But that's not what i want.
i want rich bookmark behavior.
i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.
i'm not alone right?
Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default
load common favorite news sites & blogs
or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole
i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set
What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line. Firefox has a nice "Export Bookmarks to HTML" function, but it seems only available from the GUI, so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format. I tried for a while to extract them from the SQLite DB FireFox stores them in, but the layout of that DB is pretty complex and bloated. Even after a bit of fiddling, I wasn't sure I really correctly got the data out.
Firefox automatically backs up current bookmarks in lz4-compressed json under $profiledir/bookmarkbackups ($profiledir by default being like ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxx.default). Can also autoexport to an HTML file by setting the following about:config prefs:
browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML => (boolean) true
browser.bookmarks.file => (string) "/home/user/bookmarks.html"
An issue with depending on this functionality is the backup happens when closing the browser.
I had to set "browser.bookmarks.file" to "bookmarks.html". When omitting it, no file seems to be written.
https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash
and unlike some other tab management extensions, it uses native bookmarks to store things which means you can still access the stashed tabs if you sync them to firefox mobile
That's what I think we need is a way to save the whole session of the tab. Not just the last page. Or maybe a way to graph multidimensional browsing history.
My favorite feature is being able to save all tabs within a window, send a link to a co-worker, and have them open up all the tabs. It takes like 5 secs, end to end.
Best of all: if they have the histre extension as well, they can instantly open all the tabs at once and even see my highlights - it’s like being able to send a browser window state to another person!
Bookmarks are too primitive imho. It is typically treated as just one link. It is useful to know the whole context around that. How did you get there? What else where you researching? Histre saves all that for you in a tree-style history.
On the other end of the manual work spectrum is elaborate note-taking about everything ("second brain"), keeping that organized enough to be useful etc, which takes too much time for nebulous benefit.
Histre takes care of all your knowledge management needs without making you do busywork.
you can set it to show/hide, but also to "Only show on new tab" which I use. That way I don't lose screen space, but and CMD+T (Ctrl+T on non-mac) will show my most important bookmarks in the bar right away.
edit: It seems that if your new tab is set to 'blank page' it doesn't work, the default "firefox home' works though. For...reasons.
It was something like:
SELECT url FROM moz_places WHERE id IN (SELECT fk FROM moz_bookmarks)
You lose the names, the folder structure, the order and the keywords.
The HTML format FireFox can create is so nice, that for now I am willing to manually book them up to get that. Until someone can come up with a way to automate it.
Right-Click on one of the open tabs, click "select all tabs", right-click it again and click "Bookmark Tabs"
I've written a Perl script that print bookmarks from Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Edge as <title><url><description>, but maybe it's too raw.
https://github.com/kal247/App-bookmarks
I might add other formatting options (HTML or Template Toolkit) if there's enough interest.
I think a solution can be easily scripted seeing as firefox stores its internal data in multiple sqlite files.
How? Maybe you're talking about Mac's global menu bar?
Similarly the ampersand search in history.
We have nearly abandoned menu as UI elements because a CLI-alike search&narrow UI is better in general, just file managers remain lagging behind with their crappy UI...
And useful stuff like `*` in the address bar to search just bookmarks.
Since launch, they've reduced the vertical space of the tab bar/title bar, even as screens gained more pixels.
Original design- https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_12.html
The competition- https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-of-Mozi...
Was it really? When Netscape Navigator came out, 640x480 was probably the most common resolution. It used significantly more vertical space than Chrome has ever done. What happened between then and the release of chrome to make vertical space more precious?
Desktop computers have had very abundant screen-space for a long time.
Of all of the terrible UI elements that have become fashionable, this is probably the one I hate the most.
I can never imagine e.g. my mum turning the bookmark bar off, but I can certainly imagine her just totally ignoring it/not knowing what it is.
Like not letting you add tags? not tagging definitely makes you use google search more.
I update it occasionally (last updated the HTML to XHTML 1.0 in 2000, but last edited the bookmarks a month or so ago)... but these are my frequently used bookmarks.
