I know people with hundreds, nay, thousands of bookmarks. I’m not one of them. Generally, I only use bookmarks for whole sites that I want to keep track of. For particular articles, FAQs, or other reference documents, I just post a link here, thinking that maybe there are other people who care about them as well. I just use this site’s search facility to dig the articles up later if I need them. So my bookmark file is already fairly small. The ones that I do have tend to go ignored, because I don’t really like to take my hands off the keyboard. So it’s easier to use autocomplete to go to frequently visited sites than it is to use a bookmark anyway. That said, Firebird and Google have rendered my bookmarks almost completely obsolete.

Firebird, like Opera before it, has a Google search field built right into the user interface. You can hit Control-K and your cursor appears there, then you just type in your search terms and go. A lesser known feature Googles what you type in the address field. If you type something into the address field (easily reachable with Control-L), and it doesn’t resolve to an actual host, Firebird submits it to Google using the programmatic equivalent of the “I feel lucky” button. So if you type “rafe” in the address field, you are automatically whisked to this site (unless you have a machine named rafe on your network). Google’s first result is generally very reliable, especially in cases where the term is well known. And plus, once you’ve used it once to find something you know you can rely on it in the future. So when I want to read Phil Carter’s weblog, Intel Dump, I just type “intel dump” in the address field. Very simple, very easy (as Chef Tell would say). So long, bookmarks.

Maybe I should advertise this site as “http://rc3.org or Google keyword: rafe”.