Managing my bookmarks
Ready for a boring tech post? Tonight I got pissed off at Delicious, the social bookmarking website. For the past year or so, I’ve used their service to organize my browser bookmarks using private tags and the Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox.
It’s a really good service, but it’s never been perfect. The Firefox add-on doesn’t like to hold on to favicons so I wind up with blank-looking bookmarks half the time. And when they suggested I merge my Delicious account with my Yahoo account, they added an extra click to the log in process, which is super annoying. But overall, the minor annoyances haven’t been dealbreakers. In fact until now, Google Chrome’s lack of similar Delicious extensions has been a dealbreaker in my switching to Chrome full-time. Well, not anymore.
The latest update of the Delicious Bookmarks add-on has introduced a feature that deletes bookmarks with private tags from your local browser’s cache when you log out. That means I now have to log in to Delicious (through that extra layer of Yahoo bullshit) first thing every time I restart my browser so my bookmarks will sync. This will not do. Not at all.
So I’ve spent the last couple of hours moving all my browser bookmarks over to Google Bookmarks (didn’t know Google had such a thing, did you?). In Firefox, I’ve added the Google Toolbar and deleted Delicious Bookmarks. And in Chrome, Google Bookmarks are baked-in, and all I had to do was select the Google Toolbar option from the Import Bookmarks dialog.
This switch away from Delicious — which, if we’re honest, hasn’t really been doing a great job of innovating and keeping up with the crazy-fast changes in the social media landscape lately — has let me finally switch to Chrome, too. So I guess thanks are in order. Thank you Delicious for finally breaking your service enough that it forces me to abandon it and thus lets me use the browser of my choice. Thanks a bunch.
Update: apparently Google Bookmarks and Google Chrome bookmarks don’t actively sync. This seems like a missed opportunity that will hopefully be rectified. Let go of the silos, Google!
