[dvdgsng]

> We copy-paste URLs instead of using bookmarks

Bookmarks are such a convenient and intuitive way to organize, I'm still baffled how few people actually use them. They exist like forever (1993 according to Wiki), yet there is always someone asking for links to sites/files/Tools/apps they use basically daily.

[have_faith]

> Bookmarks are such a convenient and intuitive way to organize

Despite bookmarking websites I find interesting occasionally I almost never visit a site from bookmarks. I don't remember if I bookmarked something, I forget what something was called, I expect I didn't file it in a folder that makes any sense etc. I really want to love bookmarks but like so many people I just find myself not using them for various reasons.

All browsers give very little thought to the UX of bookmarks and what users need of them. It seems to have boiled down to developers thinking that because bookmarks are technically a nested data structure of folders and links that all they need to do is give the ability for the user to manually manage this tree structure and call it a day. I think there's a wealth of missed opportunity with bookmarks but this comment would get very long if I carried on babbling.

[arantius]

I rarely click on my bookmarks, but I use them very frequently. It's a way to pin an important thing into the personal search engine that is my (Firefox) address bar.

[kortex]

The part of the bookmark UX flow I dislike is having to organize them. Especially on mobile chrome. The UX there for folder org is so bad I just have a "log" folder and basically everything goes in there, like a sightly more durable and focused history.

I use the exact same trick - just let the search bar index it.

What I really want is a system like a personal search engine. Bookmarking starts a flow which downloads the page, strips out all the garbage, indexes it in something like Elasticsearch or Bleve, tags some metadata, and organizes it by facets.

Google is decent at getting back to places I once found, but there are still 404s that Archive misses. There's also sites like stackexchange where it's easy to get drowned out by irrelevant results. It would be nice to have a more personally curated view into it.

[drewzero1]

> Bookmarking starts a flow which downloads the page, strips out all the garbage, indexes it in something like Elasticsearch or Bleve, tags some metadata, and organizes it by facets.

This sounds very useful (especially the downloading part). I don't know how many times I've tried to go back to some obscure page I've bookmarked, only to find the page has been moved or removed. Not daily or weekly, but often enough. Sometimes I'll save the info in a text document, but then I have to run a separate search on the filesystem as well as the bookmarks folder.

I've started leaving myself notes in the name of the bookmark as well, since I find myself forgetting what page names relate to which topics or projects. I know I could organize them into folders, but then I'd have to keep them organized, and I have enough trouble keeping my downloads, documents, and projects in order.

[maxjoehnk]

Joplin actually solves this quite nicely with the browser extension. Unfortunately it doesn't really work on mobile.

[drewzero1]

I'll check it out, thanks!

[EricE]

Programs like Devonthink promise such a thing, but I've found their use not quite convenient enough to keep up. Unfortunately - the promise is amazing.

[Bayart]

I've been essentially using my start up page and tabs as bookmarks for fifteen years. It's terrible but at least it's _under my nose_ and I'm reminded of those links' existence through my regular habits, which is something bookmarks do not do, out of the way as they are.

[tpm]

There are usually several more options to access/use bookmarks than manually crawling a tree structure:

- in most browsers when you type something in the url/search box it can search through your bookmarks too

- bookmark toolbars allow you to use bookmarks as a top-level or drop-down (folders on toolbar) menu

[mattowen_uk]

People have migrated away from bookmarks (in fact I'd argue that non-technical users never embraced them fully in the first place) because there is no longer any trust in that the URL you used yesterday will still be there today. Link rot is now so prevalent that even the concept of a URL as a destination is starting to become less and less important. Look at Google and it's on-going attempt to de-scope the URL bar in Chrome.

I have a personal Web based Bookmarks app, that I have self hosted for years, but even now I hardly revisit it unless I'm really stuck and a Google search can't find the site/page I need. It's got 1,000s of bookmarks in it, and I dread to think how many no longer work.

[tinus_hn]

Chrome wants to ‘descope the url bar’ because if there are no urls there are only keywords entered into Google.

[UncleMeat]

That experiment was halted because it didn't move the security metrics as much as they wanted. It is therefore very obvious that the conspiracy surrounding the motivation was ridiculous.

[coldtea]

>That experiment was halted because it didn't move the security metrics as much as they wanted

So they hypocritically said. In fact it was halted because there was blowback from users and pundits concerned with this.

>It is therefore very obvious that the conspiracy surrounding the motivation was ridiculous.

Well, I have a bridge in Brookly to sell...

[ithkuil]

You may be right, it's logically possible. We don't know.

But you seem pretty darn sure about that, and people who are too much sure about something can be easily sold another kind of bridge.

[coldtea]

Perhaps, but it's one of the safest bets to make that huge multinationals with billions of private interests do things for profit, rather than for "the customers", "to change the world", and so on.

It takes a special kind of naivety to believe something like Google's early "Don't be evil" slogan.

