How to quickly search your bookmarks and history in Firefox 3

Posted on July 16, 2008 at 5:32 am

With the recent release of Firefox 3 from Mozilla, I’ve been able to play around with some of the cool new features of the browser. It’s definitely faster and has almost 300 new features and improvements built into it.

One of my more favorite features is the new instant search of your Firefox bookmarks and web history. They’ve built this feature directly into the address bar, which is super convenient and efficient in terms of design.

If you’re like me, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of bookmarks stored on your computer. Half the time, I can’t even remember the sites I bookmarked only a week ago!

Inside each folder above, there are several more folders, each containing a bunch of links! As you can see, there has to be a better way to find bookmarks.

Luckily, if you can remember at least one word that is in the title of the bookmarked page or in the URL, then you’ll be able to quickly find the bookmark you are looking for.

For example, I have completely forgotten which folder my bookmark for the website “Who is hosting this?” is stored in, but in order to find it, all I have to do is type in the word hosting into the address bar and Firefox will automatically search my history and bookmarks for anything containing that word:

The first entry in the list is for the website whoishostingthis.com. Perfect! You’ll also notice that there are several other entries in the list where the word “hosting” showed up either in the title or the URL.

The other thing to notice is the yellow star to the right of some entries and the ones without it. A yellow star means it’s pulling the entry from your bookmarks whereas without the star means it’s a site you have visited and that is stored in your history, but that is not bookmarked.

This new search makes it much easier to access your favorite bookmarks by simply typing in one word rather than browsing through several folders in the bookmarks menu. What do you think? What are your favorite Firefox 3 features? Enjoy!

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