[entropicdrifter]

Kids these days insist that they need the "app" of something, even when it's literally the exact same thing as the webpage.

Between this phenomenon and the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers, I can't help but wonder if a huge percentage of the populace have never heard of or used Bookmarks on their web browsers before.

[lancesells]

I'm not a kid and I know about bookmarks, but I prefer using apps to apps in my browser. Electron apps I have less interest in, but I really don't like working in something like Figma (which is in the top of it's class) in the browser.

In-browser apps do all sorts of clunky things like going back a page because I'm trying to scroll right or left or hotkeys not working. Native apps feel so much better to use and I can close my browser and stay focused on the task.

[gigatree]

I think it’s less about not knowing what a bookmark is and more about just having a more direct way to access it, where it’s more high-level than just in a tab. There’s just something mentally different about opening a program from your dock as opposed to from a tab, even if they’re both basically a website.

[xd1936]

This line of reasoning was why I was hopeful that PWAs on the desktop would become first-class citizens, as far back as Mozilla Prism[1] in the late 2000s. They never really did seem to take off.

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism

[entropicdrifter]

It used to be fairly common to have web-page shortcuts back in the mid-00's. Lots of apps would add spam shortcuts to your desktop that would just open your web browser to a web page where you were encouraged to buy something/donate/start a free trial.

Anyways I think that capability still exists on all modern OSes.

[result2vino]

You aren’t as wise and smart as you think you are. Perhaps people just have different preferences to you?

[entropicdrifter]

I have no issue with others having differing preferences, just making an observation about the continual reinvention of this particular wheel

[gdhkgdhkvff]

I swear if all the ai chat apps started as fat apps and then Claude just released the first port to the web, I would be reading this exact same comment on hacker news except complaining that there was nothing wrong with the fat app.

[HelloMcFly]

I like to ALT-TAB instead of CTRL-TAB because I always have fewer applications open than I do sites. I don't have dozens and dozens of tabs always open either, but always more than my programs.

[exe34]

> the refusal of many to close tabs in their browsers

I have too many bookmarks, I'd never find anything in there. Keeping it open is the only way.

[entropicdrifter]

I was thinking more about people who use Tree Style Tabs and have nested Tab folders and such when I wrote that part. It's simple enough to save an entire session as a bookmark folder, to open an entire folder of bookmarks as new tabs (rather than needing to hibernate tabs to save ram while still keeping them "open"), and to search through bookmarks ad-hoc. Bookmark folders can be infinitely nested, categorized, ordered by when you were looking (though searching through your browser history also works for that), combined, copied, pasted, moved, put into or removed from the bookmark toolbar.

It's an incredibly flexible system that allows for a massive variety of workflows and it feels like people just keep finding ways to recreate it, but worse: less platform-independent, eating more system resources, dependent on third-party plugins, or (in the case of using an app for everything) eating up orders of magnitude more storage space at rest.

[TeMPOraL]

It's simple. Tabs keep state[0], bookmarks don't.

The web went to shit a long time ago; you can't rely on being able to bookmark a site and then go back to where you were. Half the sites are infinite scroll, or dynamically generated pages, or SPAs[1], or some other ephemeral invention du jour. Keeping a tab open gives you some chance to return to where you were for some time; bookmarks are just giving up.

--

[0] - At least until the browser decides to screw with you and unloads the tabs you needed. Firefox on Android is particularly aggressive at that, which incidentally makes PWAs unusable, too.

[1] - You're lucky when those let you make a bookmark that won't drop you back to index page when loaded.

[entropicdrifter]

Now that's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered.

I suppose I actively avoid most infinite scroll webpages because to me they feel like they're meant for "consumption" and visual appeal rather than actual usefulness and I tend to think of webpages as tools, either for information or socializing. As a dev I'm certainly biased towards sites like Github or news sites, which are both meticulous at sending you to the page you were linked to specifically rather than redirecting you elsewhere.

I do tend to keep a few tabs open at any given time, but only when I'm in the middle of reading something like an article or blog post. I try to close down my tabs to something like 5-8 max weekly, if not daily. Something about closing out the mental context and making a conscious decision about whether I really want to finish reading something or if it was boring me feels very freeing once I've decided to close the tab is deeply satisfying to me.

[xster]

I have ChatGPT app and Claude and Gemini PWAs on my dock. I gravitate towards using ChatGPT much more. It's just faster vs launching Chromium for each small query.

[jerpint]

Having a hotkey to access the app removes a lot of friction

[zarmin]

Dinosaurs these days insist that there's only one way to do things, even when most apps are literally designed to accommodate different workflows.

[entropicdrifter]

Please, tell me where I said there's only one way to do things.

My question was not meant as a critique of people who know what they're doing. I'm not talking about engineers or sys-admins like the typical HN crowd, I'm talking about the population at large. The average person understands their devices just enough to get them to work the way they want. It stands to reason that a fairly large percentage of the modern population, used to using apps for every individual service, may never have had a use for browser bookmarks and may therefore never have even attempted to use them.

I have a few friends who work as professors and tell me stories about how their students don't know how to navigate a filesystem in Windows. Why would a person like that, for instance, have bothered to learn what a bookmark is vs just keeping a tab open?