Advisorator Free: Your browser’s bookmark superpower
Howdy! I hope you’ve been enjoying these sample features from Advisorator, my weekly tech advice newsletter. I’ve got just one more that I’d like to share with you, covering some of my favorite web browsing tricks.
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The wonderful world of browser bookmarklets
Even as technology changes, some old tricks never go out of style.
In this case, I’m talking about bookmarklets, which turn your web browser’s bookmark list into a launching pad for all kinds of useful commands. You might, for instance, highlight a snippet of text on a webpage, then click a “Copy Excerpt” bookmarklet to save the text, page title, and link to your clipboard all at once. You can also use a bookmarklet to change the playback speed of web videos, perfect for getting through your Netflix backlog faster. Or, you can click on a bookmarklet to instantly remove ads and other clutter from a webpage. Once you find some bookmarklets you really like, you’ll might marvel at how you ever got by without them.
Bookmarklets have been around for roughly a couple decades now, and while you can often find browser extensions that accomplish similar things, bookmarklets have several advantages:
- They work in any browser, including ones with limited extension support such as Safari.
- While some extensions require access to your browsing history, bookmarklets have no such privacy concerns.
- Just like regular bookmarks, you can arrange them into folders or use the bookmarks bar for quick access. (If you’re logged into your web browser, they’ll also sync across all your devices.)
- Bookmarklets don’t run in the background and affect browser performance like some extensions do.
So how do you use a bookmarklet? Ideally, you would find a web page that listed out a bunch of useful ones. Then, you would drag the bookmarklets you’d like to use into your browser’s bookmarks bar. At that point, using a bookmarklet is as simple as clicking on it.
Fortunately, I happen to have produced just such a web page for you all. Head to this link, and you’ll find a bunch of useful bookmarklets that you can easily add to your browser of choice.
Here are the bookmarklets you’ll find on that page once you click on it:
- Copy URL: Adds your current webpage to the clipboard with one click.
- Copy Excerpt: Adds any text you select to the clipboard, along with the page title and a link.
- Shorten: Creates a short link of the current page using u.nu.
- Archive.org lookup: Finds historical versions of the current page using the Wayback Machine.
- Wikipedia lookup: Searches any text you select on Wikipedia.
- Add to Pocket: Saves the current page to read later in Pocket.
- Gmail this: Creates a Gmail draft with a link to the current page.
- Zip the Link: Generates a QR code for sending a web link to your phone.
- Auto-Translate: Translates the current page to English.
- Dark Mode: Converts the page to a black background with light text.
- Remove Sticky: Stops website menus from scrolling down the page with you.
- Readable: Uses Rdbl to create a custom, reader-friendly view of whatever page you’re on.
- Playback Speed: Changes the speed of most web videos. Try 1.25 for a little faster, or 0.75 for a little slower.
- Printliminator: Lets you make web pages printer-friendly by removing graphics and chunks of text.
- Bypass Paywalls: Adds a period to the end “.com” on the current page, fooling certain websites’ paywalls.
Still unclear on how this works? I made a little video showing some of my favorite bookmarklets in action.
For years, there’s been talk of websites potentially killing bookmarklet support as web standards evolve to include new security features, yet the vast majority of websites allow bookmarklets to live on. And the idea clearly has staying power; here’s a forum thread from just a month ago on the developer site Hacker News, where some of the savviest tech users on the web were sharing their favorites.
Give some of them a try yourself, and let me know what you think.
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Until next time,
Jared