49
votes
How and why I use bookmark keywords and bookmarklets for searching in Firefox, and why I'm scared they're going away
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- Title
- Bookmark keywords, again
- Authors
- River
- Published
- May 22 2025
- Word count
- 1554 words
Firefox is once again working towards killing what is for me, the single most important feature in its browser, bookmark keywords. I'm writing this post in a hope to draw attention to the issue because I'm feeling some deep existential dread that how I navigate the internet will never be the same.
But......whyyyyyyy? Tagging bookmarks with keywords makes it so much easier to organize things. I'm adding this to the pile of "change things for no damn reason" which I hate about so many things these days. It's bad enough bookmarks got relegated to the footnotes several UI updates ago.
Search is nowhere as near as good without it because often, what I will tag a boomark as won't appear anywhere in the title or body.
they want to "simplify" the user experience by making those keyword tags into custom search engine names. I am INCREDIBLY unconvinced that this change will preserve all (or even most) of the functionality that I currently rely on
Are they planning on removing bookmarklets wholesale? I occasionally use custom ones to trigger a script on a page to do something automated (like clicking a "see more" kind of link automatically, etc).
Killing bookmarklets will mean I'll need to switch browsers or at the very least find an extension that replaces the native bookmarks completely. I just use them too much.
afaik the current plan is only to remove keywords
This is such a great feature in Firefox, but I had no idea about the complex JS bookmarks. Does anyone have good examples of these? I've only ever used the simple string replacement and recently moved some off of Firefox and onto Kagi, but I still heavily use them locally in Firefox.
Honestly, in the almost 20 years I've been using Firefox, this has been the only time that I've thought I may need to prepare myself to move to a different one.
Most of the JS that I use is mentioned in one of the earlier posts I wrote, primarily it's double-substitution searches like in this post but I also use this mediawiki namespace search one all the time.
HackerNews often posts about bookmarklets though, and they even have a submit-to-hn bookmarklet, and a search of hn will give you a bunch of ideas
I haven't gone as far as JS bookmarks for search queries but I was pretty pissed off when Mozilla decided to lock custom search engines behind an about:config boolean by default. I also loathe their maintainers' snarky "just download/develop an extension" attitude toward what is generally considered core functionality in other browsers, and it really makes me want to switch to something more forward-thinking as well. I would happily switch to Vivaldi if it were FOSS and/or had a Firefox-based variant.
Honestly I wouldn't even mind that, if extensions actually had feature parity with what I'm currently doing. But they do not, the requirement to enter an additional keyword prior to the bookmarklet shortcut sucks so much, and their answer is always "no you're wrong, it's not a big deal"
Also it seems really inconvenient to develop an extension for totally personal use, the one extension I did write which is entirely intended for myself and idc if anyone else uses it, is in the store because I couldn't figure out any way to install it for myself without having to do dev mode stuff that I didn't want to deal with