25 Brilliant Bookmarklets to Boost Browsing

If you’re asking yourself, “What the heck is a ‘bookmarklet’?”, don’t worry… I didn’t know what one was either until I spotted an article over at TechRadar. As you likely assumed, ‘bookmarklet’ is a portmanteau of ‘bookmark’ and ‘applet’, and how they function is actually pretty cool. Are you aware that right now, you can excecute JavaScript code in your address bar, and it will actually do something?

It can, and that’s the design behind bookmarklets. We all save bookmarks, and inside of those bookmarks are the raw URLs of the page we want to return to later. Since JavaScript can be executed straight from the browser’s address bar, you can create a new bookmark, replace the URL with code of your choice, and have quick access to cool functionality… all without touching an extension or plugin.

So what can you do? Well, on the simple side of things, you can change background colors, font styles, increase font size, highlight URLs, list mailto: URLs and a lot more. Some is more useful than others, but if you create certain features you find yourself using on a regular basis, they’re well worth looking into. As an example, say you love the Verdana font (include me in that camp), you can execute this code in your address bar:

javascript:void(document.body.style.fontFamily=’verdana’)

That again is quite simple, but the functionality can get very creative also. There are many listed at the source article, so give them a try. Many don’t actually work for me, even while using the latest version of Firefox, so success on your given setup may vary.

Most modern browsers have been around for years, so you might think the developers would have perfected them by now. Yet every time you go online you’ll probably run into a host of browsing problems, from navigation issues, to pages you can’t read clearly, and disorganised sites where it’s difficult to find the information you need.