Desktop gives your Firefox bookmarks a new look

Desktop is a new experimental Firefox extension that lets you create a customized start page with quick access to some of your bookmarks. Similar to what Opera, Chrome, and Safari offer with their bookmark start pages, Desktop shows you a live preview of each of your bookmarked pages, and takes you to each site whenever you click on that thumbnail. The big difference is, you get complete control over that layout in a way that resembles moving files around on your computer's desktop.

To begin building your start page, the extension requires that you go through and manually pick out the sites you want to see. This process can be a bit of a pain, as it only slurps up the bookmarks in your bookmarks toolbar, and not your bookmarks menu. You can, however, enter in any URL you want.

Desktop gives you thumbnail previews of your favorite sites. You can rearrange and create new ones freely.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Users looking for a bit more customization can add a background image from their hard drive, and create sub-folders that let you drill down to another screen full of bookmarks. It remembers the positioning of each of your bookmarks, and shows it in the preview. The only bummer is that you can't name these sub-folders, so you have to be smart about what bookmarks you add to make them easy to remember.

This extension is still an early effort, but it's got definite promise. As much as a I love personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, and My Yahoo, there's something nice about keeping that page of bookmarks local, so it will always work without requiring you to be logged in somewhere.

[umbrae]

As long as the plugin respects privacy. The NoScript fiasco has definately left me sour to plugins in general, and I was a major supporter. At least, it was found and fixed, but hopefully others will learn from that mistake.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

All your info is kept locally, so it's not loading your bookmark info anywhere. The only time it calls home is to grab bookmark thumbnails :)

[drno7]

how do you begin to use this extension?

[Josh.Lowensohn]

On a freshly opened tab you right click and the menu comes up.

[edge7777]

I can't figure that out either. Funny, you have this review, you have a link to the download. There's even a link to the original site, and yet, no explanation of how to use it. I have tried the "right-click" suggested below, nothing is showing up.

[edge7777]

Dug through the users page. It doesn't autoload with a new tab, browse to chrome://desktop/content/desktop.html (that's the link for the Desktop, and you can set this as your homepage).

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Interesting. First time I opened up a new tab it came up with it for me. Maybe you had new tabs set to open to a certain page? Mine was set to blank.

[Ken_Saunders]

The "Desktop" link (http://news.cnet.com/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11781) at the beginning of this article returns the following.
"We're sorry, but the page you requested could not be found."