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The browser as the place you saved things: what a 2008 extension roundup was really describing

A 2008 list of more than fifty Firefox add-ons for sharing and bookmarking is now a record of an assumption that did not survive: that the browser would be the neutral ground where every service met.

Published 2026-08-06 · Updated — · 2,356 words · 26 sources · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

A user blog at this address posted a catalogue of Firefox add-ons for sharing and bookmarking on 2008-11-03. The earliest capture of the page that returns HTTP 200 is 2008-11-06.1 Its title claims more than fifty. The capture enumerates exactly fifty entries, each a name, a short description and a link to where that add-on could be obtained.2 Two entries link to the same file on the same host, so the fifty entries point at forty-nine distinct URLs.

None of the page’s wording is reproduced here, and none is needed. What the artefact establishes is the list: which add-ons were named, where each link pointed, and what those addresses return now. The third of those has a dated answer, and it is what this article is for.

What a shelf of add-ons assumed

Read as a set rather than as fifty recommendations, the 2008 list describes a settled arrangement. Saving a link was something a person did from inside the browser, using a button that talked to a service somewhere else. The browser supplied a stable place to stand; the services competed above it; an add-on was the adapter between the two. Nothing on the page argues for that arrangement, because in 2008 nothing needed to.

The arrangement is visible in the split of the list. Counted against the enumerated entries under the rule printed below, thirty-five of the fifty are clients for a named third-party service — the entry itself names the site or the online account the add-on works with. The remaining fifteen operate on the browser’s own bookmark store, or on storage the reader supplies: a duplicate detector, a two-pane sidebar, a tag browser for the local bookmark tags Firefox 3 had introduced, a flat editor, an extension that synchronised an XML file to an FTP or WebDAV server the user already had.2 Two entries sit on the boundary, and moving either does not change the shape of the split.a

Thirty-five of fifty is the whole finding, stated early. This was not a shelf of browser features. It was a shelf of clients, and a client is only as alive as the thing it is a client for.c

The first removal: the services behind the buttons

The named backends have dated, individually checkable ends, and they did not arrive together.

Four of the fifty entries were Delicious clients, two of them described in the entry as the official add-on, and two further entries listed Delicious among several posting destinations. Delicious passed through four owners after Yahoo and was bought by Pinboard’s Maciej Cegłowski on 2017-06-01; it went read-only on 2017-06-15, with users told there was no time pressure to move.3 An entry existed for ma.gnolia. Ma.gnolia’s database and filesystem failed on 2009-01-30, and founder Larry Halff announced on 2009-02-17 that the user data was irretrievable.4 Three entries were Digg clients and one was the StumbleUpon add-on; StumbleUpon shut down on 2018-06-30 with accounts migrated to Mix.5 One entry was Read It Later, then at version 0.9821, which became Pocket: Mozilla announced the shutdown on 2025-05-22, the service stopped working on 2025-07-08, and exports ended on 2025-10-08.6 Three entries were clients for Google Bookmarks, two of them pointing at the same file — the duplicate that makes fifty entries into forty-nine URLs. Google Bookmarks was withdrawn after 2021-09-30; 9to5Google reported on 2021-07-20 that the announcement took the form of an in-product banner carrying an “Export bookmarks” control.7

The clearest case on the list is the add-on that kept a bookmark collection alive across machines by holding a copy on a service of its own. Foxmarks was relaunched as Xmarks in March 2009; LastPass acquired it on 2010-12-02; on 2018-03-30 LastPass told users the service would close on 2018-05-01. Those dates are stated by Wikipedia and are cited here as secondary.8 As of 2026-08-06 both foxmarks.com and xmarks.com are registered and delegated to Amazon Route 53 nameservers, and neither publishes an A record; nothing answers on either host.

Sixteen years separate the first of those endings from the last, and no two of them shared a cause. That is the ordinary way this class of software ends: one backend at a time, for unrelated reasons, on dates nobody coordinated. What happened next was not ordinary.

The second removal: the API the add-ons were written against

The Firefox extensions on that 2008 shelf were written against Firefox’s XUL and XPCOM interfaces, which let an add-on reach into the browser’s own internals. Mozilla announced on 2015-08-21 that it would deprecate add-ons depending on XUL, XPCOM and XBL in favour of a new WebExtensions API, stating at the time that it had no specific timeline but that deprecation would most likely take place within twelve to eighteen months.9 On 2016-11-23 the timeline was fixed: addons.mozilla.org would stop accepting new non-WebExtension add-ons for signing in Firefox 53, and with Firefox 57 the browser would move to WebExtensions exclusively and load no other extension type on desktop.10 Firefox 57 shipped on 2017-11-14, and its release notes state that Firefox then exclusively supported extensions built using the WebExtension API and that unsupported legacy extensions would no longer work.11

That single release did to the shelf in one day what sixteen years of shutdowns did one service at a time. An add-on whose backend was healthy stopped loading on the same day as one whose backend had been gone for eight years. The dependency that removed the most software here was not commercial at all; it was an interface, and the interface belonged to someone else too.

