Core How-Tos

Smart bookmarks (on-device AI)

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

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

Smart bookmarks is opt-in — 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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