I only really use the bookmarks in the toolbar. Anything that gets bookmarked away from that is in the "will read it eventually but not really" territory.
It's because the UX for them is awful and takes up valuable real-estate unless you put them in a folder that's nowhere near your toolbar in which case you will never see them again, especially after a Mozilla update corrupts them, leaving you without the URLs you so carefully curated and with a vague sense of regret that you trusted one of the most important things (your memory) to a company that gets the largest majority of its revenue from search engine deals and the other tenth for a half-thought out proprietary bookmarks replacement they force you to waste hard drive space with.
I use the bookmark bar in Chrome but edit all bookmarks to remove their title… so I have a bar full of favicons, which is enough to have one click access to most sites I use.
> unless you put them in a folder that's nowhere near your toolbar
Hum? My bookmarks toolbar is full of folders. Some are of the "open all and close each when there's nothing interesting" kind, others are of the "will probably be useful later" kind.
In firefox, you can configure the bookmarks toolbar to only show on the new tab page, which is super useful because it doesn't steal screen space on your normal tabs.
Think some of my bookmarks date back to mosaic. About once a year I sweep them and purge a good amount of them as I have hundreds nicely organized into categories. They 'rot' so not worth keeping. Sometimes I will point them at archive but usually I can not even remember why I bookmarked them in the first place.
I was just away from the Internet for 8 years. When I checked my bookmarks 99% of them were dead links. I wonder how many from Mosaic days would still be valid?
Maybe they had a friend named Wilson on a long vacation on an island? Maybe they were the star in a day time soap where they were in a coma for 8 years.
Who would want a lifetime searchable, contextually indexed, history of all the sites you've ever been to and perhaps a couple of sub-pages automatically scraped, all stored locally to be shared at your discretion, I'm sure Google would love to add that asap.
I think I stopped using them when the browsers inexplicably lost their menus.
I don't really understand why the menus went away from the top of web browser, since desktop screen space hasn't been an issue since the late '90s, even on laptops.
You can put a bookmark folder with no title in the toolbar next to the addressbar, into which you put whatever you want. In Firefox, that works out of the box. Recently I switched to Vivaldi, and I had to use some css tweak to do it: