From my experience, using the traditional way of bookmarking in multiple browsers ends in a complete mess. I've spent countless hours in getting my bookmarks in sync between my computers at home, at work and elsewhere and all the different browsers I use. The more my list of bookmarks grew, the more tedious the process of synchronization got.

But, as for most issues, there are several ways to solve it.

First, you may use one of the countless online services or social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com or diigo.com to get your bookmarks organized. While some of them have great features and functions to share bookmarks (if this is your intention), I never trusted them. It's far to easy to create a nice profile of you and your interests, just by analyzing your bookmarks and how often you click them. Now, call me paranoid, but I bet that's what most of these free services are doing in order to sell data to market research companies and the like. Anyways, if you don't care about this, I'd recommend having a look at delicious.com or Google Bookmarks.

Another way to get your bookmark stuff organized and synchronized between browsers is the use of tools, made for this specific task. In an quite old article "25+ Ways To Synchronize Your Bookmarks" over at mashable.com you'll find many of them listed and explained. And lately the maker of browser have begun to integrate synchronization support directly into their browsers, for example Firefox Sync or Google's sync functionality in Chrome, which is great if you're using the same browser everywhere.

Personally I have chosen another tool to organize my bookmarks. Since I am running my own website with database support, I am in the fortunate position to host my own online bookmarking services. In my case I'm using the not so well known tool Online-Bookmarks by Stefan Frech, which is quite excellent for this task.

Unfortunately development of “Online-Bookmarks” has been put on ice a while ago. Nevertheless, all the functionality you expect from such a tool (except for tagging) is available and works flawlessly. And if you, like me, are used to work with an hierarchical organization of your bookmarks (i.e. keeping them in folders and subfolders) rather than tagging them, there's nothing you'll be missing.

So, if you have the necessary prerequisites and want to keep your bookmarks private, yet not giving up the advantages of an online bookmark service, you should check it out. And if you like it, drop the author an email to let him know. Maybe it encourages him to continue development on this nice project.

And just in case you wonder: I've currently 2228 bookmarks in my database :-)

Every now and then I spend some time browsing through the extension directory of the Thunderbird email client to see if there are any new add-ons that could further enhance my email management.

While there are a ton of great add-ons, I'd like to point out a few of them that I use in my current setup and that have become sort of indispensable for me.

First, these days one cannot be without a decent calendar system. I have used (and in some cases still use) various systems for my day-to-day planning, but meanwhile I almost exclusively use Google Calendar for this purpose. Since I like to have my email and calendar in one place I installed the Lightning Calender Extension which brings multi-calendar and task-list functionality to Thunderbird and integrates seamlessly into the application.

Since I use Google Calendar, Lightning wouldn't be complete without the Provider for Google Calendar, which makes it easy to link your Google Calendar to Lightning. Once set up, your GCals behave like any other calendar in Lightning, of course with full write access.

People who know me are aware of the fact that I hardly type any kind of text outside my beloved VIM editor. Thus the External Editor extension is exactly what I need. With this extension you can define your favorite text editor and use it from within a message window to type your message.

keyconfig is an incredible productivity enhancer and by far the most important extension for Thunderbird to me. First, it allows you to re-define your keyboard and associate the built-in Thunderbird functions to the keys of your choice. I used that to have a similar keyboard experience like in Gmail. But it takes it even further by allowing you to write whole functions and assign them to a single keystroke. This allows you to do almost anything with a single press of a key. I use it, for example, to navigate through my folders (F1-F10 are associated to different, most used, folders), to move or copy messages with a single keystroke, to insert text blocks, copy message details to the clipboard and so on. For the more advanced functionality you certainly need some knowledge of Java Script and the Thunderbird framework, but I found it worth the effort to dive into that. keyconfig can boost your email efficiency like nothing else.

Nostalgy helps organizing your emails by quickly selecting folders to save or copy messages to. It selects folders as you type their names or choose them from a history list. You can also use the functionality to navigate through your folder structure. I use it to save messages to not-so-frequent sub folders for which I don't have defined a keystroke with keyconfig.

QuickText is another great productivity enhancer for Thunderbird. It enables you to define text snippets (even with variables for e. g. time, date, recipient name, attachment list, etc.) and use them with a keyboard shortcut or short text while you type your message. If you, like me, write a lot of emails you should give it a try. It's excellent.

SmartSave does a great job when it comes to exporting messages from your mailbox. It exports single messages as well as whole folders to EML files and is an ideal tool for manual backups. I mainly use it to backup my Gmail account.

Finally, for visual enhancement I use the CuteBird Theme. CuteBird is an extremely well done theme that resembles the look of Apple Macintosh applications. There's also a version for Mozilla Firefox available.

A minor extension I installed is the German Dictionary. I mention this because there seem to be a lot of people who are unaware of the fact that Thunderbird has a neat spellchecker that easily allows multiple languages.

So far these are all the extensions I use in my current setup. There are a lot more I use in Firefox, but that's a different story...