Advanced bookmarking, tagging enters Firefox 3
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.
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.
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August 18th, 2007 at 2:52 am
OH CANT wait ;)
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August 18th, 2007 at 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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August 18th, 2007 at 3:32 am
Very nice! Keep us updated! I know you will ;)
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August 18th, 2007 at 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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August 18th, 2007 at 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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August 18th, 2007 at 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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August 19th, 2007 at 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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August 19th, 2007 at 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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November 2nd, 2007 at 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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February 20th, 2008 at 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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