[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.