“Bookmarklet” was once a very exciting word in the world of the internet. The little Javascript apps packaged in a bookmark and placed on your browser’s toolbar are able to provide one-click, value-added functionality that can greatly enhance your browsing.
These days most people (myself included) prefer to install browser plugin or extensions that can potentially add more complex functionality than a bookmarklet and provide much more integration with your browser experience.
But the fact remains: a short snippet of code in a bookmarklet is a much more elegant and portable solution than an extension or plugin that needs to be installed and may be constantly taking up memory. An added bonus: bookmarklets will almost always work on any browser.
I recently switched to Chrome after Google’s browser added support for extensions in earnest (and in fact wrote an article about the must-have extensions for Google Chrome). I did, however, find myself transferring over to Chrome some indispensable bookmarklets that I was using on my previous browser; hence the idea for this posting was born.
This posting will present my favorite 12 useful bookmarklets that I use: Email This from Clickability, ClipNabber, Readability, PrintWhatYouLike, PageZipper, BitLet bookmarklet, FirebugLite, View Passwords, BugMeNot, Bit.ly, Map This, and Design.
(You can register for an account with Email This if you would like address book integration and the like, but that is totally optional).
The bookmarklet itself: Email This. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the Email This home page.
All you need to do is click the bookmarklet while on the page of the video you want to download. Note, however, that you need to be browsing videos on the video sharing sites themselves and not watching them embedded in blogs and the like, in order for the bookmarklet to work. (In almost all cases, clicking on the video itself no matter where it is located will transport you to the video page on the video sharing service).
Update: the bookmarklet seems to have been discontinued. However, you can now install this service as an extension for Chrome and Firefox. Get it here.
This can come in handy if the page is extremely busy and/or confusing, or if you want a single-click printable version of the page.
Update: the bookmarklet seems to have been discontinued. However, you can now install this service as an extension for Chrome .
PrintWhatYouLike is amazingly versatile; simply click on any element on the page and you could isolate, remove, resize or save it, to name a few options. It also offers the option to remove all images from a page in one fell sweep.Simply a great bookmarklet to have.
The bookmarklet itself: PrintWhatYouLike (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the PrintWhatYouLike home page.
The Bitlet bookmarklet works on a wide range of Torrent sites and will transform the torrent links to Bitlet links that open and download via Bitlet (see screenshot).
Go here To Install Bookmarklets .
I had a bookmarklet that does this in my browser for an exremely long time, but when I searched the internet to find the source I came upon the one mentioned here, which is even better than the one I had originally.
The bookmarklet itself: View Passwords (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the original View Passwords page.
I like PageZipper because it works with sites that have “previous/next” links at the bottom as well as sites, like this one, that have page numbered navigation. Some browser extensions that offer the same functionality will offer the former but not the latter.
PageZipper will display browsing arrows in the upper right corner that can be really handy for navigation (see screenshot).
The bookmarklet itself: PageZipper. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the PageZipper home page.
Unfortunately, Firebug is not available for other, non-Firefox browsers, but Firebug Lite is. It doesn’t provide the breadth of functionality that Firebug does, but for quick inspections of pages or page elements it will work just fine in a pinch, without requiring you to switch to Firefox.
Go here to Install bookmarklet .
But don’t expect the logins to work every time. BugMeNot will actually give you a percentage of times the password worked, based on user votes.
The bookmarklet itself: BugMeNot. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the BugMeNot home page.
The bookmarklet itself: Bit.ly. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the Bit.ly home page.
Update: the bookmarklet seems to have been discontinued. However, you can now install this service as an extension for Chrome and Firefox.
Go here to Install bookmarklet .
Do you have suggestions for cool bookmarklets that should have been on this list? Please let me know in the comments section below.