Firefox bookmarks, tagged and searchable by meaning

Firefox users have the strongest claim to bookmark sophistication of any browser crowd — Firefox has supported bookmark tags and keyword search in its library for years, long before anyone else bothered. The catch has always been the same: every tag is typed by hand, and search still only matches the exact words you used. Marqly’s add-on, published on Firefox Add-ons (AMO), keeps the spirit of Firefox’s system and removes the labor: every save is tagged automatically by AI, summarized, and findable later by describing what you remember — no exact words required.

Good bones, manual everything

Firefox’s bookmark library is genuinely better furniture than most browsers offer: tags, keywords, a real management window. But it’s furniture you assemble yourself, forever. Tagging every save by hand is a tax, and taxes get skipped — most Firefox users’ tag discipline lasts about three weeks, after which the library quietly becomes the same untagged pile everyone else has.

And the search, however handy, is lexical. It matches the title, URL, or tags you wrote — not what the page was about. When your memory of a save is “the essay about attention and note-taking,” a keyword search over your own three-week-old tag vocabulary usually comes up empty. Firefox Sync, meanwhile, moves bookmarks between your Firefox installs and nowhere else; the moment your day touches Chrome at work or Safari on an iPhone, the library stays behind.

What the add-on does all day

Marqly’s Firefox add-on makes saving a single toolbar click, with optional tags at save time for the disciplined. Everyone else gets AI auto-tagging: every save labeled automatically, no filing, no tag vocabulary to maintain. Saved articles get AI summaries, which is what makes a backlog reviewable — skim the summary, decide, move on.

A few features do real work beyond capture. The tab saver commits every open tab to your library in one action, a humane end to a 30-tab research session. The side-panel library puts browse and search next to the page you’re reading. The highlighter marks text on any site in six colors with optional notes — highlights persist on the page when you revisit and sync to your library. On YouTube, an AI card offers a streaming summary, a playback-synced transcript, and on Pro a chat tab answering questions from the transcript, while a bookmark button in YouTube’s action row saves videos with transcripts attached. There’s also save-as-PDF: a clean, layout-faithful PDF of any page, processed locally in your browser.

Retrieval is the payoff. Semantic search matches meaning across titles, content, highlights, and transcripts — here’s how searching by description works. It’s Firefox’s tag idea, completed: the metadata writes itself, and the search doesn’t need it to be exact.

Bring the library you already built

Your years of Firefox bookmarks come along. Firefox exports the whole library to a standard bookmark HTML file (Bookmarks → Manage bookmarks → Import and Backup → Export), and Marqly imports that format directly — the same flow as importing Chrome bookmarks, and Pocket exports and Raindrop.io collections work too. On import, the AI tags and processes everything, which is the moment a decade of accumulated saves becomes searchable by meaning rather than by whatever you named things in 2019.

After that, the library is browser-independent: your account syncs across devices, so the same saves are reachable from Chrome, Edge, and Safari extensions, any browser via the web app, and the iOS app. Boards add the sharing layer Firefox never had — group links and highlights by project, then share a board as a public page anyone can view, no account needed.

Getting started

1. Open Marqly on Firefox Add-ons and click “Add to Firefox” — setup notes live in our Firefox FAQ.
2. Sign up free at app.marqly.com; no card required. Pro — $48 a year (about $4 a month billed annually) or $8 monthly, 7-day free trial — unlocks extras like chatting with your saves.
3. Export your Firefox bookmarks to HTML and import them so the AI can organize your backlog.
4. Tomorrow, search for something you saved by describing it — that first successful vague search is the moment the tool proves itself.

A fair fit note: if you’re a Firefox purist who wants bookmarks kept entirely in the browser’s native store, Firefox’s built-in tags remain the best native system any browser ships, and Marqly won’t argue you out of it. Marqly’s case begins where manual tagging ends — collections too big to file by hand, memories too fuzzy for keyword search, and browsing that spans more than one browser. For how it stacks against the wider field, our best AI bookmark manager comparison is candid about who wins which row. The free tier makes the experiment cheap: install, import, and search your own backlog by memory.