I also use Pinboard ( https://pinboard.in/ ) for the long tail of bookmarks where I can search the full text of the bookmarked page. If I see something half interesting it goes to Pinboard, and later I can find something with just a remembered keyword or two.
For me, bookmarks remain my primary entry into the web, and is how I open every browser and new tab... it's my personal curation of how I perceive the web and how I launch into it.
I used to rely on the browser bookmarks back in Netscape. But it feels like it never improved and with every browser since it's just been relegated and gone downhill a fraction more. I still use the Bookmark Toolbar in Firefox, but really just for ephemeral things which I keep for a week or so before either deleting or moving to Pinboard or my home page. I consider browser bookmarks impermanent, partly because I use a mix of browsers for different purposes but partly because the discovery is terrible and it may as well be a black hole.
I can also search Google, Wikipedia, etc., directly from the same home page.
The only core difference that I maintain that page locally on each device and use local file sync.
Firefox on Android stopped opening local HTML files, without them giving a clear reason why, and I stopped using it.
Control+shift+B is the shortcut to hide/unhide the bookmark bar. If you unhide it, it remains visible, even next time you restart chrome. You can create bookmark folders. Then right click on the folder -> "Open all" or "Open all in new window". Etc. It's intuitive, efficient, and prominent ("Open all" is literally the FIRST item in the right-click context menu on a bookmark folder).
Also you don't even need to know a magic keyboard shortcut. On Mac at least, literally the first menu item under "View" is "Always Show Bookmarks Bar". (You can right-click on the bookmarks bar as well for a menu to keep it always visible, also intuitive.)
There's literally an entire Bookmarks menu, both in Chrome's menu and in the Mac menu bar. The third item is "Bookmark all tabs..." and below that is the list of all your bookmarks. You can also bookmark all tabs by right-clicking on the empty area of the tab bar.
Bookmark functionality is all over Chrome. It's there in every new tab page. Heck, a recent update brought a brand-new Bookmarks sidebar to Chrome as well.
Sometimes it's a legitimate complaint that features are too hidden... but in this case it seems like the poster hasn't bothered to even glance at the interface. This post makes utterly no sense.
There is a fix; add in about:config an item "browser.toolbars.bookmarks.2h2020" set as boolean False.
Vivaldi has the best bookmark management in UX/UI.
> i want to be able to quickly load common favourite news sites & blogs.
Right click on a tab > Bookmark all tabs. Vivaldi creates a new folder "Saved Tabs ($time$)". Press F2 to open quick commands and write "Saved" and it will auto complete all the folder starts with "Saved"
You can create Session for currently opened tabs too.
"You can encounter issues when you want to create a new folder, moving a bookmark to another folder may not work as well."
You can read it offline and sync it from mobile browser to PC browser.
For me this is a strength.
(Available for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... and Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-session-manage...)
It understands whether a bookmark should be opened as a pinned tab, and the tree structure of tabs saved together as a window if you use tree style tabs (in Firefox). It also saves the history of the tab, so going back on history works
It can even open the tab session window in a tab instead of the small tooltip, by clicking on the expand button in the corner. For me this is a killer feature
The only issue is that it is oriented towards saving whole windows (or even whole sessions) rather than a single tab. There is UI for saving just a tab at once but it's a bit hidden. But for your intended use cases, its workflow is perfect
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
Saving a whole window at once is much better for this
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
Saving whole windows at time is much better for restoring your working memory, specially if you use tree style tabs.
Anyway the author has a patreon https://www.patreon.com/sienori (no affiliation, I'm just a fan/user)
Now I just print to PDF any websites to bookmark into relevants folder of my local cloud drive and sync them automatically so I can access them later from any of my devices.
I think seamless bookmark is a simple case study of local-first software and that it can be a killer application for it [2].
> i want rich bookmark behavior. This points needs specifics. What do we mean by rich? what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve?
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs. > or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites. This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each. One click and half a second... very efficient!
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole. > and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set. In a rabbit hole window with X tabs -> right click on the tabs area -> select all tabs -> bookmark tabs -> then from there you can create folder 'rh 17 August' Next time you open a browser, just right click on that folder and open all. When done, just delete the folder. Once you learn this, it's a one or two second process so it's very efficient in my view.
