Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 1, 2008

The Best Firefox Extension for Google Bookmarks

If you use Google Toolbar for Firefox only because you like the bookmarking feature, there's a much better option: GMarks. While there are other extensions that provide an interface for Google Bookmarks, John Marshall's GMarks adds a lot of value to Google's basic bookmarking service.

GMarks can display the bookmarks almost the same as Firefox's native bookmarks: in a separate menu and in the sidebar. There's also a dropdown that can be added to Firefox's toolbars. The sidebar is useful when you want to perform full-text searches in your bookmarks without having to visit Google's site, while the GMark menu has an excellent option for managing bookmarks. If you click on "Organize bookmarks", you'll be able to import bookmarks, edit or delete bookmarks and create Gmail-like filters. For example, you can automatically add the label Google for any bookmark from this blog.

The extension can show the number of bookmarks for each label, a list of recent bookmarks and the most frequently visited bookmarks. To bookmark a page, use the familiar shortcut Ctrl+D or the GMarks menu.

One of the most frequent user requests for Google Bookmarks is nested labels and GMarks uses a little trick to simulate hierarchical labels: separate the labels with >. For example, if you want to label a bookmark as Shopping and Comparison, where Comparison is a sublabel of Shopping, just enter Shopping>Comparison when you create the bookmark. Since Google Bookmarks doesn't support this feature, the labels will appear to be nested only in GMarks.

And the cool features don't stop here: the extension suggests labels based on the web page's title, you can hide the bookmarks that have certain labels and there's an option for integrating the starred items from Google Reader.

Since the last time when I wrote about GMarks, the extension added the most interesting ideas implemented by the "competition" and managed to become THE Google Bookmarks extension. If there's anything that could be added, maybe it would be useful to completely replace Firefox's bookmarking system by hiding all the interface elements related to the native bookmarks and replicating all the changes to Google Bookmarks locally.

40 comments:

Couldn't agree more. I've been using GMarks for some time now and just love it! It would be nice if it could "usurp" the "Bookmarks" menu in Firefox though... I often find myself accidentally clicking "bookmarks" and not finding what I want.

Personally, I like Shareaholic better. I use Google Bookmarks because I don't want to deal with the drop down / folder structure of Firefox Bookmarks. I want something simple and fast, and that's exactly what Shareaholic gives me when used with Google Bookmarks.

did use GMarks some Time now, deactivated the Firefox-Bookmarks and selected multiple Tags to display in the Tool-Bar, only things i dislike are Case-Sensitivity when using tags and not disabling the Firefox Bookmarks-menu

Glad some of you like it. Let's see if can address some of these issues1) You can hide the Firefox bookmarks menu. Open of the GMarks options window then Display>Menu>'Hide Bookmarks Menu'2) I hope to have it show bookmarks in other notebooks other than unfilled, but I haven't had the time.3) No keywords. It's a 'would be nice' thing, but I don't have the time for that right now either. I might be able to add it eventually. It's been requested decent amount of time. Implementing it would be a little hacking because afaik the data would need to be stored in the description, but that hasn't stopped me with other things...4) You can see if the page you are on is bookmarked if you add the GMarks star to the toolbar(View>Toolbars>Customize)You can also add 2 other(ugly) icons to add a bookmark, 1 opens a window and the other adds with no labels5) It can't highlight things on pages because google bookmarks can't. That's something more for a google notebook extension to do if it wants.

I've been using GMarks for a while also, it's the first add-on I install when I install Firefox on a new machine. I have a small problem with Firefox 3 though. It seems I've lost all the icons in GMarks. I've tried refreshing with no luck. If I add a new bookmark I get the icon but my existing ones are gone. Anyone?

1. when using a shared computer, even if you are logged in on a Google service, and you have the "Automatically log in" checkbox marked in Gmarks, you have to go and click on the button to login in GMarks (it does it automatically, though, when you have logged in Google with "Remember me on this computer"). Deng Google Bookmarks works automatically as soon as you are logged in Google in Firefox.

2. Just as the web site for Google Bookmarks, intranet links or links to other protocols than http don't work (I use links to Notes documents notes://). They do work with Deng.

I did a tour of every bookmark solution for Firefox and really wanted something Google compatable. I didn't like GMarks because 1 I couldn't use keywords or keyword searches (my favorite Fx feature) without making two copies of my bookmarks which defeated the purpose. 2 couldn't use the new Fx 3 bookmark features.

I settled on Foxmarks. My only complaint is that it's not Google but even I don't think that's a good reason.

i added gmarks, started to use it and LOVED/LOVE it. sometime after i did the latest firefox upgrade (at the time), i noticed that some of the gmarks i created when i first started gmarks are lost/misplaced? i reinstalled firefox and put it in a new folder i created but was unable to retrieve all of my old gmarks (most are there). how do i retrieve ALL of them?

All-in-One Sidebar I think is the best. It imitates Opera's sidebar showing history, downloads and bookmarks. It can be opened by a side button on the page margin. But most important to me; it lets you manage bookmarks in the traditional folder style. Like most users, I haven't got time to reconfigure my work around new-for-new-sake updates. I want what I am used to, what works and to be left alone to get on with life.

The only reason I had to uninstall it was that it would 'grab' my bookmarks(not allowing them to go to the normal bookmarks) and on top of that (most important) WOULD NOT ALLOW TO ADD A KEYWORD. Without that, Firefox is not Firefox.

Last time I used GMarks was with Firefox 3.6.* and I'm sad to say that, I too, have had problems syncing with the google server. I can't even drag and drop the bookmarks anymore into GMarks. They don't show up. I wonder if it's either a capacity problem, an addon problem, or just Google Bookmarks. Google has implemented updates regarding that section of their site, and it's looking really good. I just don't want to go to that URL all the time to look for a bookmark I need. I want an addon that syncs great with the website, and stores them without any disappearing into thin air.

Yeah, I used GMarks almost exclusively rather than in-browser bookmarks until I updated to Firefox 4.0. So far it is incompatible. Are there plans to update? Or would the author like to suggest an alternative?

It's a bit late now, but GMarks has been unofficially maintained by various people on the support forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gmarks

The latest version (tweaked slightly for compatibility with the current Google Bookmarks server) was updated by "Shitamo". He posted a link to it here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gmarks/XNYa1YyL-Ts/SBMAQb2lFAAJ

Unfortunately, it's all moot now, because Firefox 57 no longer supports XUL-based add-ons and (so far) nobody has ported GMarks to the new Web Extension API.