
Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it) - spindritf
https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/
======
h2s
Reasons why I bookmark pages:

    
    
        1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly
        2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly  
        3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly
    

My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed
Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this
particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between
browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be
useful to me.

I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start
bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of
bookmarking _too many_ things. Next I start fretting over whether they're
organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's
better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion.

It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is
still king in my book!

~~~
Karunamon
>no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me.

Ever tried Xmarks?

------
kijin
Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks.

But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least
when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they
plan to address these issues:

1\. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but
what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want
bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political
science course.

2\. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The
neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles
seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too.
But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many.

3\. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent
each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages
from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px
thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for
toggling between icon and list view.)

4\. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the
buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks?

All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not
only help you save pages for later, but also help you _manage_ the pages that
you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and
organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds,
5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even
more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read
this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".

------
HyprMusic
I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read
that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks,
and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks.

Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms
of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks
after x days or after I've already visited them once.

All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but
this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.

~~~
mitjak
I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread
organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution
consists of:

* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.

~~~
Derbasti
Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack.
I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later
articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.

------
srean
I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have
several hundreds of them open for months on end.

For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works
for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance
will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this
behavior is not unique.

I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open
tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and
have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.

The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it
stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as
well as the link.

So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc
function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.

It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the
browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF
only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on
low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text
in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have
access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for
xmarks, but I still do anyway.

And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory
footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I
think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions.
Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking
the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly
surprised.

@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of
times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the
laptop hibernate when not in active use.

Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot
of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant
admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I
have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed
though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based
browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a
byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)

@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been
nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could
be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and
memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.

~~~
lukifer
I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles
RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a
new chance in about a year.)

Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory
leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

~~~
nnethercote
That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have
wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people
with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and
Chrome fails miserably.

As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory
problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind
of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had
minor memory consumption improvements. See
<https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/> for more (possibly
too much) detail.

If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of
tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it
might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have
a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see [http://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix...](http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-
firefox-easily-fix-most-problems).

~~~
cpeterso
What is Chrome's bottleneck with hundreds of tabs? The resource load from
hundreds of processes? IPC overhead for the browser process to managing the
content processes?

~~~
lucian1900
Memory usage for that many processes. Even with all the sharing it tries to
do, its per-origin (there's usually at most one process for each origin, not
for each tab) overhead is much higher than Firefox's.

------
davecap1
I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of
Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and
only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior
seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not
focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of
improving one that is not well known?

------
webwanderings
The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I
find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you
make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the
user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is
basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in
your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to
upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the
History feature, is beyond me.

In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I
really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they
come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting
the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding
up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also
does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).

~~~
vdm
Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from
the page.

------
latif
My add-on <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/>
combines bookmarks and tab-management. It lets the user group bookmarks into
sets that a user can open all at once or singly. This approach almost
completely eliminates the need for an address bar.

Another interesting feature of the add-on is that it unifies bookmarks and
web-search. The two seem totally disparate but they can be integrated
seamlessly in a very cool way. Check <http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html>
for an overview of the approach.

------
DanBC
I'm glad they're working on something, because my bookmarks are a good example
of horribly broken.

(Ideally I'd have something that looked like the grid-home layout that most
browsers have now, but for all my bookmarks. Then it'd have the ability to
create / destroy folders, and drag and drop functionality to move bookmarks
around.)

~~~
drivebyacct2
I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My
bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my
closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the
contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.

------
kule
Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later
date.

What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so
that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can
still read what was on the page.

~~~
skymt
Have you seen Historious? <http://historio.us/>

~~~
StavrosK
Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the
recommendation (what's your username)?

~~~
corin_
I'm a paying user of yours so I don't have any specific problem with you or
historious, but I don't like that you're offering a free month here. I'm sure
it won't _really_ have any impact, but in theory by rewarding people who say
"have you tried <product>" in a HN comment you're incentivising people to make
those comments, essentially offering people the chance to use a referrals
scheme without it going through referral links.

~~~
StavrosK
That's true generally, although it doesn't really apply in this case. I don't
usually give free months to people who mention historious, I was just happy to
see a mention and gave a freebie.

Arguably, the free bookmarks you get through referrals are more useful, since
they don't expire...

------
reinhardt
I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume.
All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling
of being "left behind" more and more.

I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later"
tool or process. If I can't read it _right now_ , chances are I won't do it at
all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.

------
tribe
This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many
tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and
look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things
in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their
bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by
subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it
could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be
hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and
determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker
news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks
location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be
in another.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

------
jedahan
Mozilla's UX posts continue to impress by being thorough and open-minded.

