For quite a while now, I’ve maintainted two separate site bookmark collections. I have my most used bookmarks in my Firefox Bookmarks Folder toolbar, and then I have nearly a thousand bookmarks tagged on del.icio.us. Tagging is a wonderful way to find tiny needles in large haystacks. Over the years, I may have bookmarked several hundred CSS-related sites, so finding the ones that I bookmarked because they had lots of CSS layout templates to choose from, could be a daunting task before I started tagging everything. With tagging, all I have to do is search for “css layout” and everything I’ve tagged using those two words will immediately be pulled from my large bookmark collection.

So despite the fact that I’ve long loved del.icio.us for its tagging feature, I couldn’t help but be excited when I discovered that Mozilla had added tagging to its bookmarks in Firefox 3. I would much rather have all my bookmarks on my computer locally. Sure, if I were into sharing bookmarks socially with others, then that feature of del.icio.us would make a difference, but I’m not into sharing bookmarks. I don’t have time to peruse other people’s bookmarks. Instead, I’ve just been using del.icio.us for my own benefit so that I could tag sites to find them more easily in the future. So, it makes sense to me to bring all my bookmarks off the web and onto my computer. (I backup faithfully, so I’m not worried about losing them in a hard drive crash, and I also use foxmarks for backup/sync purposes, so I’ll never need to worry about losing bookmarks stored locally).

The question was: How do I get all my del.icio.us bookmarks – COMPLETE WITH TAGS ATTACHED – imported into Firefox 3? It’s not as simple as it seems. Luckily, however, others before me have already pondered the question and supplied us with the answer (and I thank them for it). It’s not a quick process. In fact, it takes some patience and a fair amount of free time, but in the end, it’s totally worth it.

To accomplish the goal, follow the instructions here. It’s easy to get lost in the process, and accidentally skip a step, so pay close attention. But if you follow the instructions exactly as presented, as I did, you should end up with a perfect import…tags and all.

Below is a screenshot of a search I did for the word “vector”. You can see it pulled out a few sites that I’ve tagged with that word from the nearly 1,000 bookmarks I have on my system. And it did it in the blink of an eye. I’m a happy chicklet.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why it shows up in the sidebar, and how I got my sidebar to look that way, it’s because I use a great add-on called All-in-One Sidebar. I wouldn’t want to be without it.

There are more reasons to bring your bookmarks back to the browser now. Firefox 3 has implemented some really special bookmarking enhancements. The address bar is now very smart, and entering words or tags into the address bar will result in it dropping down a list of the urls to choose from the URLs, page titles, and tags in your history and bookmarks. That saves me so much time it’s mind-boggling. To see more screenshots and learn more about all the cool bookmarking features that Firefox 3 has implemented, head on over to this article that delivers all the scoop with screenshots of everything.

UPDATE: There’s a new site that makes this whole process much easier. Woot! Check out del.icio.us to Firefox.

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