Bookmarklets are awesome. They are like more limited browser extensions, but with the big advantage that they work everywhere, even on mobile browsers. This is a big advantage to developers who don’t have the resources to create apps and extensions on every platform.

But they they are so damned tricky to install, especially on mobile devices. Check out these convoluted instructions to install various popular bookmarklets on iOS:

The situation on Android is just as bad. Not only that, but every browser update has the potential to change things.

It would be so nice if someone created a repository:

Curated to only include useful, trustworthy bookmarklets.

With friendly install guides for latest versions of popular desktop and mobile browsers. These should be templates used to auto generate guides for every bookmarklet in the repo.

Should include links to accompanying apps or extensions on platforms where they are available, since these will offer a better experience than the bookmarklet.

I would love to point my users to such a site. It wouldn’t completely solve the problem, bookmarklets would still be for power users, but it could make them a lot more accessible.

The site could be monetized by one off submission fees — which would help avoid spam too — and promoted bookmarklets/extensions.

One risk is that Web Extentions become ubiquitous, but it doesn’t look as if mobile Chrome will support extensions any time soon. For now, a high quality bookmarklet repository site would very useful.

Anyone up for the challenge?