The third removal: the catalogue that listed them

Seventeen of the fifty entries link to a listing on addons.mozilla.org, using the numeric add-on IDs of the period. As of 2026-08-06, sixteen of those seventeen return HTTP 404. The exception is Diigo: the 2008 URL, add-on ID 2792, still redirects to a live listing under a modern slug.12

The Diigo case matters because it rules out the obvious alternative explanation. Numeric-ID URLs of that vintage are still honoured: ID 1865, a number from the same range, redirected on 2026-08-06 to the live listing at /firefox/addon/adblock-plus/.13 The sixteen 404s are therefore removed records rather than a changed URL scheme. The listings are gone from the catalogue, which means the description, the version history and the author attribution for sixteen pieces of software are gone from the place that held them.

Four further entries link to project pages on mozdev.org, a community hosting service of the period. As of 2026-08-06 all four project subdomains return NXDOMAIN, and the mozdev.org apex redirects to mozilla.org. The same pattern one layer up: not a service failing, a directory closing.

Where the fifty links point, checked 2026-08-06

Each of the forty-nine distinct destination URLs in the 2008-11-06 capture was resolved once by this publication on 2026-08-06, following redirects, and recorded by the status code of the final response. Counts below are per entry, so the one URL that appears twice is counted twice.

Response at the 2008 destinationEntriesWhat is there
20013Eight still present something connected to the 2008 entry; five serve something unrelated to it
403 to an automated request; live status could not be verified2The Delicious help page; socialphile.com, which redirects to a brand-name marketplace
40423Sixteen addons.mozilla.org listings, the Facebook toolbar page, the Read It Later page and five further project pages
5xx2A free-hosting account page returning 522 and a developer’s own domain returning 500
Host does not resolve, or resolves and does not answer10Four mozdev.org project subdomains; www.foxmarks.com; www.yoono.com; suchisoft.com, the one host two entries share

Of the thirteen that answer with 200, five serve something with no connection to the 2008 entry: clipmarks.com redirects to salesforce.com; onlinebookmarkmanager.com to a domain-for-sale listing; groowe.com serves a stock-market news page at the original path; the Digg toolbar’s subdomain now serves a page containing a single image; and the annotea.org path redirects off site to unrelated commercial destinations, one of which on 2026-08-06 was an online-gambling page.b

Eight of fifty still present something connected to what the 2008 entry described: Diigo’s add-on listing, Shareaholic’s own site, the GMarks discussion group, Yahoo’s browser-extensions page, myVmarks — and three pages published by individual developers on personal or hobby hosting, for 2 Pane Bookmarks, Boox and TwitterBar. That is not a moral about individuals. It is an observation about how many parties have to keep working for a link to keep working, and the personal pages had the shortest chain: every one of the twenty-one catalogue listings on the page — seventeen on addons.mozilla.org and four on mozdev.org — is gone except Diigo’s.

What the descendants do differently

Extensions in this space still exist, and the ones that survive have a different relationship to the page. The 2008 shelf posted a pointer to a service. The current tools store a copy where the reader can reach it. Status below is repository metadata retrieved on 2026-08-06.

Whether floccus and xBrowserSync are still maintained is asked of both projects on r/selfhosted; two submissions are cited here by permalink alone, because Reddit did not serve either page to an automated request on 2026-08-06 and neither their titles nor their posting dates could be verified.1819 The answer is checkable and dated regardless. As of 2026-08-06 floccus was last pushed 2026-08-0516 and xbrowsersync/api was last pushed 2026-03-27.20 Karakeep’s v0.25.0 release of 2025-06-08 adopted floccus for bi-directional browser bookmark sync, and says so in its own release notes.21 “Is it dead” is answerable in about a minute from repository metadata, and neither of these is.