~~~
AndreasFrom
Firefox is improving at an amazing pace for both users and developers. It
seems like the rapid release schedule has sparked a flame.

------
lurrch
Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the
deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things
that suck when (trying) to use one.

My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and
that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that
shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface
_THINKS_ I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are
soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of
touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of
truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop
keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results.

Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include
resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of
software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle
between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an
e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse.

Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things
that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into
horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch
devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own
these status symbols du jour.

That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly
useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen
complex.

Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS

In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while
it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an
abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in
general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-
starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank
wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox,
and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would
simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS
program to consume and digest RSS feeds.

RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not
on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush
to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.

~~~
unimpressive
I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it
"fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's
awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.

------
GBKS
Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat,
the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like
the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small
screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many
times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this
concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based
version would be much more usable.

I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.

------
wooptoo
A mind map browser history/bookmark system would be the most intuitive. With
timestamps and relations between items.

Most of the time when searching through my browsing history I remember a small
bit from the page that I want (like a phrase), but not the whole address or
title. So searching for something like "find that page about a Python module,
which I opened two days ago" would be truly helpful. Hell, even searching by a
page's dominant _color_ would be helpful sometimes, since I have a good visual
memory.

------
grayc
For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are:

1\. I want to go back to a website for new content; or

2\. I want to store content to read/view later; or

3\. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me.

So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the
page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of
people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is
shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more
acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for
3.

I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I
mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a
file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because
it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely
visit.

A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even
though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been
updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this
comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is
impossible as I have it set up.

Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can
easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search;
folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm
missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I
don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.

------
theootz
Related to bookmarks...

I no longer use Firefox and have long since switched to Chrome, but in doing
so my bookmarks have become effectively useless. What I mean by this is, in
Firefox, one of the greatest (and probably underused) features was the ability
to tag individual bookmarks instead of simply pushing them into a single
folder.

This meant that, when I wanted to revisit a bookmark later on, I simply had to
start typing in the tags (which I always made broad and diverse). By typing in
more and more tags that I thought would likely relate to the article I wanted
to reach, it would narrow it down. I never had to remember what the article
was called, or where it was, or anything like that.

Now if this automatically happened while bookmarking? Some intelligent manner
in which the page could be skimmed for keywords or something. Bookmarking and
retrieval becomes much simpler...

Just wanted to throw that out as something to consider :)

(Now, one Chrome, I usually just leave tabs open or try to organize into
folders and fail miserably :/ )

~~~
webwanderings
Welcome to the club. Many of us have realized by now that none of the browsers
are following any standards when it comes to bookmarks. The tagging is the
exclusive Firefox feature and we were simply hijacked by it over the years.
You moved to Chrome after using Firefox for many yeas (so did I) and you
realize that your Firefox tags are not welcome at Chrome.

------
zemanel
Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have
evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i
take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing
features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps
organization.

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the
bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page
search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents
would be indexed (taking into account the security implications)

I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier
to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks.

As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct
concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct
bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of
bookmarks a user already has.

~~~
lesterbuck
At least one bookmarking service, pinboard.in, offers a paid option of full
text search on the contents of all bookmarks:

<http://pinboard.in/upgrade/>

~~~
zemanel
Cool in itself, wasn't aware, but dependent on a thirdy party service and
indexing/searching seems to happen online?

A browser builtin local solution could be best

~~~
mbreese
I don't know... I'd prefer an online option, so that I could have the same
bookmarks searched from multiple devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, etc...)

~~~
zemanel
Yes you have a point and according to the Opera link above, the indexes seem
to smalish

------
andrew_wc_brown
I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used
stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking
anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can
you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites.

1\. Tab - One time read 2\. History - I might need to return a few times in a
week, month 3\. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API

Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it,
it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu.

The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default
look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.

