Keep your browser bookmarks tidy

A friend visits and you decide to show them the amazing website you found last week. But you can’t quite remember the web address. Did it end .com or .org? How was the name spelt again? Actually, what was its name? Browser bookmarks solve this problem by keeping a record of favourite websites.

There are tools for keeping bookmarks up to date between different browsers and even to save them online, so they can be accessed from almost anywhere. These services also offer a way to organise bookmarks, even if you collect favourite web links by the hundred. Better still, they make it easy to share bookmarks with friends and discover new sites.

In this article we will explain where to find the bookmarking tools built in to your favourite web browser, how to use them and explore ways in which they can be complemented by a variety of mobile and online-bookmarking tools.

Incidentally, while we are going to concentrate on the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, we have included plenty of tips for Google Chrome and Opera users, too.

Creating bookmarks
Internet Explorer has always made it easy to record websites – though the program calls them Favorites, rather than bookmarks. With successive versions, the various buttons and menus have come and gone but the yellow Favorites star has long had a prominent place.

In Internet Explorer 7 and 8 a Favorites button sits on the left-hand side of the program window. It is labelled Favorites and is identified by a yellow star.

Internet Explorer 9 moved this icon to the right-hand side (and the star is grey until the mouse moves over it, when it turns yellow). In all cases, a click on this button will show Internet Explorer’s bookmarks. From here, a click on the Add to Favorites button will add a bookmark.

However, in all versions of Internet Explorer – and indeed, all the popular web browsers – the quickest way to save a web address is to hold down the Control (Ctrl) button on your keyboard and press D.

The Add a Favorite dialogue box will appear: a name will be suggested, which you can edit. Use the dropdown menu to select a folder in which to store the bookmark.

Firefox handles bookmarks in a similar way to Internet Explorer. The keyboard Ctrl and D shortcut works in much the same way and there is a similar star icon, positioned at the right-hand side of the Address bar (or Awesome Bar, as Firefox developer Mozilla insists on calling it).