BarFly by Kaapeine

INTRODUCTION

BarFly is a browser extension that takes over your bookmarks toolbar and shows you the bookmarks you've recently interacted with, LRU-cache style. You keep bookmarking and filing things into folders as you normally do; BarFly keeps the toolbar populated with the bookmarks you've interacted with most recently.

MOTIVATION

I love saving bookmarks and I've tried different ways of organizing them over the years. My current bookmarks collection is around 10 years old and there are several archives, folders for different subjects, etc. I've always felt one major pain point with using bookmarks - if I bookmarked a page to read later in some specific folder, I'd never see it again unless I browsed through that specific folder. Out of sight, out of mind. I'd forget what I'd even saved, so my folders would be filled with links I wanted to read but I'd forgotten about. If I saved things to the bookmarks toolbar, they'd be visible up-front and I'd remember to use them, but the toolbar would get cluttered very quickly as it shows you the oldest items first. To see the most recent ones, I'd have to reorganize the toolbar constantly. There's no built-in way to automatically surface the bookmarks you're actually using right now.

BarFly solves this by splitting the toolbar into two sections:

• Pinned - bookmarks you want visible always.
• Dynamic - a recency-ordered (LRU) list of bookmarks you've been visiting or adding recently, capped at a configurable capacity. Old items automatically fall off the back as new ones arrive.

The result: your toolbar always shows the bookmarks you actually need, with zero ongoing effort.

HOW IT WORKS

BarFly works entirely through the browser's native bookmark APIs - there is no custom UI. For every bookmark you visit, BarFly creates a duplicate bookmark on the toolbar and manages its lifecycle. Pinned items stay untouched while the dynamic list is constantly updated on every bookmark visit and creation. The native toolbar keeps working exactly as expected (drag, middle-click, context menus, folder dropdowns, overflow).

Since BarFly takes over the bookmarks toolbar, any bookmark saved directly to the bookmarks toolbar folder automatically gets moved into a "Saved to Bookmarks Toolbar" folder under Other Bookmarks, and BarFly shows a duplicate in the dynamic section. This is to ensure that no original bookmarks ever get deleted.

FEATURES

Pinned section

The section before the separator - bookmarks here stay pinned on the toolbar. To add to this, just visit a bookmark and once it appears on the toolbar, drag it behind the separator to pin it.

Dynamic (LRU) section

Every time you visit a bookmarked URL or create a new bookmark anywhere, BarFly adds a duplicate of it to the front of the dynamic section. The section is capped at a configurable capacity (default 10). When the cap is exceeded, the least-recently-used item drops off (the toolbar duplicate is removed; your original bookmark is untouched).

Separator

A native type: "separator" bookmark node sits between the pinned and dynamic sections, giving a real visual divider using the browser's own rendering.

Drag to pin / unpin

Dragging a dynamic bookmark past the separator into the pinned region promotes it to pinned (a copy is created in your pinned folder). Dragging a pinned item past the separator into the dynamic region demotes it. A right-click context menu item ("Pin to bar" / "Unpin from bar") does the same thing.

Two-way sync

Renaming or changing the URL of either the original bookmark or its toolbar duplicate propagates to the other. Deleting the original removes its toolbar duplicate. Deleting a toolbar duplicate is treated as manual eviction and the original is left alone.

Bulk imports and restoring backups

Bulk bookmark operations - importing an HTML bookmarks file, or restoring a full bookmarks backup - aren't supported while BarFly is active. These operations can recreate BarFly's own separator and toolbar duplicates as if they were brand-new bookmarks, which confuses the sync logic. Before doing either, use the "Pause event handlers" toggle in settings, or temporarily disable the extension, then re-enable once the operation is finished.