Earlier this year I was scrolling through my “Other Bookmarks” in Chrome looking for a site I had bookmarked a few weeks earlier. As I was scrolling I started to think about what I was doing more and more. Here I was surrounded by technology, I can ask Google for the news or weather, I have Youtube curating the videos I like most on their site for me, Amazon can ship me a package in 2 days from damn near anywhere. Yet, even with all of this tech, here I am scrolling through a list of links with no ability to filter or search for what I was looking for. This sucks.
The Problem
Your experience with browser bookmarks largely depends on what browser you use, Firefox, for example, will let you dock your bookmarks in a sidebar on the left and gives you the ability to search through them and add tags to categorize bookmarks. However, Chrome still does not give you the ability to tag your bookmarks and while you can search for them, searching in the omnibar is a less than obvious place to search when you’re looking for your bookmarks.
Bookmark sync is also not a great experience, you can sync your Chrome and Firefox bookmarks using their respective services but there is no cross-pollination (ie you can’t import Firefox bookmarks into Chrome or vice versa) and despite being a standard in web extensions, bookmark sync is still largely a black box on both platforms. Lastly, bookmark sharing is just non-existent on any browser. If your co-worker needs a set of bookmarks from you, you’re either going to be pasting links into Slack or emailing your co-worker an HTML file that they import into their browser.
The Solution
Not long after I spent way too much time finding a bookmark, I started working on a browser extension to fix this. My 3 requirements were:
- Easily accessible: You have to be able to quickly pull up your bookmarks and find what you were looking for
- Control over data: Users have to be able to control where they back up their data.
- Sharing: Users must be able to easily share their bookmark collections with others.
I called it “Fav”, a shortened version of “Favorites”, what Internet Explorer calls their bookmarks.
Unlike other bookmark managers like Pinterest, that have expanded the idea of bookmarks into scrapbooking or “pinning”. Fav instead focuses on how browsers think of bookmarks, as shortcuts to sites you visit often or sites you want to return to later and then tries to enhance that idea.
Easily Accessible: Browser bookmarks are quick and easy when you have a few, but a collection of hundreds can quickly spiral out of control and you end up spending more time searching through your bookmark instead of just going to the site you were looking for. Fav currently ships with support for tags and in the next update will include search, custom fields, and much more to help you find exactly what you’re looking for in no time.
Control Over Data: I hate how Google and Mozilla handle sync. When I was building Fav I integrated the app with Github Gist as the sync solution. With Gist integration, you can backup and restore your bookmarks seamlessly while still maintaining control over your data.
Sharing: One of the biggest issues I have with browser bookmarks if you can’t share them very easily. Because Fav is integrated with Github Gist, sharing bookmarks is as easy as giving someone the Gist ID to your bookmarks collection.
Head over to the Chrome Web Store and give Fav a try. Hopefully, it will help you find your bookmarks faster and keep yours from pulling your hair out when it comes time to share them.
