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Keyword bookmarks are my absolute favorite time-saving Firefox feature. I use them literally hundreds of times a day—a good system of keyword bookmarks saves all kinds of time in the browser. Unfortunately Chrome isn’t so friendly to keyword bookmarkers.

After searching high and low for a way to tweak the bookmark dialog in Google Chrome to display an option to add a keyword to my bookmarks, turns out all I needed to do was turn to the help of a few clever readers who’d emailed in how to achieve keyword bookmark bliss in Chrome. The imperfect-but-workable solution:

I just realized that keyword bookmarking is as easy as managing your search engines. Right-click the omnibox (address bar), click “Edit search engines,” and add a search engine. Use a Name you will recognize, enter the keyword you want to use, and just enter the URL for your bookmark in the URL box. Voila!

Chrome’s keyword search tool, like Firefox’s, replaces %s in the URL with your search terms. However, you can add a keyword search in Chrome without adding the %s bit at all, so when you execute that keyword, it’ll just take you to the keyword’s URL.

To clarify, check the screenshot above to how I set up a keyword bookmark for Lifehacker would look like. After setting it up, any time I want to visit Lifehacker in the future, all I have to do is type ‘l’ and hit Enter. Chrome’s autocomplete is certainly smart, and for some people is enough to replace the need for keyword bookmarks, but if you’re a keyword bookmark junkie like I am, this is an important feature to ease any browser transition.

Unfortunately it’s more of a hack than a bookmark feature, and the search engine manager isn’t nearly as robust as the regular bookmark manager, but until the Google developers decide to add this feature (my birthday’s coming up, GOOG), it’s better than nothing.

Thanks Cadence, Erik, and Rupert!

Mac OS X only: Chrome for Mac Beta just updated with support for Chrome extensions. Windows and Linux users have been enjoying suport for Chrome extensions for a while, and while Mac users who’re subscribed to the dev channel of Chrome have had extension support since January, this is good news for Mac users who prefer the relative stability of the beta release. Ready to get started installing some saucy Chrome extensions but not sure where to start? Check out these 13 excellent extensions, or just head to our Chrome extensions page to browse other extensions we’ve covered.

The release also brings with it bookmark sync, the bookmark manager, cookie manager, and task manager—so there’s a ton of good stuff to in this beta release. [Google Chrome Blog]

Firefox: Like the AwesomeBar enough to keep it enabled, but annoyed that some things appear in it when you’d prefer them not to? NotAwesome takes care of that problem.

NotAwesome is a simple Firefox extension which allows you to flag entries in your bookmark file and keep them from appearing in the AwesomeBar and the suggested entries found there.

You can flag bookmarks in two ways. When you create a bookmark you can—as seen in the screenshot above—simply check the “Hide from AwesomeBar Searches”—or if you’re retroactively fixing a bunch of bookmarks you can highlight them in the bookmark manager and apply the tag “NotAwesome” to them.

Have a handy tip for wrangling the AwesomeBar into shape? Let’s hear it in the comments. NotAwesome works wherever Firefox does.