I have been using Google Chrome for quite some time now. I really like it. I also have Edge and Firefox as well as Opera on some of my machines. I used to use Internet Explorer, but found Chrome to be better in a lot of ways. The bookmarking (favorites) was not as simple and flexible. Maybe that’s why Microsoft is creating Edge.
Some of the following works good with other browsers too.
I like that it syncs Browser Bookmarks to all my devices. I enjoy Google’s reading suggestions on my phone. If I open the suggested site in Chrome, I can add to the Browser Bookmarks from my Android phone. I wish open in Chrome was the default behavior. I’m not sure why it is not.
I really like Chrome’s Bookmark Manager functionality. When I encounter a new concept, I can just click on the star at the end of the address bar and select or create a place to store the URL of the web page that I’m looking at. It’s then available on all my devices.
I have the bookmarks bar turned on in all my browsers. When I was working, I had all the web accessible locations that I needed to do my job, on the bookmarks bar. It was very handy.
Now, I have a few folders on the bookmarks bar. The first one is named Daily. In there, I have a list of places that I like to visit on a regular basis.
I like the way the Bookmarks Manager works. It is a simple treeview, but even with thousands of entries, it is still responsive and items can be copied or edited or dragged and dropped or sorted very quickly. Simple and effective. I recall when they decided to change to a more visual presentation for a few months. I’m glad they reversed that idea.
I have another bookmarks folder that I named Research. Inside this folder, I make folders for each topic. I add folders and contents to the bottom of the Research folder. This is where they go when I click the add folder button. I briefly considered trying to organize things with multiple levels of folders, but I quickly changed my mind. I don’t recall what made me change my mind about multiple levels, but I think it had to do with being able to deal with duplication and organizing things.
I like that if a URL is already bookmarked, the star shows that it is an existing entry by changing color from while internal to blue. I wish there was an easy way to locate the existing folder. I keep the folders sorted pretty frequently, so it is possible to scroll through the list, but scrolling thousands of entries to locate the existing folder, is a little painful. Quick navigation by typing the first letter or something similar would be a welcome improvement.
This is fine as far as it goes (as I said, the best I’ve found, so far). I’d like a mechanism to quickly determine if I have seen the URL, and if so, to be able to quickly zoom into the existing folder to see how much I know about the subject.
If it is a new subject, I’d like a quicker way to add the new folder and capture the URL. The existing mechanism is not too bad, but I feel like it might be possible to decrease the number of clicks that are required.
This and all other Browsers that I’ve tried do a good job of creating a pile of links. Unfortunately, I’ve not figured out how to turn this stash into something very useful. Another, further, level of processing is needed.
Chrome, as well as most browsers, will export the links to an HTML file. There are a multitude of browsers and bookmark tools/services which will import this file. I’ve subscribed to several web based services. Some will do dead link detection, duplicate removal, or marking - others allow various levels of manipulation in their interface.
Several years ago, I found and purchased a shareware program called LinkRipper. It extracted the links from the HTML file and built an XML file with fields for a couple of tags and it kept track of when the URL was accessed (if you launched it from LinkRipper) and how many times you visited the site. Unfortunately, the developer has vanished, at least as far as I know. It was becoming a nice tool, but was not as fully polished as I would have liked, and does not seem to be a viable option now.
I know there are a bunch of Chrome extensions, but none, that I’ve tried, do everything I’d like them to do.
I guess this leads me to the next topic. I’m looking for a nice tool where I could organize my thoughts. Once the Bookmarks are gathered, I would like to be able to organize and embellish what I know about the subject. A place to compare and contrast and gather and organize information about every topic that I might find interesting.
I think it’s time for another Topic, so I’ll wrap this up here.