[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