Search Bookmarks, History and Browser Tabs

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

Available as Chrome Extension, Microsoft Edge Addon, Firefox Addon and Opera Addon (only an old version).

Quick Start

• Open the extension popup and type to search bookmarks, history, and open tabs.
• Press Enter to open the selected result, or right-click a result to copy its URL.
• Use prefixes to narrow the search: b for bookmarks, t for tabs, h for history and tabs, #tag, ~folder, or @group.
• Type g search term or d word to use the default custom search aliases.
• Click the edit icon on a bookmark result to edit its title, URL, tags, and favorite score.

Features

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

It supports two different search approaches:

• Precise search (case-insensitive, but exact matching): Faster, but only exact matching results.
• Fuzzy search (approximate matching): Slower, but also includes 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. Tabs support now the tab grouping feature by the browser.

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). It's also very lightweight (< 120kb JavaScript, only ~30-40kb need to load initially - including dependencies).

💡 Have a look at the Tips & Tricks collection.

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

Screenshots & Demo

Press play to start the GIF animation:

Browser Support

Browser	Main extension	Tab groups	Website favicons
Chrome	Yes	Yes	Yes, with optional favicon permission
Edge	Yes	Yes	Yes, with optional favicon permission
Firefox	Yes	Graceful fallback if unavailable	Uses placeholder icons for bookmarks/history
Opera	Old version only	Depends on the installed version	Depends on the installed version

User Documentation

• Search Strategies: Switch between precise and fuzzy approach by clicking on the FUZZY or PRECISE button in the search bar (top right), or by pressing Ctrl+F.
• 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.
  • Right-click to copy URL to clipboard.
• 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
    • Supports search within tags: Filter by tag and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: #Tag + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. #dev react).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • 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 in both folders
    • Supports search within folders: Filter by folder and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: ~Folder + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. ~Work project).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • Start your query with @: only tabs in the named group will be returned
    • Example: @Work to find all tabs in the "Work" tab group
    • Supports search within groups: Filter by group and search for text simultaneously.
      • Usage: @Group + Double Space + SearchTerm (e.g. @Work jira).
      • Tip: Press TAB to quickly insert the double-space separator.
  • Start your query with b (including space): only bookmarks will be searched.
  • Start your query with h (including space): only history and open tabs will be searched.
  • Start your query with t (including space): only open tabs 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.
  • A search term that can be interpreted as URL (e.g. example.com) can be navigated to directly.
• Emacs / Vim Navigation:
  • Ctrl+N and Ctrl+J to navigate search results down
  • Ctrl+K and Ctrl+P to navigate search results up
• 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
• Favorites: In the bookmark editor, the FAVORITE button cycles between no favorite, yellow star (+25), orange star (+50), and red star (+75). Favorite scores use the same +<number> title format as custom scores.
• Tags:
  • A bookmark title cannot start with a tag, it needs a title
  • Tags cannot start with a number. This is how the extension filters out issue / ticket numbers.
• Icons & Favicons: This extension can display favicons or result type icons next to your search results.
  • To customize this, see displayIcons and displayFavicons in the user configuration and favicons in OPTIONS.md for details on privacy, implementation, and browser support.
• 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.

📘 See OPTIONS.md for a comprehensive list of all available options.

For advanced users, there is also a JSON Schema available.

You can also browse the source in options.js for inline documentation.

When defining your custom config, you only need to define the options that you want to overwrite from the defaults. The extension will validate your input against the JSON schema before saving.

An exemplary user config can look like the following example:

searchStrategy: fuzzy
displayVisitCounter: true
historyMaxItems: 2048 # Increase max number of browser history items to load
maxRecentTabsToShow: 32 # Limit number of recent tabs shown (default: 8)

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. In particular historyMaxItems and how many bookmarks you have will impact init and search performance.

Here is a suggestion for low-performance machines:

searchStrategy: precise # Precise search is faster than fuzzy search.
displaySearchMatchHighlight: false # Not highlighting search matches improves render performance.
searchMaxResults: 20 # Number of search results can be further limited
historyMaxItems: 512 # Number of browser history items can be further reduced
maxRecentTabsToShow: 4 # Reduce number of recent tabs for better performance
detectDuplicateBookmarks: false # Disable duplicate detection for faster startup (if you don't have duplicates)

Or a more advanced example:

searchStrategy: precise
historyDaysAgo: 14
historyMaxItems: 2048
historyIgnoreList:
  - extension://
  - http://localhost
  - http://127.0.0.1
scoreTabBase: 70 # customize base score for open tabs
detectDuplicateBookmarks: true
maxRecentTabsToShow: 4
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 search (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

Results are ranked by a relevance score. Each result starts with a base score by type, then search quality, exact-match bonuses, usage signals, open-tab state, and optional custom bookmark bonuses can adjust the final order. Bookmarks can also be boosted with +<number> in the title or via the bookmark editor's FAVORITE button.

For the full scoring reference and all scoring configuration options, see:

• scoring.js — Core scoring algorithm with comprehensive documentation
• OPTIONS.md — Complete list of scoring configuration options

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.
• It does not use external favicon services. Website favicons are read from browser-local APIs or caches where supported.
• 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.
  • tabGroups: Necessary to read tab group names for the tab group search feature. The feature degrades gracefully if unavailable.
  • favicon: Optional permission, but needed if displayFavicons is enabled: Used for Chrome's native favicon API to retrieve icons for bookmarks and history. This only accesses local data.
• The extension is open source, so feel free to convince yourself :)

Privacy FAQ

• Does the extension send my bookmarks, history, tabs, or searches anywhere? No. The extension has no network or telemetry code.
• What is stored? Only your user options are stored. Bookmark edits are saved through the browser's bookmark API because they intentionally change your browser bookmarks.
• Why does it need bookmark, history, and tab permissions? Those permissions are required to search and navigate those browser data sources. You can disable bookmarks, history, or tabs in the user configuration if you do not want a source included.
• Why is favicon optional? The permission is only requested if you enable displayFavicons: true.

Local Development

Local development setup, project structure, and workflows are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md#local-development.

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://www.npmjs.com/package/js-yaml for the user options parsing
• https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons for icons
• https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/custom-css-reset/

Feedback and Ideas

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