Bye-bye Opera (for bookmarks)

I have finally made the complete transition to Firefox (“complete” is the keyword here).

Background check
Until now, it was Firefox for surfing, and Opera for managing my bookmarks. I would file my bookmarks in a temporary “Missed” folder in Firefox, then import that folder every month or two to Opera, and do the sorting (“X” bookmark goes to “Y” folder, etc.); a mess, I know.

But if your bookmarks collection is as big as mine, Opera makes the whole managing & searching process easy, and it’s certainly implemented far better than in Firefox or Internet Explorer (then again, anyting beats the latter’s “favorites” management).

It’s been a version or two (?) that Firefox got “live” searching: results come up in the “Bookmarks Manager” window as you type your query, think iTunes, Spotlight). This has been in Opera a long time now, and has proven itself useful a great number of times.

Making the switch
Since I was already feeling frustrated by the need to keep a separate browser merely for bookmarks management, the “live” search function in Firefox was the opportunity I was looking for to migrate over to Firefox completely.

By the way, for the Opera users interested in switching and wanting to carry their bookmarks along, you need to use BookmarkBridge, as indicated by the Firefox FAQ (the app needs a little tune-up, but it does the job).

Conclusion: a couple of improvements wouldn’t be bad
Though I do appreciate the fact that I can have got only browser to care about now, Firefox still leaves something to be desired when it comes to proper bookmarks management.

Flat search results (minor gripe)
A screenshot, to note a minor gripe:

Searching for “day in history” brings 3 results (one from the Yahoo! directory, the other one from History Channel, and the last one from the New York Times Online).

Notice that little “Educate” greyed-out label on top of the three results? This means that these bookmarks were from my “Educate” folder. This is quite handy. Unfortunately, in Firefox the results come up flat (not nested in folders), so I’m unable to track down the bookmark’s parent folder, should I need to move it around.

Query doesn’t take under consideration the bookmark’s URI (major gripe)
What if I want to look for all my bookmarks from History Channel’s website?

Wouldn’t it be logical to expect to find them when searching for historychannel.com?

Well, Opera does bring them up; Firefox, I’m afraid, doesn’t.

It seems that Firefox doesn’t read the bookmark’s URI when executing a query. I assume this can be fixed easily. √ Jul 13th, 2004