Desktop gives your Firefox bookmarks a new look
Want a start page full of your favorite bookmarks, but want it offline? Check out Desktop, a new Firefox add-on that lets you create a bookmarks page with a GUI.
Desktop is a new experimental Firefox extension that lets you create a customized start page with quick access to some of your bookmarks. Similar to what Opera, Chrome, and Safari offer with their bookmark start pages, Desktop shows you a live preview of each of your bookmarked pages, and takes you to each site whenever you click on that thumbnail. The big difference is, you get complete control over that layout in a way that resembles moving files around on your computer's desktop.
To begin building your start page, the extension requires that you go through and manually pick out the sites you want to see. This process can be a bit of a pain, as it only slurps up the bookmarks in your bookmarks toolbar, and not your bookmarks menu. You can, however, enter in any URL you want.
Users looking for a bit more customization can add a background image from their hard drive, and create sub-folders that let you drill down to another screen full of bookmarks. It remembers the positioning of each of your bookmarks, and shows it in the preview. The only bummer is that you can't name these sub-folders, so you have to be smart about what bookmarks you add to make them easy to remember.
This extension is still an early effort, but it's got definite promise. As much as a I love personalized start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, and My Yahoo, there's something nice about keeping that page of bookmarks local, so it will always work without requiring you to be logged in somewhere.