Advanced bookmarking, tagging enters Firefox 3
Posted by Percy Cabello on August 18th, 2007 • Tags:
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Following the great amount of work put on building the infrastructure for Places, Firefox’s new integrated bookmarks and history manager, Mozilla developers have started adding the necessary user interface to make it accessible in the latest development releases.

First in queue is the new star task. To understand the star concept is must be noted that what used to be a single bookmarks collection is now actually three. First, we have the Bookmarks Menu, accessible through Firefox’s main menu just like in Firefox 2. Then there’s the Bookmarks Toolbar, the special folder in the current bookmarks system is now a separate store not accessible from the Bookmarks Menu. And finally there’s a general storage that can be thought as a single folder where all bookmarked pages go by default.

The new interface consists of a gray star added to the location bar. Click once and the page is starred or bookmarked to the general storage. The gray star turns yellow to let you know it’s already bookmarked.

Click it again and you can extend the bookmark properties optionally saving it a folder in the bookmarks menu or toolbar, and, another Firefox 3 novelty, define tags for the page. Tags are entered freely typing them separated by commas. Created tags are saved and can be reused in other bookmarks just checking them from a list.

Places: Star

The interface works and does it very unobtrusively. It seems those very long discussions in the past months have paid off and developers have been able to deliver a powerful yet simple interface. Some eye candy wouldn’t hurt though and it should get its turn soon as well.

What’s next? Using those tags and other organization. We will be able to sort and browse bookmarks (and history) by tags and other criteria including most recently bookmarked or visited, most visited and others.

Comments
Marcin Górny said on August 18, 2007, 2:52 am:

OH CANT wait ;)

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Jilles van Gurp said on August 18, 2007, 3:07 am:

Does it allow for integration of social bookmarking sites? Basically I don’t use the bookmarking feature at all since I started using del.icio.us

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David said on August 18, 2007, 3:32 am:

Very nice! Keep us updated! I know you will ;)

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Percy Cabello said on August 18, 2007, 9:38 am:

Thanks David.

Jiles, according to the requirements document it will provide the hooks for integrating with social bookmarking services. Mozilla has no plans to provide the service itself and most likely it will depend on whether providers including del.icio.us, Foxmarks, Google, amazon, etc. are ready to hook up when FF3 is released.

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Tom said on August 18, 2007, 12:53 pm:

I have Minefield “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007081505 Minefield/3.0a8pre” and I don’t see it. Why ?

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Percy Cabello said on August 18, 2007, 4:48 pm:

Tom, you need a nightly from August 17 or later. There is a problem with partial updates right now and you will need to get a full install to try it.

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Nikola Kocić said on August 19, 2007, 6:11 am:

>Click once and the page is starred or
>bookmarked to the general storage.

I don’t understand this part – what is general storage and how can I access it?

I also noticed that if I chose “Bookmark this tab”, menu opens in top-left corner of tab-bar instead of where star is or in tabs position.

Other than that, good work.

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Percy Cabello said on August 19, 2007, 8:14 am:

Nikola, it will only be accessible via the Bookmarks Manager (or Places Manager or whatever it gets renamed), according to the latest discussions.

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[...] Advanced bookmarking, tagging enters Firefox 3 : Mozilla Links [...]

[...] 3, or Gran Paradiso, is really shaping up with some pretty cool new features being implemented in the recent months. That’s not including the cool FUEL [...]

Firefox 3 Bookmark Tagging Demo - CyberNet News said on August 20, 2007, 11:07 am:

[...] Mozilla Links & Firefox Builds ForumThanks for the tip [...]

[...] 3, or Gran Paradiso, is really shaping up with some pretty cool new features being implemented in the recent months. That’s not including the cool FUEL (Firefox [...]

Susie Day said on November 2, 2007, 4:05 pm:

Now what i want to see is nested tags!

When you have thousands of bookmarks, covering a multitude of topics, you need to parcel them out a little. If tags could be grouped together somehow underneath a parent tag, then tagging would become more like a very fluid folder system where one file/tag could be in more than one group/folder. :-)

I can’t use anything but the standard bookmark system right now because of this, and I’ve tried delicious and google bookmarks before.

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flav replied on June 22nd, 2008, 10:46 am:

you can have “fluid folders” via tags with TagSifter

Franky said on February 20, 2008, 1:34 am:

Neat features for a browser but I think bookmarking sites are made for bookmarking.

I personally like:
del.icio.us for research
quickieclick.com for my favorites
digg.com and now mixx.com for articles

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Pat said on June 22, 2008, 5:37 pm:

The new bookmarks process is an unfriendly user nightmare. If it ain’t broke, don’t go fix’n it.

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