Nothing here is a complaint about browsers. A bookmark was designed in the nineties to be a pointer back to a page you were reading on that computer, and it does that job perfectly. It was never designed to be a personal library you search three years later from a phone.
| Browser bookmarks | Favourl | |
|---|---|---|
| Where they live | Inside one browser, per profile. A second browser is a second, unrelated list. | One library, reachable from any browser and both mobile platforms. |
| What gets stored | A URL and whatever the page title was that day. Nothing else. | Title, description, preview image, source and your own note. |
| Search | Matches the title and URL text only, so you must remember the wording. | Searches descriptions and your notes too — find it by what it was about. |
| Saving on a phone | Possible, but awkward, and it lands in a list you never open on a laptop. | Share sheet from any app; it is in the same library as everything else. |
| Dead links | Silent. You find out when you click, sometimes years later. | Flagged, so you can clear them in one pass. |
| Organising | Folders, and a bookmarks bar that runs out of room at about twelve items. | Nested folders, manual ordering, and a note explaining why each link is there. |
| Getting out | Standard HTML export. Genuinely good. | Standard HTML export. Deliberately the same. |
The moment it breaks
It is rarely a decision. It is finding the same article bookmarked in Chrome on the laptop, in Safari on the phone, and in a message you sent yourself — and still opening a search engine to find it, because that is faster than checking three places. At that point the bookmarks are not a library; they are three piles.
When browser bookmarks are still the right answer
Genuinely, in these cases, do not move:
- You use exactly one browser on exactly one machine, and always will.
- You keep fewer than about fifty bookmarks and mostly use the bookmarks bar.
- Your bookmarks are all tools you open daily — a dashboard, a ticket tracker, a wiki. Muscle memory beats search for those.
Favourl earns its place when saving happens away from the desk and finding happens long after saving. If neither is true for you, the built-in one is free and right there.
Moving is reversible
Import is a copy, not a migration — your browser keeps its bookmarks. And the export back out is the same standard HTML file, so trying this costs you an afternoon at worst.
How to import your bookmarks →