Bookmark dial

Displays the contents of a bookmark folder including a thumbnail when you start the browser and open a new tab (instead of frequently visited sites, suggestions and sponsored links). Similar extensions call this speed dial. In most cases they do not use bookmarks and/or require you to manually tweak settings to change the layout of the thumbnails.

By default, Bookmark Dial arranges and sizes (up to a maximum size) the thumbnails to be as big as possible while covering as much space as possible. As a bookmark folder is used, sync comes with your browser and you can use the usual keyboard shortcuts, menu entries and buttons for bookmark handling to add, edit and delete dial items. You can drag and drop thumbnails to change the order.

Thumbnails are generated from a snapshot of the visible area of a bookmarked webpage. If a bookmark has no thumbnail yet, a snapshot is taken automatically when the bookmark is opened in the currently active tab or if it is loaded in a background tab and the tab becomes active. To ensure the best result, the generation starts when the page has completed loading. There is also a button in the popup opened from the toolbar icon that allows you to create a new snapshot (disabled for URLs that do not belong to bookmarks from the configured folder). The latter allows you to capture the part of a webpage that you want as you can scroll and resize the window before taking the snapshot.

Getting Started

Configure the bookmark folder and check available settings in the popup opened from the toolbar icon or from the extension page in your browser's extension manager. Open a new tab.

Customisation

You can set a background colour and/or image (including sizing) in the preferences. There is also a text field to provide custom CSS.

Known Issues

• if a bookmark redirects to another page, thumbnail generation will fail as the URL of the bookmark will not match the page in the currently active tab
• color chooser and file chooser close the popup - to change settings using them, go to the extension page in your browser's extension manager
• Firefox:
  • the location bar is not cleared when a new tab is opened - this should be fixed in Firefox 57 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372996)
  • compatibility issues with New Tab Override extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/)
• special URLs like about: chrome: file: etc can cause problems - thumbnail generation might fail or bookmarks won't open - due to limitations in the webextension API

Feedback

You can report bugs or make feature requests on https://github.com/sblask/webextension-bookmark-dial

Patches are welcome.