Search Bookmarks, History and Browser Tabs

🔎 Browser extension to (fuzzy) search and navigate bookmarks, history and open tabs.

Installation via Store

• Chrome Extension
• Firefox Addon
• Microsoft Edge Addon
• Opera Addon

Features

This extension does not collect any data nor does it make any external requests (see Privacy).

It supports three different search approaches:

• Exact search (case-insensitive, but exact matching): Faster, but only exact matching results.
• Fuzzy search (approximate matching): Slower, but includes also inexact (fuzzy) matches.

With this extension you can also tag your bookmarks including auto completions. The tags are considered when searching and can be used for navigation.

The extension is very customizable (see user options) and has a dark / light theme that is selected based on your system settings (see prefers-color-scheme).

For a list of recent changes, see CHANGELOG.md.

Screenshots & Demo

Privacy / Data Protection

This extension is built to respect your privacy:

• It does not have permissions for outside communication, so none of your data is shared or exposed externally.
• The extension does not even store any information except your user settings. Every time the extension popup is closed, it "forgets" everything and starts from a blank slate next time you open it.
• There is no background job / processing. If the popup is not explicitly opened by the user, the extension is not executed.
• The extension only requests the following permissions for the given reasons:
  • bookmarks: Necessary to read and edit the bookmarks. Can be disabled via user configuration.
  • history: Necessary to read the browsing history. Can be disabled or limited via user configuration.
  • tabs: Necessary to find open tabs and to use tabs for navigation. Can be disabled via user configuration.
  • storage: Necessary to store and retrieve the user configuration. If the browser has setting synchronization enabled, the extension settings will be synced (in this case you already trust your browser to sync everything else anyway). If browser sync is disabled, the user configuration is only stored locally.
• The extension is open source, so feel free to convince yourself :)

User Documentation

• Search Strategies: Switch between precise and fuzzy approach by clicking on the FUZZY or PRECISE button in the search bar (top right).
• Keyboard Shortcut: Trigger the extension via keyboard.
  • The default is CTRL + Shift + ., but you can customize this (I personally use Ctrl+J).
• Open selected results: By default, the extension will open the selected result in a new active tab, or switch to an existing tab with the target url.
  • Hold Shift or Alt to open the result in the current tab
  • Hold Ctrl to open the result without closing the popup.
• Search Modes: In case you want to be more selective -> use a search mode:
  • Start your query with #: only bookmarks with the tag will be returned (exact "starts with" search)
    • Supports AND search, e.g. search for #github #pr to only get results which have both tags
  • Start your query with ~: only bookmarks within the folder will be returned (exact "starts with" search)
    • Supports AND search, e.g. search for ~Sites ~Blogs to only get results which have both tags
  • Start your query with t (including space): only tabs will be searched.
  • Start your query with b (including space): only bookmarks will be searched.
  • Start your query with h (including space): only history will be searched.
  • Start your query with s (including space): only search engines will be proposed.
  • Custom Aliases:
    • The option customSearchEngines allows you to define your own search mode aliases
    • Default: Start your query with g (including space): Do a Google search.
    • Default: Start your query with d (including space): Do a dict.cc search.
• Emacs / Vim Navigation:
  • Ctrl+N and Ctrl+J to navigate search results up
  • Ctrl+P and Ctrl+K to navigate search results down
• Special Browser Pages: You can add special browser pages to your bookmarks, like chrome://downloads.
• Custom Scores: Add custom bonus scores by putting +<whole number> to your bookmark title (before tags)
  • Examples: Bookmark Title +20 or Another Bookmark +10 #tag1 #tag2
• This extension works best if you avoid:
  • using # in bookmark titles that do not indicate a tag.
  • using ~ in bookmark folder names.

User Configuration

The extension is highly customizable. Finding and setting options is a bit technical, though.

The user options are written in YAML or JSON notation.

For now, there is no nice options overview, so you have to find them in the popup/js/model/options.js file in the defaultOptions object. From there you can see the available options, their names, default values and descriptions.

