Without resorting to using an ActiveX or some other kind of client side coding:
Is it possible to determine if a visitor to a website arrived to a page via his bookmarks or the home page?
Personally I think its impossible, but I would like to be sure or proven wrong.
The way I am doing something like this at the moment is:
Request.UrlReferrer
If I don't find anything there, I currently deduce the user had me bookmarked.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, not in a portable foolproof manner.
Not a foolproof way. But, you can set the bookmark to have a querystring. e.g. stackoverflow.com/?bmark=y
And on server side, you can check for this.
Same short answer as Pax.
Long answer... unfortunately, it is possible to some extent in IE. You can use the saveFavorite persistence behavior to try to store some data and then see if you get it back later. If you do, your page load was from a bookmark.
You can also detect whether your page is the user's homepage - though this doesn't necessarily mean that they arrived at your page using that method - using the isHomePage method on the homePage behavior.
Please don't, though. It's violently horrible. IE's “default behaviors” are an abomination unto the Web.
There is away but it requires a clickstream datawarehouse that also parses your webserver log files at a suffcient rate.
Most that I have seen do ETL on log files in a +24h routine so the best guess is that this vistor used there bookmark last time. But then if its important to the business that you see if they used a bookmark there may be a case for +Mins ETL
But this is not fool proof either and you get the issues with IP address ranges et al but....
The Fav Icon can be used as this will be a get request on the webserver for an IP which you can also tie up to log on or other tracking mechanism