7 ms·

Firefox really needed the release of chrome to kick it back into gear because it had stagnated to some extent, easy in its "we're better then IE and that's all

• RDeckard 14y ago
  And it's bookmark system is still second to none (imo)
  • lucaspiller 14y ago
    One thing I've got used to in Chrome is the syncing between devices (well desktop machines anyway). I remember seeing some stuff a few years ago about this in Firefox. What is the state of it now?
    • Sanddancer 14y ago
      Better than chrome, in my opinion. I switch between my tablet, my phone, my desktop, and laptop, and have access to all my bookmarks, passwords, etc. I don't have tab sync enabled, but that's just personal preference.
    • saurabh 14y ago
      I use Firefox Sync to access tabs on other computers. I haven't tried the mobile version though.
      • LeonidasXIV 14y ago
        It is decent. Although the browser is not exactly impressive since it needs a lot of memory, hangs sometimes and has a weird UI. I really hope they get it together, because page rendering is, apart from font-weirdness sometimes, actually really good.
    • surrealize 14y ago
      Firefox also syncs bookmarks, passwords, etc. The nice thing about firefox is that it also syncs history, which chrome (last I checked) did not do. History sync is great if you use a site like HN on multiple machines; you can just visually skip all the visited links, or focus on the visited ones if you're looking for something you saw before.
      • tls 14y ago
        You also have the option of syncing to your own server.
      • Adaptive 14y ago
        Chrome syncs history for me, but I could not tell you if this is strictly Chrome or the Google Account web history (which can be managed separately from Chrome). Also: Google Now settings come into play here. It is all starting to feel a bit confusing.
      • fwenzel 14y ago
        Fx also syncs add-ons meanwhile. I somehow missed this but discovered it recently when I reset my browser profile.
    • Kerrick 14y ago
      Not only can you sync, you can even run your own sync server.
    • ernesth 14y ago
      Not answering to your point, but stating that as almost always in browser history in the last 12 years, this feature was first introduced in Opera.
  • fakeer 14y ago
    I second that. The best bookmarking in-browser. I am really convinced it's better than most others out there - even those dedicated "bookmarking" services e.g. Delicious, Pinboard(which is a disappointment other than when I look at my li'l bookmarks in a browser window in its webapp) etc - with its sync. I am planning to plug my own server to Firefox sync service so that I can have it wherever I want. Great if I could just stumble upon sth good ready to deploy.
  • Aardwolf 14y ago
    Wow Firefox bookmarks are terrible imho. If you click the star on a website and you want your bookmark to go in the bookmarks menu, you need to press the star TWICE, then choose "Bookmarks Menu" from a dropdown, and then click ok. That is 4 click too much. And where it puts it after clicking the star once is useless. Then, the bookmark menu itself. So many useless things in there first before your actual bookmarks start.
    • kijin 14y ago
      I actually like the fact that Firefox puts all my new bookmarks into "Unsorted Bookmarks" by default. I often bookmark pages before I read them, and use the Unsorted Bookmarks folder as a kind of reading list and sorting area. After I've read a web page, I will either delete the bookmark (if the page turns out to be useless) or move it to its final location (if I want to reference it again). I also often change the title to be more descriptive, remove cruft from the URL, etc. while doing so. For my workflow, a bookmarking system that automatically placed my bookmarks inside the Bookmarks Menu would be useless. It would be even worse if it tried to "guess" the folder where I wanted my bookmarks to be.
    • sp332 14y ago
      Try this: Right-click a page -> Bookmark this page -> enter.
    • shardling 14y ago
      I never use bookmarks that way. I just star (once), and use the URLbar to search for bookmarked pages. It's much easier than trying to maintain a hierarchy. If a page doesn't have a title I'll add a couple tags, and likewise if it ever takes too long to find a particular bookmark. But 99% of the time I don't even need to think about those things.
      • mercurial 14y ago
        Likewise. I use it (rarely) as a way to keep a reference on a page and prevent it from getting garbage collected at a later point.
  • gnosis 14y ago
    Firefox's bookmarking system is actually one of the things I hate most about it, compared to Opera. In Opera you can right click a link and then select the exact place in the bookmark heirarchy to place it in. In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go. Opera's bookmark manager is also just much nicer, more powerful, and more intuitive than Firefox's. Unfortunately, Opera is closed-source software, and has been moving in anti-privacy directions I don't like, so I still use Firefox. But in many ways, Opera is a far superior browser.
