A bookmark manager that never asks who you are

Think about what a sign-up screen on a bookmark manager actually buys you. It buys the company a record of every page you found interesting, tied to your email address, retained for as long as they choose, and readable by anyone who later acquires them or breaches them. In exchange you get sync.

That is a poor trade for a list of links, and it is avoidable. Chrome and Firefox both already ship a sync mechanism that does not require a third-party account. LinkLyst uses whichever one your browser provides.

What "no account" means concretely

• No sign-up, no sign-in, no password. Install the extension and the toolbar button saves a page. There is no first-run wizard.
• No OAuth, and no identity permission. The extension does not request the browser API that would let it read the Google or Mozilla account address you are signed into the browser with. It could not learn your email if it wanted to.
• No LinkLyst server exists. Not one that is optional or turned off by default — there is no application backend at all. Nothing is uploaded to the developer, because there is nowhere for it to arrive.
• No analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting. No third-party scripts of any kind, and no remote web fonts.

So where do the bookmarks live

In your browser's own local extension storage, on your machine. That copy is authoritative: a save is never rolled back because a network request failed or a quota was hit somewhere else. Preview screenshots sit in a device-local IndexedDB database and never leave the device at all.

Sync without an account

If you want the same playlists on your laptop and your desktop, LinkLyst can keep a compact, metadata-only copy in the browser's own profile-sync namespace — the same channel it already uses for your bookmarks and passwords, under the Google account on Chrome or the Mozilla account on Firefox that you are already signed in with. LinkLyst never sees it; the browser moves it.

That copy carries titles, URLs, and playlist structure. It deliberately excludes preview screenshots, your search and filter state, and anything saved in incognito or a private window. A Local only toggle switches it off entirely, and a confirmed erase removes it — an erase that stays visibly pending until the browser reports it finished, rather than showing a checkmark the instant you click.

The permission warning you will see

Your browser will warn at install that the extension can read and change data on websites — Chrome words it that way, Firefox as access to your data for all websites. That is worth explaining rather than glossing over.

It comes from the HTTP/HTTPS host permission, and that permission exists for one feature: when you right-click a link and save it without opening it, the extension needs to fetch that page to read its title and preview image. Those fetches are bounded — a six-second whole-response timeout, an allowlist of content types, a 512 KiB ceiling on HTML — and nothing is ever injected into a page you are reading. No script from this extension runs in page context.

Getting your links back out

Export the whole library as clean JSON, or as the standard browser-bookmarks HTML file that Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all import. Restoring a JSON export merges into what you have rather than overwriting it. No account also means no account to delete, and no data-retention policy to read.