AcqURL for Windows

AcqURL is a free bookmarks manager, but it does much more. For instance, you can use it to bookmark and quickly access practically any application, file, or data on your PC. It includes a user-defined metasearch engine, FTP client, file launcher, and HTML generator. However, at the time of writing it offered limited support for Chrome, and a missing online Help file made this flexible yet complex program more difficult to use than it should have been. Many users may like its predefined bookmarks, though, and find themselves taking advantage of AcqURL's other features as well.

AcqURL's gridded main window displays four rows of narrow rectangular Bookmark Buttons, grouped by topic into pages. A row of tabs running along the bottom of the program's interface let us quickly access pages full of bookmarks related to Finance, Hotels, Travels, Television, Movies, Stores, Food, Wine, Shareware, Desktop, and many more, including a variety of search links. We could add, remove, and verify links, as well as change the color of individual buttons or all the buttons via color pickers.

The first thing we did in setting up the program was add Firefox and Chrome to the default selection, Internet Explorer. We were able to import bookmarks from Firefox, as well as Opera, Netscape, Web pages, the Clipboard, and Local Files, but surprisingly not from Google Chrome, despite numerous attempts. We thought exporting Chrome's bookmarks as HTML to the desktop would make it easy for AcqURL to import them, but everything we tried failed, and AcqURL usually crashed in the process. Opening AcqURL's Help file led to a dead end, and we found no CHM or any other Help file in the program's download.

We successfully created bookmarks for several applications, files, and processes, though, and we were impressed by AcqURL's range of options. It offers a lot of features and plenty of extras, such as the ability to protect files with passwords. It definitely has the feel of an app from the IE-versus-Netscape era brought into the Chrome Age, though, and it could use some updating to handle the latest browsers, not to mention a viable Help file.