SOFTWARE - BROWSER - 12.10.2018

Manage your bookmark overload

The bookmarks bar

To gain greater control of your huge bookmark collection, it is best to start with your browser’s bookmarks bar. This is a separate bar under your navigation bar where you can place your most frequently used bookmarks. First make sure that this bar is visible: in Chrome, click on the three dots in the upper right corner, choose Bookmarks ; Show Bookmarks Bar . In Edge, go to the Hub (the three-striped star) and use the gear icon to set the Show the Favourites Bar option to on. Now go to the website you want to bookmark and drag the icon shown at the left of the URL onto the bookmarks bar. Give the bookmark the shortest possible name after right-clicking it, or give it no name at all if the icon speaks for itself. As a result, all your most frequently used websites will become directly accessible.

Organise your other bookmarks

If your other, less frequently visited bookmarks form one long, confusing list, there are several ways to improve its structure.

First of all, you can organise your bookmarks in an alphabetical list. Tip. Give each bookmark a telling name, because the names of webpages can be very vague (e.g. “Welcome”). Unfortunately, new bookmarks are not inserted in their alphabetical place automatically: they are always moved to the bottom of your existing list. To change their place, open your browser’s bookmark manager (e.g. in Chrome: “three dots”, Bookmarks ; Bookmark Manager ) and drag the bookmarks to the desired position in the list.

Alternatively, you can have all your bookmarks sorted alphabetically by the browser itself. In Edge, click on a bookmark in the bookmark manager and choose Sort by Name . In Chrome, click on the “three dots” in the upper right corner of the bookmark manager and choose Sort by Name . If you have a large number of bookmarks, it is a good idea to create separate folders by right-clicking in the bookmark manager and choosing New folder . You can create folders per category, e.g. professional literature, restaurants, travel, etc. and then create subfolders. Within a folder, you can arrange the bookmarks alphabetically or in order of use. For example, if you visit the same five news sites every morning in a given order, you can arrange them in a folder in that order. If you then right-click on this folder and choose Open all Bookmarks (Chrome) or Open All (Edge), all these websites will be opened in separate tabs as well as in the desired order.

Use a browser extension

If your bookmarks remain untidy even after applying the above tips, you can install a dedicated browser extension. For Chrome, there’s Google’s Bookmark Manager . It allows you to add images and notes to your bookmarks and it automatically organises your bookmarks by topic. Unfortunately, Google has stopped developing this extension. SuperSorter organizes bookmarks and folders alphabetically, removes duplicate bookmarks and empty folders, and merges folders that have the same name. Recent Bookmarks produces a pop-up list of recently added bookmarks - this is useful if you’ve forgotten which folder you’ve placed them in. Edge does not have any similar bookmarks extensions as yet.