In this episode of “Bug Evangelism,” Chris highlights a 4-year-old bug in Firefox concerning bookmark keywords.
Mozilla Firefox lets you assign “keywords” (or “shortcuts”) to bookmarks by entering a word or phrase in the bookmark’s “keywords” field. The advantage to setting a keyword for a bookmark is that you can load the page more quickly by typing the keyword in the location bar than by finding the bookmark in your bookmarks menu or toolbar.
However, if you assign the same keyword to multiple bookmarks (for example, assigning “tech” to both Slashdot and TechMeme), Firefox will only open one of your bookmarks when you type the keyword in the location bar. This mis-behavior is documented in bug #237180, which was submitted in March of 2004. Some argue that you shouldn’t be able to assign the same keyword to multiple URLs, and others (like me), argue that you should be able to, and Firefox should open all bookmarks that have been assigned a given keyword. After all, isn’t that what tabs in a browser are for?
So, if, like me, you would like the ability to quickly open a set of bookmarks by typing a single word (think “stats” for a set of pages showing various statistics about your website traffic, or “news” to pop open your three favorite news sites), vote for bug #237180, and leave a comment indicating how you’d like the multiple keyword problem to be resolved.
Opening the Bookmarks Sidebar and typing what I want, has always worked well for me, for showing only the Bookmarks I have tagged or titled with the word(s) I have chosen. However, to make it more convenient, when typing a tag into the location bar, and when the location bar is on focus, and a keyboard shortcut is used, it should then open the Bookmarks Sidebar, showing only the bookmarks tagged with what was typed into the location bar.
yeah that sounds a little logical chris. I voted for ya.
Hey Chris,
I recently found this Firefox add-on from Nikitas Liogkas, called Autocomplete Manager 2.3. I haven’t tried it out, but if the extension does as advertised, then the Autocomplete Manager will show your Firefox bookmarks in the Autocomplete field as you type in the tags or keywords into the Location Bar.