You might argue that this option could become a one-click thing (ie a right-click menu item called 'save all tabs as bookmarks' and use an automated name) but that brings a whole new range of problems (cluttered interface for users that don't want this, and therefore decrease in overall UI efficiency)
> i'm not alone right? No, many people like me relies on bookmarks. I share the frustration others shared around the bookmarks toolbar being hidden by default. However, by using standard behaviour I manage to make bookmarks work in a pretty efficient way.
Even more efficient, you can Ctrl left click the bookmark folder, or even more even more efficient, middle click. Of course, this requires you properly curate your bookmark folders, my News folder has some two dozen bookmarks, and I definitely don't want to open all of them. But this "open all" behavior isn't recursive, so you can just put stuff you don't want to open every time in subfolders.
And don't even get me started about mobile browsers...
Sometimes when I'm investing effort in looking for URLs of one particular thing I create lists of links using markdown and hosted publicly on Gist.
Eg:
https://gist.github.com/PierBover/0ab4326cb80f47d3f95607d052...
https://gist.github.com/PierBover/cfad93ad4fb3e569ab360f0f32...
https://gist.github.com/PierBover/6eaa538f4ebfe6d56b070f9d92...
text/uri-list is the superior format
At Opera Software, where I worked for a decade, both speeddials and bookmarks was important streams of income, but it was nothing compared to the income from searches.
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
That is behavior that Firefox had more than 15 years ago, and still does. I used it frequently, until I learned about RSS, which is a vastly superior solution to the same problem.
Is it really necessary to post weird e. e. cummings-style art pieces about how you long for functionality you already have?
You're not alone. I am with you.
To add to your little annoyances, I'd add one as well – categorizing the bookmarks.
Even if I end up bookmarking a site, I find it hard to organize it nicely in a place that I can go to later on.
I'd love to put some hashtags on bookmarks to search for later.
Just me?
Replace * with ^ to search in your history or % to search in your open tabs. You can also try @google or @wikipedia to search on those websites.
I love those shortcuts! This is the kind of features that make Firefox far superior to Chrome in my opinion.
When I'm browsing, I don't want links in the top bar to tempt me to context switch, so my bookmark bar is off and my left hand rests next to my keyboard. If I want to navigate to a site, I either type in the URL if I remember, or hit Ctrl+B to pull up my bookmarks. I put the bar on the right hand side so it doesn't move the starting position of page text, and select using topic based folders (usually within a top-level folder). The whole process is very comfortable. Often I'll be lazier than that and just prefix with a * to directly pull up the link via search.
Its honestly so far ahead of everything else, I feel like I'm on another planet when people say they prefer Chrome for productivity.
I effectively solve this by creating custom websites to service those needs. RSS was invented for some of those purposes and still exists today. "SaaS productivity" is out of scope for a bookmark and I wouldn't trust a browser extension.
You want a UX that's tailor crafted to your workflow? Build one. Or find a service/FOSS project that has one built for you. I'm not sure expecting a basic feature of "save this website URL in a CSV file" should be elevated to anything more.
It also looks like this is a Google service which means if Google sunsets this service, which is not unlikely considering their history, then my bookmarks are lost.
It looks like it's also tied to my Gmail account which means if I don't have a Google account, have multiple Google accounts that I want to keep separated or lose access to my account Google account, my bookmarks are lost.
All the above scenarios, with some degree of generality, have happened to me before in one form or another.
I have 3 browser windows:
- Chrome window with personal Google Account and 2-5 tabs
- Chrome window with company Google Account and 2-5 tabs
- A third browser window as a media player (https://github.com/curzel-it/pipper)
Bookmark bar is set to always visible, and I have exactly 10 bookmarks: Company browser:
- Backlog view
- Sprint view
- Company doc tool (Confluence, Nuclino, ...)
- Calendar
- Gitlab
- Some other link Gitlab
Personal window:
- Gmail
- Hacker News
If I need any reminder for reading something later I will use the reminder app.
I will try my best to either read right away or just discard.
Once I read a tab I close it. I can reopen it later, no need to have more than 10 tabs at a time... Right?
