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BOOKMARKS ORGANIZATION

See Backing up your profile! for important information!

How people use bookmarks seems to be one of the more personal things about all browsers, be it IE, Mozilla, Firefox, or any other one. My bookmarks.html file contains about 1,830 bookmarks and is about 430 Kb. Obviously, it's critical to have some kind of hierarchy to be able to find anything in there!

Here are some tips to use in organizing large bookmarks files. This is how I do things. I'm not saying it's the "best" way and it's certainly not the only way! Do what works best for you.

Bookmarks Toolbar

In Firefox do this:

The Bookmarks toolbar by default sits just below the navigation bar. I use it to easily access frequently-used bookmarks.

If the Personal Toolbar is not visible in SeaMonkey, then do this:

organizing


Another nifty trick!



"graeme" on alt.fan.mozilla made note of this pretty neat trick.

Both Mozilla and Firefox can have as your home page not just a single URL/file but also several pages that open in multiple tabs on startup. You can do this by opening just the tabs you want and then using the home page preferences menus to set "Use current group" (SeaMonkey) or "Use current pages" (Firefox). However, in Firefox (not SeaMonkey) you can also do this:

You can select any folder at Tools - Options - General - Use Bookmark. When you click OK FF writes a string into the "location(s)" bar that contains the URLs in the selected folder, separated by a vertical bar "|". So far as I can tell, FF makes no association to the selected folder that is remembered from session to session. You can drag and drop in the Bookmark Manager (or the Bookmark sidebar) to change the order of the startup tabs. You can even add or remove bookmarks. However, you then need to re-do the definition of the Home Page location(s) as in the step: Tools - Options - General - Home Page - Use Bookmark.

You can also manually edit the Home Page(s) by using about:config and editing the pref: browser.startup.homepage. Further, accomplish changes by editing manually the string in the Tools - Options - General - Home Page location(s) bar.


Another nifty trick! - 2

Once you have a separator you can right-click on it, choose Properties and enter a name. The name will show up at the beginning of the line so you can identify the groups of bookmarks below that separator! I think this is very cool! The separator names will show up in the sidebar but not the Bookmarks drop-down menu. See the screen shot and notice how the folders on my Personal Toolbar are delineated by separators for clarity. Notice the named separators in the bookmarks sidebar.

separators


Another nifty trick! - 3

NOTE - At some point the developers decided nobody needed this feature and removed it.

You can change the display of the name on the separator line. In the chrome folder of your profile location copy and paste these lines into your userChrome.css file. (The userChrome.css file file does not exist by default. Simply create one using a plain-text editor (like Notepad).)

The first section will change the display of the name on the separator line to bold, italic, deep red text.

The second section changes the display of the name text on the separator when highlighted to a blue background with white text.

You can use most standard CSS formatting rules in these sections to change the separator line's name appearance.

/* BEGIN customize bookmark separators */
treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(Name, separator) {
color: #aa5522 !important;
font-style: italic !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}

treechildren:-moz-tree-cell-text(Name, separator, selected, focus) {
color: #FFFFFF !important;
background: #3333ff !important;
}
/* END customize bookmark separators */


NOTE - See the little upward-pointing arrowhead to the left of each of the toolbars? Click it. See that this collapses/hides the toolbar without actually removing it from being displayed. If you "lose" a toobar you may have accidentally clicked that arrowhead.

Here's the Bookmarks Toolbar visible directly below the Navigation Toolbar.

image

Here's the Bookmarks Toolbar NOT visible/collapsed after clicking the upward-pointing arrowhead. Note the left-pointing arrowhead with nothing to its right? Click it and the toolbar re-appears.

image


This page last changed: Sunday, July 26, 2015 - 12:49 PM USA Eastern Time

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