How in the Tech

Checking Firefox bookmarks for dead links

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 2, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

The idea of having hundreds of bookmarks in your browser of choice is slowly fading away. Sites that I frequent often and therefor candidates for bookmarking are now read via an RSS subscription in Google Reader. However, there are still a sizable portion of Internet users who rely exclusively on the browser bookmark system and even though I’m a heavy RSS user, I still do bookmark sites on occasion.

With bookmarks still maintaining relevancy it is shocking to know that most browsers do not contain any sort of functionality to search and eradicate dead links, or sites that no longer exist after you’ve bookmarked them. Instead, the process generally follows the path of clicking on a bookmark made months ago, seeing the page is no longer accessible, and updating or deleting that bookmark. You only know a site doesn’t exist when you need it most. This is messy and generally not a great browsing experience, certainly not on platform that should  be considered mature.

Check Places is a Firefox extension that can search for duplicate as well as dead bookmarks in your profile. Once installed, the Check Places link is access from within your Bookmarks dialog. It’s usage is straightforward, as you may expect. Check Places effectively hits every website in your bookmark list and determines, based on the received response, whether the site is valid. The entire process only took a minute or so on my testing of a 175 bookmarks. On the completion of the scan you are presented with the results and at that point you can decide how best to proceed – such as deleting all the dead entries.

Check Places is another example of a Firefox extension that should be included with the native browser.