Surfed - Fell Off, Drowned

I recently saw an announcement for the release of version 3.0 of the Internet history and bookmarking tool Surfed. Previous app store reviews of the app stated that it had a lot of potential but that it wasn't a mature product. I had hopes that a new version would correct that.

I downloaded the app and purchased the pro version. I was disappointed to find out that the iOS version only works with Safari as I am an Edge user. After downloading the browser extensions needed for the app to work I opened a new tab in my browser to find that Surfed had taken over that feature and that if I disabled it, Surfed would not work.

One of the primary features of Surfed is recording your browsing history. It does this on a joint and per device basis. I have a desktop, a laptop, an iPad and an iPhone. Surfed consistently creates duplicate copies of both my computers causing me to constantly merge the browsing history of the copies with a master record and then delete the extras. Surfed also randomly stops or fails to record my browsing history for hours at the time.

After the 3.1 update, the new page browser feature is no longer working as it was before. I use my new browser page to hold shortcuts to frequently opened web pages and not having the ability to access those is a serious impediment to my workflow.

I imported about 1000 favorites from Raindrop.io into Surfed. The bookmarks are organized by the tags I had assigned in Raindrop and the tags in Surfed are case sensitive, which means that for many categories, I have for example, a #Blogging and a #blogging collection. There is no way to drag and drop multiple bookmarks onto the correct tag, nor is there a way to rename tags to merge them, making it necessary to retag the bookmarks one at the time. There is a workaround available that involves making a tag group I eventually discovered but the process was not intuitive and featured disappearing and reappearing tags. It was very confusing.

I plan to spend more time with Surfed to try and figure out how its logic works and to troubleshoot the reasons why it stops recording web history and why the browser page isn't functioning properly. One of the things I discovered today was that the sync function has to be run manually from the menu Like previous reviewers have noted, the app has a lot of potential, but it is still not mature enough to recommend.

The developers website explains some more of the claimed functionality of the program.