Edge also does all or almost all these things. Bookmarks bar might be disabled by default, but iirc it is a right-click away, and only has to be configured once.
Safari also supports everything here. The “Tab Groups” feature in combination with the bookmarks bar (which safari also supports) makes it super easy to maintain persistent tab sets or just keep certain things separate (the research rabbit hole use case). Tab groups persist between sessions and sync across devices.
I think safari tab groups are intuitive, efficient (no performance impact that I can see), and super prominent.
I'm not a heavyweight user of bookmarks. But I do love vertical tabs and grouping, which can be collapsed. Moreover, they can be saved to collections (to get rid from tabs) and collection can are restored as groups. Notes can be added to collections or entries, tho I don't use it
Anyway, not that there would be some kind of search for collections - not even the URL bar detects items in there.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/02/tab-groups-in-microsoft-ed...
The rabbithole is a trap btw..
Pocket is owned by Mozilla.
In Utopia the browser would crawl a bit from the bookmark to make a completely personal search engine.
"^" does history which is almost indecently useful.
[1] https://speedtestdemon.com/productivity-hack-chrome-aliases-...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alias-bookmarks/og...
That said, it has to be really unique since browsers usually search for both title and url of the bookmark. I also have the issue that sometimes I want to search in a specific group of folders, so I'm currently working on an extension to scratch that itch.
Some pages are difficult to find again as time goes on though, so I’m a heavy bookmark user myself.
I used Firefox for 20 years and it’s better for bookmarks. Edge is only acceptable at best. My time resisting Chromium was over though. Time to give up that hill for me.
or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
I want to open a tab with a page that's an index consisting of the bookmarks of some folder in the bookmarks bar. That's obvious to me: when I'm researching some topic, I drag the interesting finds onto a folder in that bar.
Once I have a list for consulting later, I would like that list to be presented as a list of links, much like Hacker News front page, not as a menu. Menus are BAD ui for links.
Of course I'd like to add icons, re-order, save, nest, group by month, etc.
I've found that Firefox saves all bookmarks (and history) to a sqlite database, so it must be easy to program a little tool to do most things I want.
I also recommend using Firefox Containers (mostly for privacy and security reasons), and then you can also reorder you open tabs by container.
Actually that was how Firefox used to export bookmarks, as one HTML page with clickable links.
Edit: I've just checked and Firefox still can export the whole bookmarks collection. What I would love is the option to export just a folder, not the entire database.
Edit2: Now, if I just want to export a folder, I must export the whole thing, open the result in a text editor and paste the html in some of my "launcher pages".
You open the history, search for some keyword -> say you get 50 results.
Then you want to go through result 1 to 50 to find the page. But nooo, the results arent "fixed" in their positions. If you go to page 2, it jumps to position 1. If you go to page 3, it jumps to position 1.
In current Firefox it is even worse: now it just closes the whole history window, so you cannot quickly scroll through those 50 sites. The history window closes after you pick one (and moves the site as first on the list).
It seems that Chrome can at least keep the history fixed.
_shameless plug_
Have you tried websktop.com?
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
Put them to a bookmark folder and click "Open all in tabs".
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
Again, same. Stuff bookmarks to a folder, "Open all in tabs".
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
Restore your previous session in Firefox or use "Tab Session Manager" plugin.
> and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.
Which can be done.
Ask your specific questions as a reply, and I'll answer ASAP.
Or middle-click, or ctrl+click, or shift+click on the folder. (The latter will open them in a new window rather)
That part is a bit of a temporary bookmark section. And the prior part is where all the important stuff is that I use all the time. Of course I prune it when usage changes. Old stuff goes away. If I need it again, I'll find updated more recent/modern material.
Bookmarks focus on categorization, which fails miserably when you could instead organize by usage. What should be made more easily presentable: 25 years of Common Lisp links, or a section on a single page that links to the Common Lisp resources I'm using right now? How many of the older bookmarks aren't even valid or interesting anymore? Probably most of them.
That's just me, and I'm sure there are people who might agree, and many more who would hate the entire concept and need to tell me why it's wrong.
