A bookmark collection can reveal quite a lot about what someone is working on, researching, planning or simply interested in. That does not necessarily mean the content is particularly sensitive. Sometimes you just do not want every person who happens to use or look at your computer to see everything you have saved.
Most bookmark managers treat every bookmark in essentially the same way.
You save it, and there it is.
We wanted a little more control than that.
Not Every Bookmark Needs to Be Public
When people think about browser privacy, they usually think about browsing history, cookies or incognito mode.
Bookmarks do not receive nearly as much attention.
But bookmarks are persistent by design. You deliberately save something because you want it to remain available.
That could be work research, financial websites, gift ideas, personal projects, private interests or simply links that are nobody else's business.
If somebody can see your bookmark manager, they can potentially see all of those things too.
We thought users should have the option to decide which bookmarks are visible and which are not.
That became the starting point for the privacy features in Caves of Wonders.
Hiding Bookmarks and Folders
One of the features we added was the ability to hide bookmarks and folders behind a password.
The idea is deliberately simple.
Sometimes you want a collection to exist in your bookmark manager without having it permanently visible alongside everything else.
Instead of requiring a completely separate browser profile or another bookmark system, Caves of Wonders lets you protect selected parts of your collection.
For us, this was less about creating some kind of high-security vault and more about giving users practical privacy inside their everyday bookmark manager.
Your bookmarks should not automatically be visible simply because somebody happens to be looking at your screen.
Privacy Mode
We also added a privacy mode for situations where you want to use Caves of Wonders without displaying everything normally.
This is particularly useful because bookmark managers are inherently visual.
A well-organized collection can make it very easy to see what someone has saved at a glance. That is normally an advantage.
It can also become a disadvantage when you are sharing your screen, working around other people or simply do not want certain information immediately visible.
Privacy mode gives users another way to control what the interface reveals.
Again, the principle is straightforward:
you should decide what other people can see.
Opening Bookmarks in Incognito Mode
We also wanted users to be able to open selected bookmarks directly in an incognito window.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for doing this.
You might want to visit a website without mixing that session with your normal browser history or existing cookies. You might be testing something, signing into another account or simply prefer to keep a particular browsing session separate.
Instead of manually copying the URL, opening an incognito window and pasting it in, Caves of Wonders can open the bookmark there directly.
Incognito mode does not make someone anonymous online, and we do not pretend that it does. Websites, networks and internet providers may still be able to observe activity.
What it does provide is separation from the normal local browsing session, which is exactly what many people actually need.
Privacy Without Turning CoW Into a Security Product
There was also an important boundary for us.
Caves of Wonders is a bookmark manager.
We are not trying to turn it into a password manager, encrypted vault or cybersecurity platform.
There are already dedicated products for those jobs, and they are much better suited to protecting genuinely sensitive information.
What we wanted was practical privacy for bookmarks.
Hide something when you do not want it visible.
Protect particular bookmarks or folders.
Open a link in incognito when that makes sense.
Keep control over what appears in your bookmark collection.
Those are relatively small features, but they solve situations that ordinary bookmark managers often ignore.
Privacy Is Part of Personalization
We eventually realized that privacy and personalization are closely related.
Personalization is about deciding how your bookmark collection should look and behave.
Privacy is about deciding what it should reveal.
Both come from the same basic idea behind Caves of Wonders: your bookmark collection belongs to you.
If you want custom backgrounds, icons and favicons, you should have that choice.
If you want certain bookmarks hidden or password protected, you should have that choice too.
A customizable bookmark manager should not only let you decide how things look. It should also give you some control over who gets to see them.
Why We Thought It Was Worth Building
None of these privacy features are necessary for the basic act of saving a bookmark.
Chrome can already do that perfectly well.
But Caves of Wonders was never built simply because browsers needed another way to store URLs.
We built it because we wanted more control over the bookmark experience.
That includes organization.
It includes customization.
And, for us, it also includes privacy.
Most of the time, your bookmarks can sit there happily doing what bookmarks have always done.
But when there is something you would rather keep private, we think your bookmark manager should give you that option.
Sometimes a cave needs a locked treasure chest.
Keep your collection yours
Add a little privacy to your cave
Caves of Wonders gives you practical control over what your bookmark collection shows and who gets to see it.
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