The button that replaced the bookmarklet

The public half of that 2008 arrangement — the button that posted a page to a service — became the share button embedded in the page itself. What it converted at has one well-documented public measurement, and it is old. The UK Government Digital Service reported on 2014-02-20 that between 2013-12-03 and 2014-02-17, GOV.UK URLs were shared 14,078 times to Facebook and Twitter through its own sharing buttons, against 6.8 million pageviews; the post gives the overall rate as 0.2 per cent in its text and 0.21 per cent in its table.22 That figure resurfaced on Hacker News on 2026-06-16, by way of a post published the previous day which restated the ratio as about one visitor in 476.2324

The limits of that number should be stated plainly: it is one government website, measured over ten weeks twelve years ago, and no comparable current public measurement was found. What it does establish is that the low rate was already documented and public long before the buttons began disappearing from pages.

The rule the shelf illustrates

Stated as a rule about the object rather than as advice: a saved link kept by an add-on survives only as long as every party in its chain keeps working — the service holding the record, the catalogue distributing the add-on, and the browser interface the add-on is written against. A collection that must outlive any one of those three requires a copy in a format the reader holds, in a location the reader controls. A collection that only needs to work this year does not.

One artefact on the 2008 page illustrates the other half of that rule by accident. The page’s own markup carried a link rel="search" pointing at an OpenSearch description file at this address. Every capture of that file which returned 200 carries the same content digest, from 2007-02-20 to 2011-03-15, and no capture after that date returns 200.25 That file was a declaration, not compiled code against a browser interface, and OpenSearch description files remain documented as supported by Firefox, Edge, Safari and Chrome, on a reference page last modified 2026-07-28.26 The format outlived every add-on on the page. The file written in it stopped being served fifteen years ago.

Where to find it now

The 2008 page at this address
Captures returning 200 run from 2008-11-06 to 2011-01-11. From 2012-01-11 the apex returns 404 in capture, while www still returned a 301 on 2012-06-27. No export of the page’s content exists other than the Wayback captures themselves.1
The sixteen removed addons.mozilla.org listings
Gone from the catalogue as of 2026-08-06; no export was offered. Where a Wayback capture of the individual listing exists it is the only surviving record of the version history and author attribution. The extension files themselves are not served from the 2008 URLs.
Delicious
Read-only since 2017-06-15 under Pinboard’s ownership; users were explicitly told there was no time pressure to migrate, and the API was withdrawn at the same time.3 The delicious.com help page linked from the 2008 list returned 403 to an automated request on 2026-08-06, so what it serves now could not be verified.
Ma.gnolia
Data irretrievable per the founder’s announcement of 2009-02-17. There was no export window. What users recovered afterwards came from third-party caches and feeds.
StumbleUpon
Closed 2018-06-30; accounts migrated to Mix.com rather than deleted.
Read It Later / Pocket
Service stopped 2025-07-08; an export remained available until 2025-10-08, after which remaining accounts and data were deleted.
Google Bookmarks
Withdrawn after 2021-09-30. An “Export bookmarks” control was offered in an in-product banner before the date; nothing was offered after it.
Foxmarks / Xmarks
Closed 2018-05-01 per an announcement of 2018-03-30, as stated by Wikipedia. As of 2026-08-06 neither foxmarks.com nor xmarks.com publishes an A record.
mozdev.org projects
All four project subdomains on the 2008 list return NXDOMAIN as of 2026-08-06; the apex redirects to mozilla.org. Surviving copies of those project pages are in the Wayback Machine.

