Vivaldi browser bookmarks (and other browsers...?)

[pacharanero]

Feature request:

Would it be possible to adapt the excellent Chrome and Firefox bookmarks plugins for other browsers?

I've been a Firefox and Chrome user for some time and have got used to using Albert to launch my bookmarks, however I'm currently experimenting with using the Vivaldi browser https://vivaldi.com/ and there are quite a few other browsers around (Brave, Opera etc)

1. Is it possible to adapt the Chrome browser bookmarks plugin for Vivaldi? I had a look at the code but I have no experience with C++, maybe if it's just a case of changing where to find the bookmarks file and which browser to launch I might be able to do it

2. Could we envisage a future Browser bookmarks plugin that can be used with a wider range of browsers, or be made semi-'browser-agnostic'? ie feed in the bookmarks file path and the command to use with the bookmark url

[ManuelSchneid3r]

Bookmarks are stored in different ways. FF uses a database, while chromium uses a json file. A generic bookmark handler is impossible. But well yes, instead of writing an entire extension for each browser some sort of abstraction over the bookmarks would be nice.

[pacharanero]

Vivaldi uses a JSON file as well. It is heavily based on Chromium, and I guess is probably an Electron app under the hood.

example JSON item from bookmarks (there is some wrapping boilerplate as well)

 {
            "date_added": "0",
            "id": "86",
            "name": "Ecology Building Society - Ethical Savings & Mortgages",
            "type": "url",
            "url": "https://www.ecology.co.uk/"
         },

[ManuelSchneid3r]

You could try to add the path to the chromium extension and see if it works. This shows if they use the same format and if not i would like to see how the chromium extension behaves on bad input.

[pacharanero]

Ah, neat. It looks as though they are the same format, probably because they are both essentially based on Chromium.

I changed the path to the Bookmarks file from
/home/marcus/.config/google-chrome/Default/Bookmarks
to
/home/marcus/.config/vivaldi/Default/Bookmarks

I ran Albert from the command line to inspect the startup logging output, and Albert indexed the Vivaldi bookmarks perfectly: 11:47:48 [INFO] Indexed 93 Chrome bookmarks.

All we need now is a way to make Albert launch a different browser, perhaps this could take the form of an input box with 'command to execute with bookmark URL', in which I can put google-chrome or vivaldi or anything I like.

(Enabling a custom command here would also help people who need to start Chrome or any other browser with special command line switches enabled eg to use different GPU settings or GTK themes or whatever)

There are a few other browsers around that are based on Chromium/Electron: https://electronjs.org/apps?category=productivity&q=browser including Brave, so (assuming at least some of them use the same Bookmarks format) this might be a way to considerably broaden range browser support in Albert, without adding the headache of having to parse different Bookmarks files.

[CanadianEngineer]

I'm in a similar situation - I want to use vivaldi's bookmarks, but Vivaldi isn't supported out of the box.

My problem though, is that I'm not too sure how to set the path. Albert currently doesn't have a UI field to set the bookmarks path, and there is no default value for the path in ~/.conf/albert/albert.conf.

If someone could tell me what variable to set, that would be great!

[org.albert.extension.chromium]
enabled=true
fuzzy=true

EDIT: Temporary fix - I just created a symbolic link from the google chrome's Bookmark file to the vivaldi's bookmark file, and just never touch chrome.

cd ~/.config/google-chrome/Default;
ln -s ~/.config/vivaldi/Default/Bookmarks Bookmarks;

[ManuelSchneid3r]

This should actually be possible with the current chromium extension