At the meeting yesterday someone, I believe it could have been John, asked how you could move bookmarks from one browser to another. It’s a good question, and I’ll try and answer it below, but perhaps an alternative answer is even better and that’s what this post will also address. But first, exporting and importing bookmarks for the common browsers.
However Microsoft has been changing it’s browsers quite a bit over the past couple of years. Internet Explorer was phased out for a bespoke re-write which was called Edge; this in turn was then completely re-engineered to use the same Chromium platform as Google Chrome, Brave and others, which was called NEW Edge. Confusing eh!?
Internet Explorer – read this article [Internet Explorer 11 was the default browser for Windows 10, but you may find that it’s been replaced in one of its automatic upgrades by Edge]. For all older versions of Internet Explorer including ones for versions of Windows older than Windows 10 – you might like to look at this article.
Edge – if you’ve got the NEW Edge browser rather than the old legacy EDGE version (which should still be on your machine, as should Internet Explorer 11, if you’re running Windows 10) – this is probably the easiest way of exporting your bookmarks/favourites from a Microsoft browser. Alternatively you should look to see how you can run Internet Explorer if you’ve got the OLD Edge installed on Windows 10. Then you could use the notes above for Exporting from Internet Explorer. Alternatively upgrade either of them to NEW Edge and use the first link in this paragraph to export your Favourites. Simples!
Note: Exported Microsoft Favourites (Bookmarks) are stored as .htm (HTML) files.
If you’re using Brave this article explains how you can Import and Export Bookmarks.
There must be a better way, and there is! You could use a third-party application such as Evernote, which can not only store Bookmarks, but also whole articles through the installation of a Browser Extension which allows you to “clip” content to a “note” in your Evernote datastore held in the cloud. Evernote has long been a favourite piece of software of mine and I pay an annual subscription to get an extended service from it, but there is a really good free version which you can use to trial it and see if you like it. The screen shot shows that you can save the whole article, or just part of it. [One great feature is that it only saves the article, not the additional content, sidebars, panels, etc which often hold ads.]
Alternatively, you could use a Bookmark Manager such as diigo. Again this sits as an extension in your Browser and every time you want to save the link to a website, you click on the diigo extension, and perhaps add some tags to help you find the site at a later date …
… and after pressing Save Bookmark, it saves the page with a brief excerpt …
Finally there’s Pocket which combines bookmarking with a facility for offline reading of webpages. This used to be a great feature when trains didn’t have good WiFi and you could catch-up on your reading, but it’s still a very useful way of storing web content for reading away from the Internet and it’s the way I store all articles that I come across that I’m going to use in Computer Group meetings. Again, you can install a browser extension for all the major browsers that makes it very easy just to click on a webpage and it’s immediately saved and synchronised to any device that has Pocket running on it.
Looking at the bar in the browser above (Brave) you can see icons for LastPass, Pocket, Feedly, diigo, Evernote, AdBlock Plus, GoFullPage (full page screen shot), Push to Kindle, and Flipboard plus the extension to open the Extensions Library. Of course the screen shots for an Android or iOS device would be different; these are just taken from a browser running on a desktop or laptop.
Extensions are really neat, BUT only install ones from the Extensions Library of your Browser. Generally Chrome Extensions will work in Brave. That’s probably a topic for another post at some later date.
With my Chrome browser, I have got the sites I use most often on the bookmarks bar at the top of the screen. For sites I use less often, I find that a Google search is so fast that there is little advantage in opening my list of bookmarks and searching it for the site I want. If I started using another browser, I would probably use Google to find a site I wanted when I wanted it, and bookmark it then, rather than bother to transfer a whole list at once, many of the sites listed being ones I used once but not since.
(Note to self: Time to do some housekeeping, and prune my bookmarks list!)
Horses for courses Jim. I think your system obviously works for you.
I use multiple browsers – Safari, Chrome, Brave and Firefox (and should be trying out Edge as well) – to test for the Group, and for my websites [I need to make sure the pages render well on the most common browsers]. So a central bookmarking system is essential. I used to use diigo exclusively, but now I find that as my first point of call for the day is feedly to catch-up with the news, that it is easier to “bookmark” sites I want to read later in Pocket, or Flipboard (for the Group). So now, I just use diigo for the “really important sites I stumble upon that I feel I may need to remember, and that’s where I come to the only weak point in your “system”.
I could never reproduce the Google search that created the link to the site I wanted to find. Similarly, due to the way that Google search works, there is a decreasing likelihood of the site being returned in the “top search returns”.
So for me, that would not work TO FIND A SITE (which is what a bookmark is); to obtain information – yep! That’s the way I’d do it.
I’m sure John will find your advice helpful, David, as will all the members of the Computer Group who use multiple browsers, and bookmark more than one site per day.
I must try and re organise my Bookmarks,
I copied them across a couple of years ago from IE to Chrome an ended up with Double entries…
possibly as I had linked the browser on the computers.
I am now using Chrome, with new different Bookmarks, but have not copied the Bookmarks across from its previous incarnations.
One valuable feature of Chrome is that if you have a Google account and are logged in both your browsing history and bookmarks are stored to your account “in the cloud” and so you can acrry them from machine to machine – even when it’s not your own. However, you might not have, or want to have a Google account!!
As I’ve said before I tend to use a Bookmark Manager. The one that I’m using currently is diigo, and I have a bookmark extension setup in my browser bar to save a URL to it.