[WorldMaker]

This feels like it relates to why for many Tabs seem to be the "new" bookmarks. Browser bookmark UX stagnated at some point in the 90s, but tab UX keeps improving. Especially on mobile devices, tabs keep screenshots of at least their last state. Users often have a general sense of time from their order of tabs.

[Night_Thastus]

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I love bookmarks. They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important. I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later.

To me they're completely different purposes. Tabs are short term - for whatever you're working on right now. It's like a short-term cache, a worktable to keep everything in your head right now easily accessible.

Bookmarks are long term, like a filing cabinet. You may not be using it today, but you want to hold onto it for later.

If I had to use either one for the other purpose, it would suck.

[drivers99]

> I have hundreds of bookmarks that I may not be using right now but end up being useful years later.

I pulled up an old bookmark file that I had backed up on CD-R and pretty much every single link was dead. So at best, it was just a memory of something that I thought was worth saving at one point and might go back to someday. So more like what you said: "history of things I've found that are interesting" but not being able to use them to get the website (unless it's in Wayback Machine perhaps).

[Night_Thastus]

Weird. For me it's quite rare that I run into a dead link. I think I ran into one Youtube music video recently that was taken down for Copyright, and an old niche forum that went down. That's about it. The rest are still valid.

[b33j0r]

I think that we are information hoarders by nature, and that it is mentally taxing to discard something potentially useful forever.

So we file it away to relieve that mental stress. We now have the option to retrieve it should it ever become necessary, but we probably won’t.

I find the same thing to be true of note-taking and storage units.

[RiverCrochet]

> They allow me to keep a long history of things I've found that are interesting, or useful, or otherwise important.

Bookmarks alone don't quite do it because stuff is moved or dies. A saved copy of the webpage does do it, though, along with the bookmark. SingleFile is a godsend here. I also really like Shiori and other similar bookmark managers that snapshot the webpage along with the bookmark. Even if the saved copy is incomplete or not high-fidelity, it's often enough.

[Night_Thastus]

For me, it's moved or dead infrequently enough that it's not a problem.

And given how dynamic and interconnected content on websites can be, I don't see a lot of use for snapshots - too much would be missing from a snapshot. Could be nice for an in-case-of-emergencies though, at least you've got something.

[chuckadams]

I can't stand having more than a dozen or so tabs open, let alone hundreds. And I might not want them to keep state, but I could see how a "snapshot" bookmark could be very handy, so why not have "bookmark tab" automatically save the state? Or heck, let me drag a tab onto my bookmark bar. We already have the technology, but the UI around it has barely evolved in 20 years.

[cpmsmith]

For what it's worth, you can drag a tab onto your bookmark bar, at least in Firefox.

[chuckadams]

Nifty, hadn't noticed that. I only switched back to Firefox as my daily driver a few months ago after a long time with Chrome, so I'm still finding new things.

Now we just need it to save the page state like it would for an unloaded tab. But I guess the hard parts of that aren't really implemented after all, all kinds of issues though with serializing the page state, making it work with sync across platforms, or just dealing with someone trying to open the same state multiple times...