    • skrause 14y ago
      In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go. In Firefox you can click the star in the URL bar to set a bookbar. When you click the star for a second time immediately, you can select where in the bookmark hierarchy it should go without opening the bookmark manager at all. You can also just drag&drop the tab title to the right location in the bookmarks toolbar and it will create a bookmark there.
    • belorn 14y ago
      No? You right click, and get a menu for placing the bookmark in the folder of your choice, or you drag the bookmark to the bookmark toolbar. Or are you talking about in which order a bookmark is placed inside a folder, accessed from the first bookmark setup window? I am quite sure there is a add-on that do exactly this.
    • Ziomislaw 14y ago
      I totally hate Opera bookmarks, they are completly unintuitive. Each bookmark can be displayed/removed from the bar without any concern about which directory it is in. You'll end up with one folder of bookmarks that should be displayed on bookmark bar and a few of them will be 'lost' (not really shown).
    • derleth 14y ago
      In Firefox, I right-click to bookmark the page, and then a little drop-down from the right side of the address bar allows me to modify the bookmark or cancel the whole thing. The main thing I do in this context is edit the tags. I like Firefox's tagged bookmarks. I love how it's not slow anymore, and how I can browse by tag in the main bookmarks window I get through Ctrl+Shift+O. But I'm using the MicroFox theme, which pretty much completely changes how Firefox looks. Nobody that I know of in the browser world does themes like Mozilla does for Firefox. Chrome doesn't even come close, and I don't remember Opera offering much beyond palette swaps, either. I have MicroFox and Status-4-Evar and a number of other Add-Ons that combine to give me the browser I want. I can do that with Firefox and with no other browser I know of. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/microfox-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/microfox-for-... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...
  • rschmitty 14y ago
    Agreed, this has been a big thing keeping from switching to chrome. Really surprised chrome doesnt have tagging w/o some hacky addon I do like chrome's dev tools better imo, so I run both. Chrome for active dev and FF for browsing
  • jvzr 14y ago
    Apparently, people still use bookmarks. I stand corrected. I've not used bookmarks for years, literally. I even tried to use GReader, Delicious and Kippt but I can not wrap my head around bookmarks. Instead, my "bookmarks" are my history, my most frequently visited websites and the few pinned tabs I keep open on all my browsers through syncing. I am alone in this?
    • blaabjerg 14y ago
      Do you never find a page and think, "ah, this will be useful for project X later"? Keeping them all in my browser session for six months before I put it to good use is just unnecessary, so I bookmark it and find it later when I need it.
      • Cthulhu_ 14y ago
        > Do you never find a page and think, "ah, this will be useful for project X later"? I do. Then I delete them again three years later when I bother to check my old bookmarks.
      • cageface 14y ago
        Pocket has completely taken over this responsibility for me.
      • stevewilhelm 14y ago
        Try pinboard.in for this.
      • jvzr 14y ago
        I do, but most of the times it's been via Twitter, so I just fave it there. Or it's here, in which case I usually don't bookmark it. Like Cthulhu_, I've been bookmarking for years till my bookmarks were filled and literally unusable; then I moved to Google Reader and carefully chosen RSS Feeds, which slowly became a bloated mess (more than 3,000 favorites there); then to Kippt, and bis repetita. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that keeping bookmarks for "interesting stuff" isn't so interesting (no pun intended.) If it's a great thing and I must keep it in mind, it'll surely come back to the surface somehow. I must add that I have an extremely complex memory: it is very small and forgetful when it comes to actual stuff I have to remember (like my friends's names or university lessons), and abnormally large when it comes to seemingly insignificant stuff (like ZURB's Foundation framework which is competing with Twitter's Boostrap). I'll usually remember all the URLs I've typed. I'm a strange weirdo. Finally, I realize now that I'm quite the exception here in terms of bookmarks, but seeing the rise and fall of Delicious, as well as Xmarks's (one of the insignificant things I remember, even though I've never used the service or heard of it before it closed down) I thought it was more common.
• J_Darnley 14y ago
  Yes, it looks like they did need it so they can copy everything even down to its god-awful UI.