When defining your custom config, you only need to define the options that you want to overwrite from the defaults.

⚠ The options are not validated properly. Please make sure to use them correctly.
If something breaks, consider resetting your options.

An exemplary user config can look like the following example:

searchStrategy: fuzzy
displayVisitCounter: true
displayDateAdded: true

If you have troubles with performance, here are a few options that might help. Feel free to pick & choose and tune the values to your situation:

searchStrategy: precise
searchMinMatchCharLength: 2
displaySearchMatchHighlight: false,
searchMaxResults: 20
historyMaxItems: 200

Precise search is faster than fuzzy search. Start searching only when at least 2 characters are entered Highlighting search matches takes some effort, this can be disabled. Number of search results can be further limited Number of browser history items can be further reduced

Or a more advanced example:

searchStrategy: precise
historyDaysAgo: 14
historyMaxItems: 1200
historyIgnoreList:
  - http://localhost
  - http://127.0.0.1
colorStripeWidth: 4 # Customize width of search result color stripe
bookmarkColor: '#46e6e6' # customize color for bookmark results
scoreTabBaseScore: 70 # customize base score for open tabs
searchEngineChoices:
  - name: Google
    urlPrefix: https://google.com/search?q=
customSearchEngines:
  - alias: ['g', 'google']
    name: Google
    urlPrefix: https://www.google.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://www.google.com
  - alias: d
    name: dict.cc
    urlPrefix: https://www.dict.cc/?s=$s
  - alias: [gh, github]
    name: GitHub
    urlPrefix: https://github.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://github.com
  - alias: npm
    name: NPM
    urlPrefix: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=$s
    blank: https://www.npmjs.com

In case of making multilingual searching (CJK) correctly, you may need to tweak uFuzzy options via option ufuzzyOptions, for example:

# make CJK chars work for fuzzy search
uFuzzyOptions:
  interSplit: (p{Unified_Ideograph=yes})+

Scoring System

The scoring systems works roughly the following:

• Depending on the type of result (bookmark, tab, history) a different base score is taken (e.g. scoreBookmarkBaseScore).
• Depending on in which result field (title, url, tag, folder) the match was found, the search match gets weighted by multiplication. (e.g. scoreTitleWeight).
• This base score is now merged / multiplied with the search library score. A less good match will usually reduce the score and a perfect / highest ranked match will keep it at .
• Depending on certain conditions some bonus score points are added on top. For example, exactStartsWithBonus will add score if either the title or the url start exactly with the search term, including spaces.

For a description of the scoring options and what they do, please see popup/js/model/options.js.

Local Development

Install and Build

Prerequisite: Node.js

# install dependencies
npm install

# build extension
npm run build

The source code for the extension can be found in popup/ (HTML, JS and libs) and sass/ (SCSS/CSS).

The built extensions can be found

• dist/chrome/ for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge
• dist/firefox/ for Firefox
• dist/opera/ for Opera

Developer Installation

• Check out this extension via git

• Run npm install and npm run build (via bash / git bash)

• For Chrome / Edge:

  • Navigate to extensions page (chrome://extensions/ on Chrome and edge://extensions/ on Edge).
  • Enable "Developer mode"
  • Choose "Load unpacked" and open the root folder of this repository

• For Firefox:

  • First install and build this project.
  • Load the built extension in dist/firefox as a temporary addon in about:debugging.

Developer Workflow

• Typical developer actions
  • npm run build for a complete build
  • npm run start to start the extension locally in a browser (with mock data)
  • npm run test to run end to end tests
  • for more, see npm run

Credits

This extension makes use of the following helpful open-source projects (thanks!):

• https://github.com/leeoniya/uFuzzy for the fuzzy search algorithm
• https://github.com/yairEO/tagify for the tag autocomplete widget
• https://markjs.io/ for highlighting search matches
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/js-yaml for the user options parsing
• https://bulma.io/ for some minimal CSS base styling
• https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons for icons

Feedback and Ideas

Please create a GitHub issue to give your feedback. All ideas, suggestions or bug reports are welcome.