> For the last two years, the Firefox Sync team has been hard at work improving bookmarks on all our platforms
If they only would improve the actual bookmark manager. It's been a thorn in my eyes for quite some time now.
- you can't find duplicates
- it takes 0.5-3sec/bookmark to delete bookmarks (on my devices at least)
- you can't cut found bookmarks out of a search (it copies it)
- the bookmark search sucks
And there are multiple other minor annoyances that bug me or features I would wish for (searchable offline bookmarks anyone? [I know that's going more in the direction search engine, but it sure as hell would be nice])
I'm kind of a horder when it comes to open tabs and bookmarks, so it is a pain in the butt to manage those. Last time I cleaned all my bookmarks I exported them and managed them with buku[0]. "Lost" my directory structure through this but it was worth it.
For me, amongst other things, there's no easy way to e.g. share a folder of useful bookmarklets.
Or, more generally, perhaps e.g. sharing a folder of bookmarks pertaining to a research project.
Lame.
P.S. Two decades ago, Kaylon's Powermarks was -- and remains -- the best bookmark manager I ever ran across. Third party app that was cross-browser and integrated itself via interfaces that gradually got killed off.
Lightning fast, handling thousands of bookmarks, with pretty good automatic, override-able tagging that fed a very effective search facility producing immediate, progressive results as one continued to type their query string.
Pretty much, you could just bookmark something, then find it a week or a month or more later with a couple of seconds' thinking and typing. Even if you had a then somewhat vague notion or memory, you usually immediately found what you half-remembered.
Yeah, I'm now remembering a handful of really frustrating sessions of pouring over my history looking for a now-important resource I didn't bookmark, triple-checking and etc... and it may have not been there in the first place? That's awful.
While I recognize not everyone liked it, I really enjoyed Chrome Bookmark Manager extension[1]. It made it a lot easier for me to sift through my hoarded bookmarks. I switched to Firefox after Quantum because it was noticeably faster, and this style of bookmark management is something I miss from Chrome. I haven't found a Firefox alternative yet.
I once accidentally deleted some of my bookmarks because I thought I had disabled sync (which I hadn't). To my surprise, I found out that Firefox maintains a (local) bookmarks history, so I was able to fully restore them. This was really a lifesaver.
While I've never experienced conflict issues with bookmark sync, one pet peeve of mine is how their sync implementation has never supported syncing search engines.
I mean proper OpenSearch support, different from using keyboard bookmarks with %s as a hack, since you actually get proper autocomplete.
In fact that whole situation there is just a mess, no proper way to use sites that implemented OpenSearch from the awesomebar like the Tab to search in chrome's omnibar.
Historically this has been a little tricky to add due to some peculiarities with addons. That shouldn’t be an issue anymore, although I don’t think anybody’s jumping at implementing the bug, presumably since it seems like it will require walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting search contracts (for example, it becomes tricky when you consider that search contracts are by location but users could have devices in multiple locations. There are several other headaches around this too).
We do sync bookmark keywords FWIW, which can be used as a sort of search, but it’s a bit indiscoverable and not the same as syncing settings like your default search engine.
Wow, I didn't know that they just shut down this month. I definitely still have the add-on installed in all my browsers, and thought it was still syncing...
Using this post to ask a question about bookmarks sync: does anyone have found a way to periodically sync bookmarks from Firefox/Chrome with Safari?
I use Safari on iOS for obvious reasons and the inability to export the bookmarks I have on my Mac browser to Safari is really annoying. Fun fact: if you have a Windows computer you can do it https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203519
I really hope they improve also tab sync - for some reason it usually doesn't work (or better yet it works but I see tabs from months ago, which is quite useless)
This is literally what switched me back to Chrome on Android. When I want to continue browsing from another device, Chrome is always up to date. With Firefox, they were always at least a few hours out of date, and often up to days. And either there was no way to manually refresh, or it didn't work... can't remember.
This is a feature I use mainly when I've just left my computer but need to continue reading, so the list being up to date is paramount. In a few hours, I'll have moved on or gone back to my desktop.
It shouldn’t unless your device is unable to sync for some reason. You may have error logs in one of your firefoxes at about:sync-log. Either way it’s probably worth either filing a bug or asking in #sync in mozilla IRC.