References

  1. Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server API: capture index for infopirate.org/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons.” web.archive.org, n.d. http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=infopirate.org/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons&matchType=exact&output=json — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩ ↩
  2. Internet Archive. “Capture of infopirate.org/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons.” Wayback Machine, 2008-11-06. https://web.archive.org/web/20081106070714/http://infopirate.org:80/_top-50-social-networking-firefox-addons — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩ ↩
  3. Cegłowski, Maciej. “Pinboard Acquires Delicious.” Pinboard Blog, 2017-06-01. https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩ ↩
  4. Backblaze. “The Story of Ma.gnolia: A Social Bookmarking Site That Wilted with No Backup.” Backblaze Blog, n.d. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/magnolia-wilts-with-no-backup/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  5. Wikipedia contributors. “StumbleUpon.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
  6. 9to5Mac. “Mozilla announces shutdown of Pocket as it refocuses on Firefox.” 9to5Mac, 2025-05-22. https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/22/mozilla-announces-shutdown-of-pocket/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  7. Schoon, Ben. “Google will shut down ‘Bookmarks’ in September, won’t affect Maps ‘starred’ locations.” 9to5Google, 2021-07-20. https://9to5google.com/2021/07/20/google-bookmarks-closure-maps-starred-places/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  8. Wikipedia contributors. “Xmarks Sync.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmarks_Sync — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
  9. Mozilla Add-ons Blog. “The Future of Developing Firefox Add-ons.” Mozilla Add-ons Blog, 2015-08-21. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  10. Mozilla Add-ons Blog. “Add-ons in 2017.” Mozilla Add-ons Blog, 2016-11-23. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/11/23/add-ons-in-2017/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  11. Mozilla. “Firefox 57.0 release notes.” Mozilla, 2017-11-14. https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/57.0/releasenotes/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  12. Mozilla Add-ons. “Diigo Web Collector — Capture and Annotate.” addons.mozilla.org, n.d. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/diigo-web-collector/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  13. Mozilla Add-ons. “Listing served for numeric add-on ID 1865.” addons.mozilla.org, n.d. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  14. GitHub. “gildas-lormeau/SingleFile.” GitHub, n.d. https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile — retrieved 2026-08-06; repository metadata read from the GitHub REST API on the same date. ↩
  15. GitHub. “obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper, release 1.7.1.” GitHub, 2026-07-22. https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper/releases/tag/1.7.1 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  16. GitHub. “floccusaddon/floccus.” GitHub, n.d. https://github.com/floccusaddon/floccus — retrieved 2026-08-06; repository metadata read from the GitHub REST API on the same date. ↩ ↩
  17. GitHub. “zotero/zotero-connectors.” GitHub, n.d. https://github.com/zotero/zotero-connectors — retrieved 2026-08-06; repository metadata read from the GitHub REST API on the same date. ↩
  18. Reddit. “r/selfhosted submission 1kev000.” reddit.com, n.d. https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kev000/ — retrieved 2026-08-06; the page was not served to an automated request, and its title and date could not be verified. ↩
  19. Reddit. “r/selfhosted submission 1kev0zd.” reddit.com, n.d. https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kev0zd/ — retrieved 2026-08-06; the page was not served to an automated request, and its title and date could not be verified. ↩
  20. GitHub. “xbrowsersync/api.” GitHub, n.d. https://github.com/xbrowsersync/api — retrieved 2026-08-06; repository metadata read from the GitHub REST API on the same date. ↩
  21. Karakeep. “Release v0.25.0.” GitHub, 2025-06-08. https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/releases/tag/v0.25.0 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  22. Francis, Graham, and Ashraf Chohan. “GOV.UK social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks.” Inside GOV.UK, Government Digital Service, 2014-02-20. https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  23. Sethi, Ankur. “Nobody clicks your share buttons.” Ankur Sethi’s Lab Notebook, 2026-06-15. https://ankursethi.com/links/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  24. Hacker News. “I’ve always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs” (item 48561332). news.ycombinator.com, 2026-06-16. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48561332 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  25. Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server API: capture index for infopirate.org/downloads/BookmarkSearch.xml.” web.archive.org, n.d. http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=infopirate.org/downloads/BookmarkSearch.xml&matchType=exact&output=json — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
  26. MDN contributors. “OpenSearch description format.” MDN Web Docs, 2026-07-28. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XML/Guides/OpenSearch — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩

Notes

  1. The counting rule, printed so the split can be re-derived from the same capture: an entry counts as a client for a third-party service when its own catalogue entry names the site or the online account the add-on works with. An entry counts as local when it acts on the browser’s bookmark store or on storage the reader supplies, including the two entries that write to a WebDAV or FTP location the reader already runs. Two entries sit on the boundary and are counted as local under that rule: the Read It Later entry, whose 2008 description names no service and no account, and an add-on for bookmarking search engines locally. Counting both the other way gives thirty-seven and thirteen. ↩
  2. The annotea.org destination on the 2008 list no longer serves the page it served then; it redirects off site, and the destination observed on 2026-08-06 varied between requests, one of them an online-gambling page. It is named in prose and not linked, consistent with this publication’s rule for a legacy address that has been repurposed. ↩
  3. One entry named an add-on that was never a bookmarking tool at all — a URL shortener client — and several named toolbars and clients for services whose business was not saving links, among them Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. They are counted with the rest because the census is of the page as published, not of a tidier list. ↩

From about 2007 to 2010 this address served a Drupal social bookmarking community, and this path carried a user blog post of 2008-11-03 cataloguing fifty Firefox add-ons for sharing and bookmarking. Captures of the path return 200 from 2008-11-06 to 2011-01-11; the apex returns 404 in capture from 2012-01-11, while www still answered with a 301 on 2012-06-27. techrights.org still points at this address (checked 2026-08-06).