I find folders a rather limited approach to properly categorize my bookmarks, so I am glad that Firefox at least offers the opportunity to tag things with words of my own choice. However, by default, no simple way is offered to actually browse your bookmarks by those tags. There is a “Recent Tags” folder, but that only shows a few recent tags, as the name implies. Not that useful if the number of different tags you use exceeds the length of that list.

Turns out there is a simple enough method to get around this limitation. Open up your bookmarks menu and select Show All Bookmarks. On the left hand side you will see a list including History, Downloads, Tags and All Bookmarks. Select Tags and drag it over to your Bookmarks menu or wherever you want it to be. Now checking your bookmarks will show a Tags folder which contains all your current tags and, more importantly, automatically updates.

This is actually, as far as I can tell, a special case of smart bookmarks. What is even more fun is you can create your own smart bookmarks using the Places query URIs. This comes in handy in the specific case of tagged bookmarks if you often have to browse bookmarks that have multiple specific tags. For example, I have a tag “sport” for bookmarks related to sport and one called “log” for everything related to logging things in my life (be it books at Goodreads, shows at trakt or runs at Runkeeper and Strava). I have five bookmarks tagged with both log and sport and often enough want to reach those specific ones. With the Places query URIs, it is easy!

Open up a new tab and paste the following in the location bar:

place:queryType=1&tag=log&tag=sport

Press enter and an error will show that Firefox cannot load the page. No worries though, just bookmark the page and go check out the new bookmark. You will find it shows up as a folder and opening it shows exactly the bookmarks matching both tags.

Analysing the query further for your convenience. place: indicates to Firefox that it is dealing with a Places query. queryType=1 indicates Bookmarks should be queried. Different values than 1 query different things. tag=log and tag=sport state that Bookmarks having the tags log and sport should be matched. The & combine the different parts of the query, much like in regular URIs on the internet.

There are more things you can do with the Places query, just check out the MDN article linked earlier and fabricate things to your own needs. Enjoy!