If you mean your own firefox sync then here you go [0] if you mean an actual cross device, cross browser sync then you probably need to write something yourself. It seems like a need for something like this does exist [1]. Maybe a simple sync server and a cross browser plugin? Anyway have a nice day :)
> Thanks to the magic of complex distributed systems, corruption also isn’t stable: inconsistent data can become eventually consistent, and much of Sync relies on this property to work.
Oh boy. The whole article reads like a lesson in over engineering and trying to find the most complex solution. "But it's a really hard problem." - yeah, every problem can be framed in an arbitrarily hard context if you need to supply a group of people with work and resume-includable buzzwords.
Seems more like they used an existing solution that was not quite up to the task. Also had the handicap of not being able to rely on the server due to client-side encryption.
[+] [-] BlackLotus89|7 years ago|reply
If they only would improve the actual bookmark manager. It's been a thorn in my eyes for quite some time now.
- you can't find duplicates
- it takes 0.5-3sec/bookmark to delete bookmarks (on my devices at least)
- you can't cut found bookmarks out of a search (it copies it)
- the bookmark search sucks
And there are multiple other minor annoyances that bug me or features I would wish for (searchable offline bookmarks anyone? [I know that's going more in the direction search engine, but it sure as hell would be nice])
I'm kind of a horder when it comes to open tabs and bookmarks, so it is a pain in the butt to manage those. Last time I cleaned all my bookmarks I exported them and managed them with buku[0]. "Lost" my directory structure through this but it was worth it.
[0] https://github.com/jarun/Buku
[+] [-] pasbesoin|7 years ago|reply
For me, amongst other things, there's no easy way to e.g. share a folder of useful bookmarklets.
Or, more generally, perhaps e.g. sharing a folder of bookmarks pertaining to a research project.
Lame.
P.S. Two decades ago, Kaylon's Powermarks was -- and remains -- the best bookmark manager I ever ran across. Third party app that was cross-browser and integrated itself via interfaces that gradually got killed off.
Lightning fast, handling thousands of bookmarks, with pretty good automatic, override-able tagging that fed a very effective search facility producing immediate, progressive results as one continued to type their query string.
Pretty much, you could just bookmark something, then find it a week or a month or more later with a couple of seconds' thinking and typing. Even if you had a then somewhat vague notion or memory, you usually immediately found what you half-remembered.
[+] [-] Brakenshire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sloxy|7 years ago|reply
My opinion is it's not okay. Why would it be?
[+] [-] gilrain|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/g...
[+] [-] blauditore|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joaomsa|7 years ago|reply
I mean proper OpenSearch support, different from using keyboard bookmarks with %s as a hack, since you actually get proper autocomplete.
In fact that whole situation there is just a mess, no proper way to use sites that implemented OpenSearch from the awesomebar like the Tab to search in chrome's omnibar.
[+] [-] yoklov|7 years ago|reply
We do sync bookmark keywords FWIW, which can be used as a sort of search, but it’s a bit indiscoverable and not the same as syncing settings like your default search engine.
(I work on firefox sync)
[+] [-] gadders|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmarks_Sync
[+] [-] hartz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArmandGrillet|7 years ago|reply
I use Safari on iOS for obvious reasons and the inability to export the bookmarks I have on my Mac browser to Safari is really annoying. Fun fact: if you have a Windows computer you can do it https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203519
[+] [-] josteink|7 years ago|reply
What obvious reasons? Why not just use Firefox for iOS instead?
[+] [-] ktosobcy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilrain|7 years ago|reply
This is a feature I use mainly when I've just left my computer but need to continue reading, so the list being up to date is paramount. In a few hours, I'll have moved on or gone back to my desktop.
[+] [-] yoklov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcooks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackLotus89|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17072977
[+] [-] stevekemp|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public
[+] [-] _pmf_|7 years ago|reply
Oh boy. The whole article reads like a lesson in over engineering and trying to find the most complex solution. "But it's a really hard problem." - yeah, every problem can be framed in an arbitrarily hard context if you need to supply a group of people with work and resume-includable buzzwords.
[+] [-] nikbackm|7 years ago|reply