Bookmarks are basically link hoarding. They quickly become useless.
https://github.com/binarynate/omnibookmarks
I use it constantly (probably hundreds of times per day) to load common pages I use for running by business and living my life.
This leads to me saving all open tabs onto it when im rebooting and later on just removing those that i dont like quickly by window instead of one by one. It has import and export functions too so i dont need to worry about it. Furthermore because it also has an inbuild douplicate scanner.
IMHO its been a long time since I made a REAL bookmark. Otherwise browser completion has become really good, for instance "yc" will show me hackernews so its much quicker to just tab into the address bar and be on my way.
Funny enough, the bigger my screen gets the less of advertisement icons I want on it, so removing the fav bar really has gone unnoticed by me. I have more grief with firefox removing the reload button from the adress bar, but i bet thats just a random setting somewhere.
For instance: when I research a new topic i sometimes have 20 open tabs out of which i really want to bookmark none, but as long as i am working on the issue i want to be able to use them still. This is where onetab shines, because it lets me remove all, lets call them virtual bookmarks, that have been gerated by one specific window. Henceforth i can use a window more like a topic of interest and am totally able to "hibernate" on research. and when i come back i just click "open all tabs" on the index and will be goot do go:
I believe my actual point was, that I have much more stuff that i like to store temporarily, instead of a "permanent bookmark" and the ability to remove bookmarks by "window" really allows me to ogranize myself better.
On Firefox you can add tags (ctrl D to bookmark plus comma separated tags). If you then type the tag in the search bar it will show all the bookmarks with that tag.
I found it incredibly useful to find bookmarks, instead of a polluted bookmarks bar or a strictly organized tree of bookmarks.
Lately i have the need to save a couple of bookmarks again (though only a few)...so instead of using shaarli, i just saved them within firefox and set up the firefox account syncing, and it seems good enough for my needs. But, going back to my original point, yeah shaarli fit my need quite weel as far as saving remote bookmarks. If you ever don't want to maintain your own php setup, i encourage you to take a look at shaarli; really fast, stable, crazy low on resoiurces...all around great utility!
The best way I've found is to use the MarkDownload[1] extension for firefox, and download a markdown version of the page into my notable[2] folder. That way, a markdown version of the page I'm interested in becomes part of my notes, becomes taggable, searchable, gets synced, etc. And I don't need to spend time properly categorizing it. All the bookmarked sites and their content become fuzzy-searchable (fzf). Very convenient.
1. https://github.com/deathau/markdownload 2. https://notable.app
i would like to able to focus in on one folder on the sidebar and have nothing else showing. currently when you have things organised in folders and subfolders, the 1st level of subfolders are indented, the 2nd level are indented even more and eventually you have to scroll sideways to see things.
and having shortcuts to get back to frequently used folders, or at least be able to search for a folder in the sidebar. at the moment firefox only searches for bookmarks, not folders
being able to edit bookmark names and links directly without having to open separate editing window. vivaldi's sidebar does a pretty good job of this and also has a note section which can be very useful to remind your future self in a few years why you bookmarked something
Yes, annoying. I've set Firefox to export bookmarks to .html each time it closes and then use scripts to search in that HTML for folder names. Messy, but beats manually scrolling around in a very long list of bookmark folders in the Firefox UI.
Then have some Firefox "query" bookmarks selected by keywords like "g" (Google Search), "gi" (Google Image Search), "gm" (Google Maps), "d" (DDG), "w" (Wikipedia), particular shopping sites, shipping tracking number lookup, etc.
(I just realized that this is not so different from my 1996 solution, from when browsers and search engines were much more limited: https://www.neilvandyke.org/webjump/ )
On Firefox desktop I also enable the bookmarks toolbar. I put there the links to the documentation of languages and frameworks I use most. I also got hundreds of bookmarks collected since forever but I ended up not using them anymore. I park pages in tabs. One browser window per customer (different virtual desktops) and a couple of them for me.
A bookmark is generally not highly private. It would be reasonable to sync it as one syncs their notes.
It is the kind of thing one may wish to annotate in various ways.
