Core How-Tos

Smart bookmarks (on-device AI)

Let private, on-device AI keep your bookmarks for you. It runs automatically — every page you open is quietly filed into a tidy, auto-categorised bookmark — and nothing ever leaves your machine. Turn it off anytime.

Where it works: desktop Chrome only — Windows 10/11, macOS 13+ (Ventura), Linux, or Chromebook Plus — on a recent, capable machine with space for the one-time model download. Not on phones, tablets, or other ChromeOS devices. This is fast-moving tech, so where it’s available may change.

What Smart bookmarks does

With Smart bookmarks switched on, each page you visit is automatically turned into a clean bookmark: a tidied-up title, a single category, and a few topical tags. Those bookmarks are gathered under a Smart button on the bar, with one sub-button per category the AI chooses — so your day's reading organises itself without you lifting a finger.

Revisiting a page refreshes its entry rather than creating a duplicate, and look-alike URLs (tracking parameters, trailing slashes, www, and the like) are folded together so you never end up with the same page twice.

Private by design — nothing leaves your machine

Smart bookmarks runs entirely on Chrome's built-in on-device AI (Gemini Nano). That means:

  • No network call. The model runs locally in your browser — there's no server, no API key, and no account.
  • The page body is never read. Only the page's URL, its title, and a little basic <head> metadata (such as the meta or Open Graph description) are ever looked at. The content of the page itself is never sent anywhere or even examined.
  • Everything stays on your device. Your Smart bookmarks live in your browser's local storage, alongside the rest of your bar settings.

Turning it on or off

Smart bookmarks is on by default — it starts filing pages as soon as the on-device model is ready. To turn it off (or back on), flip the toggle in the bar's options under Smart bookmarks. The options page shows a live status for the on-device model (whether it's ready, still downloading, or unsupported on your hardware or Chrome version).

If the on-device model isn't available, Smart bookmarks gracefully falls back to a simple tidy-title bookmark (a cleaned title plus the site name, filed as "Unsorted"), so you still get a usable entry either way.

Make it fit how you think

  • Role / context — add an optional one-line description of yourself (for example, "engineering manager" or "home gardener"). The AI uses it to bias categories and tags toward the way you organise things.
  • Retention — choose how long un-revisited bookmarks are kept: 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days, or Forever. Revisiting a page resets its clock.
  • Categories shown on the bar — cap how many category buttons appear; any extras fold neatly into a More button.
  • Reorganize now — re-classify every stored Smart bookmark in a single pass to tidy up the taxonomy after you change your role/context.
  • Clear all — wipe every Smart bookmark whenever you want a fresh start.

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