync ver 1.1 (EoL fall 2015) @home for almost 5 years now on a tiny vm but have not taken the time to move over to 1.5. This requires (since Fx version 32-ish maybe) to keep old installers (ver 28 is the furthest back I go) around for any platform if I re-image or add a machine I want to carry my bookmarks to and then upgrade to latest once sync is complete. iOS _used_ to work but that was the first platform to completely bail on the older sync

This is probably the absolute worst way to handle bookmarking but as long as sync ver 1.1 is still functional I will probably keep doing it, sadly. I've at least given up sorting with folders and labels and just rely on the search in Fx.

You should really take the time to set up 1.5, or just use Mozilla's hosted sync service. You're probably burning more time schlepping installers around and doing upgrades… not to mention the Sync 1.1 server code is ancient, so the infra you're running it on is probably riddled with vulnerabilities.

Safari does this really good, as well (your point about checking bookmarks against what you type in the address bar). It also pulls history, and it's very fast (no doubt due to Spotlight).

This. I use Firefox bookmarks as an auto suggestion resource , too. Very very handy.

It is, and it is great. Until an update a few months ago wiped everything out.

I have no idea what happened, it just forgot all my history. Everything else was still there, just the history.

Try Bubblehunt (https://bubblehunt.com) - search platform where you can create own search system for your bookmarks, interesting resources and get results from other people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com