Firefox Bookmarks upcoming changes

Mozilla plans to release a couple of changes to the Firefox web browser's bookmarking system in upcoming stable channel releases.

Bookmarks have not received much love in the past couple of years and while they are still an integral part of all web browsers, they work pretty much like they did a decade ago.

Some companies try to change layout and presentation of bookmarks but for the most part, they are still just links saved locally that point to web resources.

Mozilla plans to make gradual changes to bookmarks in Firefox and release those alongside Firefox 47, 48 and 49 Stable.

As is the case with all upcoming feature additions, things may get postponed or even cancelled outright so keep that in mind.

If you are using bookmarks regularly, you may have noticed a slight change in Firefox 46 already. When you open the bookmarks library in the browser or a newer version now, the unsorted bookmarks are opened directly instead of the all bookmarks listing.

All bookmarks that are not filed into user created folders are filed under unsorted bookmarks by default in Firefox.

Starting in Firefox 47, you may notice a change in bookmarking behavior. You know probably that you can click on the bookmark star icon to add a new bookmark to Firefox.

This always added the bookmark to the unsorted bookmarks by default and if you wanted to file it in another folder, you had to click on the bookmark star again to display the bookmarks panel which allowed you to do that.

This panel opens directly in Firefox 47 and newer versions so that you are saving a click if you save bookmarks to specific folders regularly in Firefox.

Starting in Firefox 48, unsorted bookmarks are renamed to other bookmarks instead. Again, a subtle change and nothing major but it may be the better description for the default bookmarks folder.

From Firefox 49 on, Firefox users will get a list of the five most recent bookmarks that they have added to the browser when they click on the bookmarks icon or use the bookmarks menu.

This functionality is not entirely new as Firefox offers special bookmarks folders already of which one displays the ten most recent bookmarks, but it moves the last five to the main bookmarks listing which improves their visibility.

Firefox users who don't want those listed in the main bookmarks listing may right-click when the mouse hovers over the menu to display and select the hide recently bookmarked option to remove these recent entries from it.

The recently bookmarked listing replaces the special bookmarks folder on new profiles.

Closing Words

These changes are not really major as nothing gets removed but they optimize how you work with bookmarks in the Firefox web browser. You can already test all the changes in the most recent Nightly versions of Firefox.