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Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#441

Post by David_R »

Mac users...take a look at URL Manager Pro.

Macintosh-only stand-alone local database for URLs; Costs $25; url-manager.com. I've been using it for years...have 10s of thousands of bookmarks...it's where I keep all my research...has saved me many times. All data in one local file (or Dropbox)...easily portable; no annual fee.

Click on the icon in the menu bar to save the current web page Title and URL; optional field for Notes permits you to add keywords or large excerpts from the site or article.

Organize the database/outline by making folders/sub-folders. Fast db search;

Mac OS X app : Customizable toolbar, standard Window Menu and Fonts Panel, Font Smoothing, Sheets and Drawer Windows, Cocoa Status Item and support for Dropbox. Includes Yosemite Share extension and Spotlight importer.

Import and Export : URL Manager Pro can import from and export to Safari, Firefox, Chrome, OmniWeb, Camino, iCab, Mozilla and Netscape. It lets you 'harvest' bookmarks by importing XML (XBEL), HTML and text files for bookmarks and URLs. Export entire db or any one folder to HTML or text format.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#442

Post by wtbob »

kking50 wrote: post #27
wtbob wrote: post #25

Yes, I use them. I prefer them to any online service because they are completely under my own control. I do wish that I could securely sync them, but ever since Firefox completely broke the security of their Sync system, there's nothing I can rely on to safely sync for me. It's not a huge deal

Curious how that's a security issue? Bookmarks are just public links, so there's no problem if someone sniffs them out, right? Do you mean if a site stores cryptographic information in the url? Or is it the act of syncing with your local machine that introduces surfaces of attack on your local system?

Firefox Sync used to be protected with high-entropy keys; now it's protected by a (likely) low-entropy password. Moreover, even if one uses a high-entropy character sequence as a password, Mozilla are able to target one with malicious JavaScript and snarf that password at will.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#443

Post by wtbob »

grigory wrote: post #391
wtbob wrote: post #25

Yes, I use them. I prefer them to any online service because they are completely under my own control. I do wish that I could securely sync them, but ever since Firefox completely broke the security of their Sync system, there's nothing I can rely on to safely sync for me. It's not a huge deal

Can you expand on "Firefox completely broke security if Sync"? Do you have a specific incident in mind, or an architectural change, or..?

The old Firefox sync protocol used secure keys to encrypt user data; the new protocol uses one's Firefox account password to encrypt it. A memorable password is a low-entropy password, which means it is an insecure encryption key.

Mozilla's protocol purports not to reveal passwords to Mozilla itself, but the security of the system rests on Javascript files delivered from … Mozilla. They can, if they wish, target a user and serve him suborned Javascript which send the plaintext password back. Unlike a tampered build of Firefox itself, which might actually be noticed, this could be a one-shot attack.

Worse, not just Mozilla as an organisation can do this: it can be compelled to do so on behalf of any government which has the power to compel it (or those employees capable of targeting someone).

It's a terrible, terrible change.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#445

Post by rachkovsky »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #181

I have tons of bookmarks. Pro-tip: make a bookmark, edit the bookmark, set the title to "" . Then you have it's favicon as your site launcher. http://imgur.com/a/mVFYh sometimes I make use of the features "open all bookmarks in this folder". other times I use the bookmark to (as somebody else mentioned already) weight consideration of sites I'm interested in getting results from. aside: at hackreactor, I worked with…

Try zeerka.com if you like favicons.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#448

Post by edeion »

pmoriarty wrote: post #161
hashhar wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you like to seem improved in the bookmark manager? I'm currently working on the ability to rename the bookmarks inline in the tree instead of the input boxes on bottom in the Bookmark Manager (the one you get from Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+Shift+O).

Searching tags, bookmarks, and bookmark comments by regular expressions would be awesome. It would be nice if I could, say, rename a tag. So, for example, if I had a tag named "map", I'd like to be able to rename it to "maps" and have all bookmarks with that tag updated. Same with deleting a tag from all the bookmarks that have it. I'd like to be able to: - see a list of all my tags, in various sort orders, and be ab…

FWIW you can rename tags in Firefox: from Show all bookmarks, unroll the Tags menu in the left pane, click the bookmark you want to rename, fix the name in the right lower pane. It can take some time to update.

Many things can be done from the "Show all bookmarks" window. But they can be very misleading.

(The following may not be very relevant nor clearly stated. Sorry if I can't convey my point.)

For instance, when you want to delete all bookmarks associated to one tag, it's not just going into the Tags menu and deleting the corresponding tag: this would only remove the given tag from the bookmarks but leave the bookmarks bookmarked (which is the right thing to do when I think of it). Instead, the only way I found is to search from "Search Bookmarks" for the bookmark name and delete from the resulting list (making sure I don't delete a bookmark that just happens to share the tag name in other fields. Sorting by tags may help a bit.)

For complex things, I once had to open bookmarks with sqlite and edit them by hand. Scary experience even though I made backups. (How would it deal with Weave, at the time, was my main concern.)

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#449

Post by edeion »

pmoriarty wrote: post #93

I have thousands of bookmarks, and gave up putting them in to folders years ago. Now I just tag them with every relevant keyword that I can think of when I make the bookmark, and search them that way. Firefox's bookmark manager is very primitive, though, and I've long been meaning to migrate my bookmarks over to org-mode in emacs, where I have much more powerful searching, metadata, editing, linking, commenting, rest…

I do the same and share the same pain about the bookmarks manager.

One thing that irks me is that Firefox saves my bookmarks in "bookmarks menu" when I use ctrl-d. Then I get a monstrous "Bookmarks" menu and I have to move manually all these bookmarks with the Bookmarks manager from "bookmarks menu" to "unsorted bookmarks". Which is easy enough, but why the hell does Firefox save bookmarks in different folders when I use ctrl-d or the star icon?

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