In the past, both Ryan and I had been a fan of Google Bookmarks, especially because we were able to use the GMarks extension along with it. With the release of Firefox 3 though, we wanted to use the built-in system because we liked the way it handled itself. We ended up leaving Google Bookmarks behind and switched to using the Firefox 3 bookmarking system along with the Foxmarks extension which keeps our bookmarks in sync across multiple computers and serves as a good backup. We’re pretty content at this point with Foxmarks but it looks as though Google is working on a new interface for Google Bookmarks that’ll make it even better.
Those of you who currently use Google Bookmarks know that they have your web history integrated into the bookmarks page, which makes sense, but now with the new version (shown above) they take out the web history and include Notebooks. If you click on this link and you have Google Bookmarks, you’ll be able to see what the new interface looks like. At some point you’ll be able to click back and forth between Bookmarks and Notebooks in the left sidebar, but for now once you click away from the Bookmarks, you have no way of getting back to the new interface.
While this new interface makes sense because your Notebook clippings are essentially bookmarks, the “old” interface that incorporates web history makes sense as well. The best solution would be to incorporate all three together, bookmarks, notebooks, and web history, because then you would have all of your important web search information right in one central location. One downside that Google Operating System Blog points out is that with this new interface, full-text search is missing because all of your bookmarks get converted to notes.
Google has not officially launched this yet which is why you’ll probably run into a problem here or there if you decide to try it out. Just keep this in mind. Once they have it perfected and officially release it, we’ll let you know.
Like you i personally love the json implementation of FF 3 bookmarks which lets me store manage and backup my bookmarks with ease. but still i would like to use google bookmarks as a central place for storing my 1000+ bookmarks just for backup. let us see how the new interface unfolds.
If it’s true that this version excludes full text search of the bookmarks, that’s disappointing. That’s one of the few good things about Google Bookmarks. That and it’s influence on search results (at least I think they used to) are the two best things about the service.
I wrote the GMarks extension, but I have to agree with you that it isn’t as useful now that Firefox 3 has a nice bookmarking system built in. I switch between GMarks and Firefox+Foxmarks myself and have thought about discontinuing GMarks, but there are still a lot of people who use it and I don’t want to leave them out.
What I think needs to come along is some way where you can use the Firefox bookmark system to manage your bookmarks, but have them synchronize with Google Bookmarks. Before having GMarks replace my bookmarks was really nice, but now I like having the features of Firefox’s built-in bookmarking system.
Google Bookmarks is not doing it for me. I like Diigo better because of its neat Firefox integration.
At one point I used Diigo, and then switched to Google Bookmarks/ Google Notebook, and then I gave up with all of that. I found that I’d make note of something and never go back to view it, so it was hardly worth it. Now I just use the Firefox 3 bookmark system and it seems to be doing the trick!