Instead of bookmarks what I really want is markdowns files that describe my relationship with that site. I want a split screen text editor on my phone that edits the notes field in that file. I want the option to save an offline copy and fulltext search it all. If not, the text file could default to an algorithmic summary.
And most importantly, this should be in a folder of my choosing that SyncThing can access.
I've been thinking about making an external bookmark manager that uses Android's share feature.
Even in Google-sponsored Firefox bookmarks are less accessible than 15 years ago.
We should bring back web rings.
If you export the markdown to HTML, for instance with a static site creator, it's very easy to open many links by just middle-clicking them, or search the context with the browser's search function.
Might not be what you're looking for, but it has worked out better for me down the years than having an ever growing collection of bookmarks with limited searchability and indication of relevance.
None of these replace a bookmark list on its own but between all of those features my need to use a traditional bookmark list has become so small that I just don’t bother. The UX for bookmarks is there but it feels like a paper address book for telephone numbers these days.
In the past, the "description" field was available for folders and I used it to store bits of information. I just realized yesterday that the description field is not visible for folders. I fired up an old PC running XP and the description field data is still there.
Some of these are
-pin bookmarks or folders and sort the rest of bookmarks in that folder
-search bookmarks by name or tag in a group of folders
-have something like sessions where only a custom groups of folders are visible
I have been of the opinion that a set of bookmarks is a work product in the same sense. In that sense opening a browser instance might be matched to intentionally opening a portable bookmarks or comparable file.
Why I onload autoformat all my links from a source "links" text file. (I keep an editor tab open to this file, for live maintenance.)
I search for something. I save it. I’d like my search to be included so next time I search it includes the thing I found last time. Let me tag it. Let me filter my bookmarks for the last month or two. But do it all simply, not some horror show of checkboxes and text boxes.
Wider than bookmarks, I’d like to save the project state and go back to it later. Folders, browser windows, IDE, documents, bookmarks.
If you need the bar to always be there, I'm sure there's an option about it I just don't agree that the bookmark bar needs to be taking up screen space 100% of the time you're browsing.
I haven't used Chrome in a while, but doesn't the bar show up when you open a new tab (and hides when some site is on the tab)? I thought it was a nice intuitive behavior for most people.
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites
You can move those sites into a folder, and one-click-open that folder.
You're asking for a combination of bookmarks+start page+history. You can have all of those things, and it's probably not too difficult to build an extension which provides the cohesive system.
The data is already in your browser. The challenge will be deciding exactly what you want and what the UI should be.
I had this same problem so I solved it and now can't live without it :)
If you don't like my opinionated interpretation, you can search for other "startpage" browser extensions that offer similar approaches
For news, people use RSS readers. For productivity - nobody's using more than a few tools, they keep them open. For rabbit holes - there's a save all tabs feature in chrome, you save into a folder.
It sounds like you're testing the waters to see if there's demand for this and, there isn't :)
i still am able to do much of what i want natively - def not all.
like, i have a 'News' tab that i right click to open 32 media sites that give me all the ways the world is prob going to end today.
i have a bunch of 'search engine and site search' shortcuts that get me to all sorts of places - right click the location/url bar and go from there.
google/chrome type-ahead/lookahead pulls up a few of the sites i like to go to.
i've recently gotten better about opening the bookmarks with a shortcut and then searching for a keyword for some bookmark i want.
last time i built my own bookmark extension, i had 8,000+ bookmarks, i think. prob never looked at most more than once.
maybe google is just too good?
I don't use Chrome, but one reason I can imagine would be that Google would prefer you search for content/websites (so your eyeballs inevitably land on Ads).
GAFAM interest (and their equal "competitors" in Russian Fed. and China) is that the human live connected to their services, dependent on them FOR ANYTHING, having bookmarks means less search engine usage, having RSS means less aggregators usage, having local MUA, perhaps even on a local maildir NOT leaving messages on the server since perhaps you have yours at home and on it many different mails from different services, some even yours directly, means less webmail usage, witch in turn means less "cloud storage", calendar, ... usages.
