Chrome's omnibar is great, but it lacks the ability to set bookmark shortcuts. Quickmarks is a Chrome extension that solves this problem, allowing you to access your bookmarks via the keyboard very quickly.More »

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.

It occurred to us, after writing yesterday's list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts, that there was one glaring omission: bookmark shortcuts.

Not only does the Bookmark Bar take up valuable real estate, but no one really wants to click through folders of bookmarks to find what you're looking for.

Now, Firefox has 'Smart bookmarks', which lets you add a keyword to a bookmark. Chrome, however, only lets you assign keywords (and thus keyboard shortcuts) to search engines.

Fortunately, with a little bit of hacking, that doesn't matter.

We love some of the new apps in the Chrome web store, but a few are without obvious URLs and are seemingly only available from Chrome's new tab page. To get an app's special URL, though, just add it as a bookmark. More »

Android and Chrome: If you don't like the small, hard-to-use bookmark manager on your Android phone, Chrome extension and Android app PhoneMarks lets you manage them from Chrome on your computer. More »

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Browsers

Xmarks' announcement that it would be shutting down in the near future is turning into a topsy-turvy saga. Now the Xmarks team has decided to reconsider offering a premium service in order to keep the product alive, thanks to an outcry from Xmarks fans. Here's the pitch: if you love Xmarks, pledge $10-20 to say you'd commit to a premium service. Your pledge doesn't require a credit card number, it's just a way of saying "I'd pay for this if you launched it."

If 100,000 people express interest, Xmarks may get a fresh start with a new company. The freemium model wasn't something Xmarks had ever considered before, because it now has to compete with free solutions like the ones built into Firefox and Chrome. None of those browser-based alternatives offer cross-browser syncing, though, so Xmarks can stay in the game if enough people are willing to pay for it.

Also worth noting: only 0.001% of the people who downloaded the Xmarks Firefox add-on actually clicked the donate button on the add-on page, and most of those were from Europe. That doesn't bode well for the pledge campaign, but we're rooting for Xmarks!

As I write this, they're up to nearly 1500 of the 100,000-pledge goal.

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services

Mozilla has recently released the fourth beta of the Firefox 4 browser. I have been testing it since the first beta and I am happy to see the progress and the addition of new features with each beta. I have held on the review of Firefox 4 because most of the features are still unstable or not in place. With the release of beta 4, things are becoming more stable and plenty of new (and revolutionary) features are added to it, so it would be a great time to do up a review. There will probably be another one or two more beta before we see the release candidate and the final version. /> id="more-20478">

New Interface

Firefox 4 has gone through a big design change. The first thing that you will notice is the replacement of the menu bar with a menu button (currently only available in WIndows and Mac version). The new big orange menu button is located on the very top left corner of the browser, and when clicked, will open up a compact menu window. While I don’t really like the orange color and the location that it is situated, I do welcome the idea of replacing the menu bar with the button. It makes the browser more clean and compact.

We've sung the praises of the art of keyword bookmarking before, but the number of keywords in your setup can quickly get out of control. Reader Swc oxcart shows us an easy way to keep track of all your bookmark keywords. More »

Hello! I'm back [at the turn of the tide...] To celebrate, here's a very neat Chrome extension that mimics (albeit a bit clumsily) Firefox's live bookmarks: Foxish live RSS.

If you've never used Firefox's live bookmarks, you're missing out! They're just like normal website bookmarks, but using the magic of RSS they update every few minutes. For the vast majority of Web users, a dedicated RSS reader is overkill -- with live bookmarks you can have the latest news (or Download Squad stories!) right there on your browser, always just one click away.

Foxish live RSS isn't without its quirks. It can't auto-discover a site's RSS feed, so you have to obtain it (either by viewing the source, or installing Google's own RSS extension) and then add it manually by right clicking the odd-looking Foxish icon. Also, once you've added the feed, you have to go into your Bookmarks Manager and drag the new 'folder' onto your bookmarks bar.

So, it's clunky but it works. You have to wonder when Google will simply bite the bullet add native, live bookmark functionality. Firefox has surely borrowed enough Chrome features... now it's time to return the favor!

Chrome only: Google Chrome extension Foxish Live RSS mimics Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature by creating folders on your bookmarks bar that update automatically from your favorite RSS feeds. More »