File this add-on under awesome.  The Places’ Tooltip add-on for Firefox adds more detailed information about the bookmarks and links you have saved to your browser. 

It shows you more than your standard name and address, as Firefox does by default.  Once installed, you can see:

the last visited date, the tags associated with the link, the description and the keywords

It shows the tooltip for and in:

all links, folders, bookmarks, RSS items in the bookmarks toolbar, bookmarks menu, history menu and sidebars

This is a great simple extension for those who just need to have a little more information handy about the links they have saved to the browser.  You can pick up the Places’ Tooltip add-on on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

The features to love here are plentiful. You can dynamically, show bookmarks by using folder and search terms.  Highlight the bookmarks in any color you would like, sort the bookmarks by name, visit time, last visited and most visited, and a lot more.

Incredible Bookmarks also help you clean house.  It can:

• Run a check to find out duplicate bookmarks in each Incredible Bookmarks toolbar.
• Run a check to check the links in each Incredible Bookmarks toolbar to see which links are no longer available.

This video covers some more of the basics when it comes to using the Incredible Bookmarks add-on for Firefox:

This add-on for Firefox has incredible promise, and I could not find a feature I didn’t like.  My favorite overall feature is the ability to color code your bookmarks and bookmark folders.  I like to keep things neat, nice and organized – so this suits my needs, perfectly.

To learn more about Incredible Bookmarks, check out the official site, and you can download it from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

How often do you still use bookmarks? 

Generally speaking, I find there are two types of browsing people.  You have those who still bookmark everything they find interesting, and then those who only bookmark what they need, and Google everything else.  A lot of the time, typing something into the search box might be a faster way to launch a web page, rather than searching through a bucket-full of saved links.

Take a stand, and leave you thoughts in the comments.  Are you pro-bookmark, anti-bookmark, or somewhere in between the two?

Once installed, the options here are simple.  You can enable or disable the multiple bookmark rows, and you can also set the max number rows to display.  If it doesn’t exactly match up with your current theme or you want to tweak it some, check out this post from the mozillazine.org forums. 

If you need more bookmark room in the browser, this add-on will do the trick.  You can pick it up on the Firefox Add-ons site.

To launch, all you have to do is hit Ctrl+Space (or for the Mac users Ctrl+Alt).  If you want to use it without the graphical launcher above, use Shift+Alt (or Shift+Ctrl for the Mac users).

Some of the best features include the ability to customize the appearance, set the launcher to open in current or new tabs, set the launcher up as your homepage and you can add as many sites to it as you need to.

You can get more information about it via the official web site, and download it via the Firefox Add-ons site.  It is nice to see a good looking and well thought out extension – and this one fits the bill.

Here is one more tip from the Smart Productivity blog:

One other great use of this tip is that if you right-click any of the items at the top of the Bookmarks folder, such as Organize Bookmarks and select Copy, your complete library of bookmark URLs will be placed on the clipboard as well as the folder names.

Very neat discovery, I must say.  Check out more Smart Productivity here:

http://www.smartproductivity.com/firefox-tip-easily-copy-your-bookmarks

How to Backup Your Bookmarks Manually

From the Firefox menu bar go to Bookmarks >  Organize Bookmarks to bring up your bookmarks manager.  Now you want to click the top button that says Import and Backup.

Next, select Backup.  This will bring up a “Save As” box where you can save your bookmarks to any location.  Make sure you leave the bookmark as a .json file too.  Since Firefox 3, this is the type of file Firefox uses for backups.  If you wish to export your bookmarks as an HTML file, go to Import and Backup > Export HTML.  That will give you the more traditional .html backup.

Recover Firefox’s Internal Bookmark Backups

Did you know that Firefox has been backing up your bookmarks all along?  They are in your Firefox profile folder.  First thing you need to do is find your profile folder for Firefox.  Depending on your operating system this may be in a different location.  If you are unsure, be sure to check out this previous post: 

• Where is my Firefox Profile Folder?

Once you make it in there you should see a folder named “bookmarkbackups”.  Double-click that folder, and there you have some of your saved bookmarks that you thought you had lost waiting for you to restore them.  If you want more backups to be saved (default is 5) then check out this previous article on the simple about:config tweak you will need to do.

Backup Your Bookmarks with an Add-on

There are many extensions for Firefox that will help you backup too.  My personal favorite is Foxmarks, which comes with the additional feature of syncing them with another PC (another good backup technique in its own right).  Here are the best:

• FEBE – The perfect add-on for those backing up and don’t wish to rely on other services.
• Foxmarks – The greatest backup and syncing extension out there today.
• Delicious Bookmarks – Yes, syncing with services like Delicious is another great way to backup your bookmarks.

Now the question is how do you and when did you last backup your own Firefox bookmarks?

Right-click on your bookmarks toolbar, and select “New Bookmark”.

The name can be anything.  To keep things simple, for now we will just call it “Unsorted Bookmarks”.  You might want to shorten that to “ubooks”, “ub” or something like that if you want to save bookmark toolbar space.  Now for the location, type this smart bookmark string in:

place:folder=UNFILED_BOOKMARKS

Now hit the “Add” button, and you should see a new folder popup on your bookmarks toolbar named “Unsorted Bookmarks”.  Click on it as you would with any other bookmark folder, and you can see all of your bookmarks that have not yet been categorized into the rest of your bookmark folders.

UPDATE: For Firefox 3.5 (or for any version where this is not working) try to restart Firefox, then see if it works.  So add this bookmark, restart Firefox, then re-launch Firefox and it should work.

This comes in handy when you bookmark a page, and your not sure exactly with what words it should be tagged with (or you don’t want to take the time to think it out).  There is no need for straining your brain to think of descriptive tags any longer with this extension.

You can pick HandyTag up on the Firefox Add-ons web site and learn more about HandyTag on the official web site.  It is still sandboxed on Firefox’s web site, so if you need a login to try it out, be sure to checkout these bugmenot username and password combinations.

With Tagmarks, you have a lot of different icons that popup whenever you hover over the traditional bookmarking star you see in the Firefox 3 address bar.  When you click in each icon, it will add the page to the bookmarks and associate that icon with that page, through the use of tags.

Selecting one icon has the same effect as clicking on the bookmarking star. It will add the page to the bookmark.   The perk here is that it will also apply a tag to the page and always remember and show that icon when you are at that page.  Think of it as a visual tool for you too, to say for example, “oh that is a search magnifying glass, this must be a search site”.

Watch the Screencast of Tagmarks in Action!

You can pickup Tagmarks on the Firefox Add-ons site.  It is still sandboxed, so if you need a login to download it, check out this list of user names and passwords you can use.  Also check out the author of the add-on’s web site for more information on how to get the most out of Tagmarks.