[Retric]

Actions can have multiple independent influences. For example, aggressively doing searches around the URL bar is decent UI and provides valuable data for search engines. It’s such a central part of the interface that a lot of innovation and experimentation occurs around the search bar.

[ezconnect]

I used to save a whole web page as HTML when I got started experiencing the early web because the page might be gone next week I had experience and afraid to lose the reference. Now a days I just use bookmarks because there's less chance the page will be gone in a few weeks. Hosting was expensive in the old days and now it's so cheap sites don't suddenly disappear anymore.

[spideymans]

Browsers really should have an option to automatically cache your bookmarks offline.

[CRConrad]

> Browsers really should have an option to automatically cache your bookmarks offline.

Isn't that the default already, and has always been? I mean, most browsers I've ever used save your bookmarks to a file on your computer.

(Maybe not Google Chrome? Yet another reason to avoid that, then.)

[taejo]

I guess spideymans meant caching the bookmarked site rather than the URL.

[CRConrad]

Ah. Yeah, I already do that, too: I cache every site to this personal cloud of mine, that I call... The World Wide Web.

[chillfox]

I used to have a lot of bookmarks and I used them a lot to return to stuff, but after half a decade a significant amount of them went no where. So I migrated to using note apps + web clipping or screenshots.

[wtetzner]

I’ve gotten in the habit of running a page through the Wayback Machine and bookmarking the archived URL. Would be nice if that was automated.

[cseleborg]

I now use bookmarks both as a shortcut to sites or apps that I use frequently and as a sort of process helper: I group bookmarks of apps, documents and even annotated pictures into a folder and open all in new tabs as a means to getting set up for a particular task.

For example when I do my bookkeeping, I can open the finance app, an instructions Google Doc, a spreadsheet for recording stuff that's causing me problems and 1-2 more pages I need in that context literally with one click of my mouse's wheel button (yeah, I'm a mouse person).

Same for when I process my inboxes, GTD-style: with one click, I open Gmail, my calendar, a picture of my notebook, a picture of the spot where I keep paper documents, the Facebook Leads Center etc, and then I just process each tab one by one in order.

[simonh]

Automatically syncing bookmarks were a game changer for me, in Chrome and Safari. The fact that desktop Safari and all my iOS devices have the same bookmarks and automatically sync changes is fantastic.

It would be nice to be able to sync between Safari and Chrome, and I'm sure there are extensions for that, but it's not too much of an issue.

[dredmorbius]

Bookmarks on mobile are an utter clusterfuck.

On Chrome, they're little more than an intentional history, with no ability to spatially organise or annotate them. Sometimes Chrome will utilise bookmarks as a type-ahead autocomplete resource, sometimes not. It mostly favours browser history, which may be useful but often is not.

On Fennec Fox, there's a vestigal organisation available (folders), as well as the ability to add descriptive text (but not specifically tags). There's no ability to re-order links within folders, or folders within the overall hierarchy.

On both, text input is so painful that any real organisation is all but impossible.

The tool that I tend to find most useful these days is the old-school "bookmarks page" --- a manually edited listing of sites that I've organised into some ad hoc folksonomy that suits my use at the time.

Desktop and console browsers are still more useful. Firefox has a hierarchical listing that I find useful, and will still occasionally use. w3m effectively creates a hierarchical page I can then further edit and navigate. I actually use that as the basis of some of my freestanding edited bookmarks pages.

[tinus_hn]

Many people use their open tabs or their recently visited sites as a replacement for bookmarks.

The problem here is that there are too many barely working crutches.

[kortex]

Guilty. There's not a great level of abstraction between bookmarks (I definitely want to remember this) and open tabs (I need this in my working memory for a day/week/month, and/or this is interesting but I don't have time to read it).

I guess session savers? Never really got into them because (at the time a few years back) they weren't great for indexing within pages. Might give it a try again.

[skytreader]

I had extensive bookmarks when I first surfed[1] the web. Then, that computer broke for one reason or another and I found myself staring at a fresh install of IE with none of my catalog. From then on I never built a bookmark catalog again.

I've replaced the functionality with various tools and tricks, from Google Reader to, nowadays, a simple dump list in Evernote with a loose tagging system. I guess now that you can sync bookmarks with Chrome and Google Account my original problem is solved but that solution came too late and old habits die hard (not to mention private data concerns).

I did take to bookmarking again lately though but mostly for work purposes: obscure pages in our wiki, some internal systems, the system we use to book leaves, etc. But if I have to change my work computer I would definitely have to ask around for those URLs again.

[1] Funny how using this term really dates my actions.

[NavinF]

> not to mention private data concerns

You can set a sync password to encrypt all chrome sync data before uploading it to Google. This will prevent sites like https://passwords.google.com from working because Google can't see your data.

[photojosh]

Am I the only person on the planet who drags-and-drops from the location bar into the filesystem (in a folder for a project usually) to create a .webloc file?

[emodendroket]

The ability to search the history is so good that it seems unnecessary