Automatically sort Firefox bookmarks

By Martin Brinkmann on September 28, 2012 - Tags:bookmarks, Firefox add-ons

Firefox bookmarks are not sorted automatically, which may be fine as long as you do not add more than a dozen or so bookmarks to a folder. When the count rises to hundreds, you may however appreciate an option to sort bookmarks in the browser to improve the accessibility.

Bookmarks by default are unsorted in Firefox, which means that new bookmarks are simply added to the end of a folder.  Back in 2007 I explained how you can change the sort order of bookmarks in Firefox manually. For that, you need to load about:config in the browser and edit – or create if it is not existing – the preference browser.bookmarks.sort.direction there. The preference is a string value, and options include setting it to natural to sort bookmarks alphabetically from A to Z, or ascending to sort them from Z to A.

The Firefox add-on Auto-Sort Bookmarks handles the sorting automatically. Once you have installed the extension in the browser you will notice that all bookmarks in Firefox are sorted alphabetically from A to Z. The extension puts folders at the top and bookmarks below the folders by default.

You will also notice that you can’t change the order by dragging and dropping bookmarks into other locations. While you can still move them into other folders, you can’t change a bookmark’s position in its current folder anymore.

The extension has no options dialog. What you can use however are about:config parameters to configure some of its functionality. The following parameters are added to Firefox when you install the extension:

• extensions.sortbookmarks.sortbar – set to true by default. Defines whether bookmarks in the bookmarks bar will be sorted as well.
• extensions.sortbookmarks.foldersbefore – set to true by default. Puts folders on top of bookmarks in the same structure.
• extensions.sortbookmarks.autosort – set to true by default. Defines whether bookmarks are automatically sorted or not.

If you are working with lots of bookmarks, you may want to use the manual or automatic sorting options available in the web browser to put order into chaos. Bookmarks stay sorted alphabetically even if you remove the extension from the browser again.