Free favorites and bookmarks manager – Tidy Favorites

Posted on January 16, 2009 at 5:12 am

I’ve previously written about several tools to manage your bookmarks, including Only2Clicks, a cool service that lets you access your bookmarks quickly by using thumbnail previews. I personally find it much easier to search through my bookmarks when they are thumbnail snapshots of the websites rather than just plain text.

If you enjoy using Only2Clicks, then you may also like another free bookmarks manager called Tidy Favorites. It’s a free extension for both Internet Explorer and Firefox that lets you manage your bookmarks visually into convenient tabs as thumbnails.

So what makes it any better than Only2Clicks, which is completely web-based and uses thumbnails also? Lots! I think I may actually switch over to it now as my main bookmark manager and use Only2Clicks when I am on the road and cannot access my main computer.

What makes it it unique? Well, a couple of things. Firstly, you can organize your bookmarks into tabs and folders, not just tabs like with Only2Clicks. This is great because I was starting to have issues with Only2Clicks. For example, I have a tab for all of my blog-related websites, but I had no way to separate out the different sites, i.e. sites for managing my servers, blogs I read, sites for tracking advertising revenue, etc.

Using Tidy Favorites, I can create a tab for Blogging and then have separate folders for each type of activity rather than a big clump of sites. This basically makes it more hierarchal in nature, kind of like browsing folders in Explorer.

Another nifty feature is the Drop Stack, which is the sidebar you see in the first picture at the right. Any time you bookmark a site, it first appears in the sidebar panel. You can then drag it to a tab or folder or you can just leave it there as a quick way to access previously visited sites.

The other cool feature is that you can resize your thumbnails, so if you have some sites that you visit more often than others, make them a little bigger so they stand out.

However, the best feature of the program has to be the fact that you can zoom into a particular section of a web page and create a thumbnail of it that will automatically be updated on a regular basis. So what’s the use of this? Well, you can go to weather.com and create a thumbnail of the temperature in your city and throw that onto one of the tabs. Now those thumbnails will be updated and you’ll have yourself getting updated weather info in your bookmarks!

You can take snapshots of news, maps, stocks, etc and Tidy Favorites will automatically update the thumbnails! Nice! Of course, if you have a start page like iGoogle or something, this may seem a little archaic, but for people like me, it’s great.

Overall, it’s a great bookmarks manager that looks really nice and works really well. If you are not using anything to manage your bookmarks other than the default built into Firefoxs and IE, then you should check out this program! Enjoy!

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

Comments

4 Responses to “Free favorites and bookmarks manager – Tidy Favorites”

Beth Hoy said on : January 16th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

Hi Aseem,

Would you do an article about Google Chrome bookmarks and extras that may be available for it?

Thanks,
Beth

Ben said on : January 26th, 2009 at 9:02 am

hi Assem,

First of all let me thank you for this cool website. It has sea of information on so many different things.

Then about this application “tidy favourites”. I tried to install and run it, seems to be pretty handy. But doesn’t work with my firefox 3.0.5. At the end of installations, application crashes saying the tidyfavourite.exe and assbuttons.exe can not run, then buttons are can not be added to the browser. I got in touch with the programmer “Dennis” and he sent me 3.75 version. but the problem is still the same. I am not asking for any solution but just making you aware that this program has lots of bugs.

ben

RanMan said on : March 8th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

I have been using TidyFavorites with Firefox v3.0.4 through the current v3.0.7 and it works perfectly. My TidyFavorites thumbnail database has over 400 bookmarks and is completely reliable. The latest version of TidyFavorites, v3.8, even works with Firefox v3.1 Beta 2, soon to be Firefox v3.5

The small number of minor bugs that have surfaced over the last year have been resolved in a just a few days. “Dennis” always strives to provide the highest level of technical support for all of his products.

I would be lost without TidyFavorites because trying to locate, regardless of how well categorized, over 400 bookmarks would be unrealistic for me.

I don’t know and am just guessing, but Ben could be having problems because of a TidyFavorites/Firefox extension incompatibility. This sort of problem surfaces with all kinds of products, including other extensions, in Firefox because so many different extensions are available. Heck, I must have 70 extensions installed

Typically when issues like this surface Firefox technical support experts suggest disabling extensions and then re-enabling one at a time until the culprit that is causing the problem “raises its ugly head.” Just a friendly suggestion.

BTW- TidyFavorites v3.8 added some really cool features like import/export bookmarks, more skins and few other neat things. (No I do not work for TidyFavorites, just a big supporter of a program that works so well for me.)

Fritz said on : November 6th, 2009 at 9:59 am

Whats even cooler are website logos instead of thumbnail snapshots like for example 3×3Links or Symbaloo are trying to offer those.

In general online-based speed-dial services rock due to the ability to take your bookmarks with you.

Only problem so far: Those speed-dial services are often slower compared to a browser built-in solution.