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Benefits of Third-Party Bookmark Managers over Browser Bookmarks

Bookmark Managers are great. They make keeping track of online resources easy, which is in my opinion increasingly important as the internet continues to become overwhelmingly big. I like to compare Bookmark Managers to Password Managers. They are the kind of tool people are can hesitant to try, but after trying people realize its a tool they can’t imagine life without.

Below are some of the reasons why I believe almost anyone who spends a significant amount of time online would benefit from using a Bookmarks Manager, be it Linkidex or something else.

Organization & Ease of Use

  • Enhanced Organization and Management: Many bookmark managers provide better ways to organize your bookmarks than traditional browser bookmarks do, by letting users create tags, categories, and folders. This gives users more freedom in organizing bookmarks, and more control when searching through them.

  • User-Friendly Interface: Bookmark Managers typically have user interfaces that better facilitate navigating and searching through a large numbers of bookmarks over native browser bookmarks.

  • Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser Accessibility: Many Bookmarks Managers are mobile-friendly, work on any device, and/or any browser. This allows users to sync and access bookmarks from anywhere and not be locked into a certain ecosystem. This is one was a big one for me personally. I am a software engineer by trade and use multiple browsers and multiple devices on the job.

  • Visual Organization: Many Bookmark Managers display bookmarks in visually appealing layouts like boards, cards, or grids. Others either use logic or let the user customize the layout and / or position of the link. This is great for people who like to organize bookmarks in a visual way. They can know that the link they are looking for ‘is the second from the top, left most pink button’.

  • Customizable Views: Some Bookmark Managers let user’s create dashboards or personal pages where a user can view or share a subset of their bookmarks. An example of this would be being able to generate a unique view of your bookmarks that only contain bookmarks you have categorized as ‘Recipe’.

  • Customizable Themes: Some Bookmark Managers give users freedom to select colors and icons for categories or tags.

  • Full-Text Search: Some Bookmark Managers index and can then search the content of the bookmarked page.

Security & Privacy

  • Privacy-Focused Options: There are self-hosted bookmark managers available that focus on privacy, offering complete control on how and where all of your data is stored.

  • Authentication: Some Bookmark Managers support additional security features such as 2 Factor or Webauthn, which can help protect your privacy and data better than passwords alone.

Quality of Life Features

  • Faster than Browser Bookmarks: The more bookmarks you have, the more cumbersome browser bookmarks become. Bookmark managers typically handle a large number of bookmarks much more elegantly than browser bookmarks, which ultimately means you can find what you are looking for easier and faster.

  • Annotation Tools: Some Bookmark Managers offer annotation tools for saved content, such as highlighting and adding comments to articles.

  • Importing and Exporting Existing Bookmarks: Many Bookmark Managers support importing and exporting bookmarks to and from your browser, making the transition to and from these tools easier. If you haven’t done this before it may sound a little daunting, but I promise it is not. I also have guides on how to both import and export bookmarks from Linkidex, and guides on how to import and export bookmarks from various browsers.

  • Backup Options: Some Bookmark Managers make it easy to backup your bookmarks, ensuring your bookmarks can be restored even if something catastrophic happens to your account or device. Note: If you are still using browser bookmarks, an easy way to back them up would be to export them into an html file and then email the file to yourself. This ensures you won’t lose your bookmarks if your device gets blown up or you loose access to your browser account (if you are using one).

  • Team Support: Some managers allow sharing bookmarks with other people. For example - sharing your recipe collection with a friend, or sharing tools related to your job with a new hire at work.

I encourage anyone and everyone who uses the internet regularly to give Bookmark Managers a shot. Its free to sign up for Linkidex and we would love to have you.

~ David