To elicit more money not only they need surveillance, they also need users pay to be surveilled in exchange of breadcrumbs (the useful part of the service they offer, witch is NOT negligible BUT compared to their earning it's actually a breadcrumb service) and lock in. The best way is full integration because we are "fully integrate minds" and if such integration happen on someone else computer that owner own us de facto.
That's is. The original web, the "modern Mundaneum idea" [1] is not the actual web, the actual web is not the original companion of usenet. Is just a few-giants-own-nearly-all arena.
[1] see Paul Otlet, Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum history
I've been doing this for decades now, and it is pretty much perfect for me.
This is the most helpful extension that I've installed on my browser.
You can't even EDIT THEM (seriously) let alone order them in folders or pin them etc. Open, edit or share, that's it, and the last of which I think perhaps three people have ever done, and only by accident.
But there is another way to organize bookmarks like one would expect.
_shameless plug_
You can use Websktop webapp for this. That way you'll have a fully customizable grid of bookmarks. It could look like this:
I want tags, and better search and classification, and previews, and so much more.
Raindrop does all of that and works very well
If you’re on the Mac, you should give it a try.
Does it also have a way to deal with sets of "related" links? For example I might want to save and archive a webpage and its discussion on HN together or a collection of multiple blog posts as single entity. Currently I use org-mode but, even with org-capture, it is not frictionless and the mobile integration is lacking.
But it's a subscription!
Bookmarks are data. I don't want to have my bookmarks under the control of something that will lose them or make them inaccessible any time.
but i just wish there were some talented engineering teams at the leading browser creators (cough couch google, mozilla, MS, apple, etc) that would integrate this as a first class feature. a design goal, not a supported extension.
And I’ve never once used a bookmark. Not even once.
Maybe I’m the second class citizen?
the reasons I stopped using them (and wanted to keep 'em)
1. links dont always take you back to where you were in a website (javascript) 2. links change often and end up broken 3. google search usually pulls back up what I want
why has there been so many Ask HN questions without the “Ask HN:” before the title recently?
The mainstream vendors became extremely conservative about introducing bigger UI changes and generally innovating on user experience (because of the sheer number and diversity of users as well as classic enterprise internal MO).
That’s why we’re still stuck in the 90’s paradigm of browsing web documents where today the browser is also proto-OS running web applications and a data pre-processor (used to retreve+download from Net into local apps or to upload+classify from local apps to Net).
Even though it’s technically possible to save multiple tabs as bookmarks and reopen multiple bookmarks as tabs (with a single action), very few people do.
My theory is that they became obsolete because: 1. The bookmarks bar is very limited with active real estate and quickly becomes crammed, and thus useless for long-term use which begets large quantities of data 2. To search bookmarks you need to open Bookmarks Manager which is too cumbersome even for occasional searches (most users probably don’t even know about it) 3. Editing and maintaining them is also cumbersome due to a lack of proper tools (batch operations, quick preview, etc) 4. The older the links, the harder it is to remember names and keywords, and our visual memory is often the most reliable point of reference 5. Even if the person is willing to put in the effort to deal with #3 and #4, once saved links tend to become forgotten about because #1 and #2 and the vicious cycle of deprecation is complete
That’s why most people use the bookmarks bar as a quick launcher pad for frequently used bookmarks.
The Read Later services and native features are great for articles but not for general bookmarks that are not long-form reading. Equally, full-text carbon copy clippers such as Notion, Raindrops, Evernote, etc. are not ideal for bookmarks for the same reason. Not to mention such solutions can only save pages one-by-one (instead of in batch), and can’t open multiple links at the same time — both needed to easily and quickly switch between different tasks/contexts.
Without being able to easily save and organise large quantities of (useful) links, people resort to leaving them open until they are able to process them, contributing to a pervasive issue of tab-hoarding.
Without being able to (auto)save sessions/tabs, people end up losing a lot of valuable references. The browser is the only (major) app in a modern stack that doesn’t save work and doesn’t enable you to reopen previous work.
You can only undo recently closed tabs and recover the last state of the browser if it crashes. But you can’t save and close an online shopping session in the middle, only to reopen and pick up where you left off several days later. Why not?
Shameless plug… this is precisely why we’ve developed Tablerone: https://tabler.one/
