Linkman Lite

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on November 03, 2010

Linkman Lite from Outertech is a free tool for collecting, centralizing, and managing bookmarks from 10 different browsers. It integrates with Firefox and Internet Explorer as well as the interesting Maxthon. But it's capable of much more, such as the ability to organize and sort bookmarks by keywords, comments, folders, paths, and other filters; synchronize bookmarks and links between two programs or two separate computers; automatically check and update links and delete duplicates; and import and export saved files. You can also color-code bookmarks, protect your bookmark files with a password, set hot keys, save all the links on a page, and customize the templates, interface, grids, and tools.

Linkman Lite's interface has a familiar left-hand tree view for bookmarks and a main window to display specific selections, such as a folder of links or the results of a search. A compact tabbed view for comments, descriptions, and user-defined entries as well as fields for entering ratings, changing the name or path, and entering keywords runs under the toolbar, which is packed with colorful icons controlling all the program's primary functions, including previously mentioned features as well as a Links Collector, URL validation tool, and other frequently accessed items. We clicked Import/Firefox 3 Bookmarks, and Linkman Lite navigated directly to the right folder--a good start, considering it would have taken a while to find it manually. But it loaded our most recent bookmarks in the tree view. Clicking any folder or range of bookmarks showed them in the main view. Clicking any bookmark opened the page in the selected browser, in this case, Firefox 3.6.11. Linkman Lite replaces your browser's native URL handling and promises faster browsing, and pages did seem to load a little quicker. The duplicate finder and link updater did a fine job with our collection of literally thousands of links, some years out of date. There's a recommended online tutorial and a good Help file for sorting out this flexible program's many options and features.

If you've ever switched browsers, upgraded your OS, or migrated to a new PC, you can appreciate what a pain it can be to get your old bookmarks back and how difficult life is without them. Linkman Lite makes it easy. It's by far best solution we've tried for keeping your bookmarks safe and up to date.