One feature I still miss when switching between Chrome and Firefox is support for bookmark keywords, which make launching sites from the address bar a breeze. Chrome's Omnibar does a fairly good job of finding what we want to launch from standard input (e.g. gmail), but it would be nice to have straight-up keywords (like gm). Sebastian showed you one method using custom search engines -- but those don't sync, so it's not an ideal situation.

Quickmarks is up to the task. Simply install the extension, and then do some manual editing. Any bookmark that you'd like to launch via a keyword needs to have [keyword] appended to its name. For example, you can right click your Gmail bookmark and choose edit, change its name to Gmail [gm], and Quickmarks is now able to launch it.

To open a bookmark using its keyword, simply click into the Omnibar or tap Ctrl+L B [space] and then enter your keyword. The B trigger tells the Quickmarks entension to fire up and watch for keyword input.

Since Chrome can sync both your extensions and your bookmarks, once your [keywords] are sent to the cloud you'll have access to them on all your Chrome installs.

Xmarks is an excellent tool for maintaining the same set of bookmarks in all your web browsers -- on all your computers. It works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome and in addition to your bookmarks they've recently been busily adding tab sync support.

Today they've announced on the official Xmarks blog that your open tabs are now available anywhere. That includes places where you can't use an Xmarks add-on or extension, like your iPhone or Android handset. Just head to my.xmarks.com and you'll see a new addition to the mobile interface: open tabs.

You can access your tabs from any desktop browser as well. Just open the same page, click the tools button, and choose open tabs from the menu.

[via Xmarks blog]

Sebastian and I were chatting about Google Chrome earlier today when I mentioned something that I wanted to be able to do: pull up the new tabbed bookmarks manager when I open a new tab.

Now...I haven't coded a lick in more than a decade, but it looked like this would be easy enough to hack in via an extension. Seb agreed that it looked like a pretty trivial task, and he decided to give it a go. Thanks to an existing extension called New Tab Redirect, I had my fix about an hour later.

Redirect is already a solid extension, giving you the option to use most of Chrome's internal pages (file:// URLs and about: pages like downloads, history, and extensions). The dev channel's in-tab bookmark manager is (obviously) a fairly new addition to the browser, however, so it wasn't supported.

With a little bit of additonal code, Seb turned out the New Tab Redirect (mod) extension. It's now available for download from the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery and should work just fine with the dev channel build and Chromium snapshots. Now every time I click the plus sign to create a new tab, there are all my bookmarks... awesome!

Once the bookmark manager makes the jump to the beta and stable channels, those of you using less "experimental" versions will be able to use it as well! We'll keep you posted when that happens.

Earlier this week, the Chromium browser's bookmark manager moved from a separate native app window to a new tab inside browser itself (a la Opera). The streamlined manager has quickly made its way to Chrome, landing today in the developer channel build.

The bookmark manager in-a-tab feels is a much more logic implementation on tabbed browsers, and it's been a feature of Opera for quite some time. You can still drag-and-drop to rearrange, sort, import, and export your bookmarks like you could with the native manager.

Along with the manager, the new build includes improvements to Chrome's autofill and translate features.

Download the dev channel build of Google Chrome and take it for a spin -- or check out my previous post to see the bookmark manager in action.