------
tarr11
I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these
fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on
what computer I am on.

If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose
Chrome.

------
blahedo
Aside from the content, this is a fantastic exposition of the _techniques_ of
UX design, and since I teach a unit on that I wanted to make sure I'd be able
to give the link to my students. But I'm on my home computer right now, and I
manage that from my office computer, so I...

...emailed the link to myself. :P

Which is actually an interesting confirmation of several points the article
made. Most of my save-for-later is "I want to consume this, but don't have
time" and "I want to come back to this momentarily", for which I use the
leave-tabs-open strategy rather than bookmarking or emailing. I knew this
article would be great almost from the time I saw the title....

------
yason
I hit Ctrl-D and later search for something of resemblance by typing into the
url bar and letting results flow in from bookmarks.

I'd much rather just _minimize tabs_ into a staging area than bookmark. And
then type things into the url bar and finding pages. Or browsing the staging
area visually, much like an eternally long strip of tabs. And tabs preserve
context unlike bookmarks.

THe only thing that prevents me from saving too many tabs is that browsers get
crashy/laggy when I do that and I have no way to stash the saved tabs to some
place where they don't clutter my desktop visually.

------
sabret00the
I have three uses of saved pages. \- The open tab: return to it later \-
Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar \-
Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news
sites

Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or
for very specific functions.

The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all
bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where
Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.

------
bazzargh
There's only two things I use the browser's bookmarks for now - firstly to
prime the pump for FF's awesomebar. I rely on that when I delete my history
(which I do irregularly during development).

The second thing is bookmarklets, which are also a subversion of the
mechanism, but let me customize /across browsers/ which most extension
mechanisms don't do.

Glad to see Mozilla tackling the fragmented collection of bookmarks I've ended
up with as 'favourites' in Google Reader, Hacker News, twitter, youtube,
vimeo....

------
ollysb
My ideal solution would be to search my pinboard bookmarks from the address
bar in chrome. As it is I get fairly close using alfred and a custom search
for pinboard.

------
olalonde
No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)

~~~
evoxed
Honestly, this is the main reason I always have a tab open to HN. There are so
many items on here that I know I don't have the time to look into immediately
but will return to, and having them saved just by upvoting feels really good.
I very close attention to what I vote for, and when I go hunting for a link I
know there's a good chance it'll be saved along with comments for context.

------
Lagged2Death
I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and
confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point
I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so
many eyeballs, either.

------
amitamb
I worked on a app to let you keep your bookmarks searchable from any browser
and share them with others at same time.

<http://www.microki.com/>

------
stuaxo
Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.

~~~
shardling
WFM. (In all browsers I can test on OSX.)

Hopefully you're not experiencing a MitM attack! :)

------
CT100
I wish browsers had 3 suggestions for which folder to put the bookmark into -
that would save me time scrolling through my bookmarks.

------
webwanderings
Does Mozilla know that their blog's comment section is probably broken? I
cannot submit my comment where it matters.

------
code_duck
Safari's Reading List comes to mind.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using
this feature?

~~~
mh-
better description here than I could muster:

<http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari>

 _Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an
Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free
Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up
to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you
looked at available on all your devices, too._

[http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...](http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_hero2_2x.jpg)

------
derleth
My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two
bookmark files _with tags attached._

Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can
understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks.
I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. _The tags from both original
files must be preserved._ If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original
files, _it must be tagged the same way in the new file._

 _Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option._ I like my privacy.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension
that will do this for me.

~~~
damncabbage
_It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension
that will do this for me._

I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own;
extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

(I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)

~~~
derleth
> I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own;
> extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract
anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the
relevant data.

~~~
kbrosnan
If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do
this.

If you want simple and dirty.

1\. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on
the Library window on each machine

2\. Pick your favorite scripting language

3\. merge the two json backup files using your script

Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.

~~~
derleth
> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the
> Library window on each machine

I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people
apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything
_except_ the tags.

A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the
places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.

~~~
kbrosnan
Tags are in the bookmark backup JSON.(Storing tags was one of the primary
reasons for moving from bookmarks.html.) Search for "root": "tagsFolder"
anything that is a parent of that is a tag.

~~~
derleth
Hey, thanks. Looking at a pretty-printed JSON file with that little piece of
info cleared it up for me.

