
Mozilla Mozaic: visualizing the future of bookmarks - Ygg2
https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/visualizing-the-future-of-bookmarks/
======
dsr_
I gave up on bookmarks in normal web browsers. (I still use them on my phone.)

I have five or six permanent tab-pins in each of Firefox and Chrome, and about
two hundred open tabs at any given time. Add in search engines and history
suggestions, and I'm covered.

It would be nice if unused tabs gradually migrated to a bookmark list, I
suppose, but we're already most of the way there with late-loading tabs.

~~~
otakucode
Wait... you mention Chrome... and two hundred tabs open. Given that Chrome
(very intentionally) becomes unusable before you get to 15 tabs even on
gigantic widescreen monitors, how does Chrome manage to remain in your stable
of browsers? I'm in the many-tabs crowd, but not so much to replace bookmarks.
Bookmarks to me are 'this is a resource I will probably need later... likely
much later'. Open tabs are 'I want to read this soon', and soon might be weeks
later (though I usually get time to read on the weekends).

I gave up on Chrome when they took their perfectly usable vertical tabs
implementation (which was an experimental feature you had to enable manually
through the about:config page at the time) and just tore it out one day for no
reason better than 'eh, we dont think that was a good design'. There weren't
any problems with it. It wasn't holding back the development of anything else.
Just some random dude at Google got a bug up his ass and decided to destroy
Chromes usability for a few thousand users. And, of course, thanks to the
whole invisible upgrade 'feature', the application just became unusable
overnight with no mention.

Personally, I want the solution I've wanted for a very long time - tabs that
remain open. Forever. At least, that is how it should LOOK, with the
intelligent swapping and like going on in the background. When Firefox came
out with the fullscreen tab manager with tab groups and everything I was so
psyched.... and then I found out that Firefox actually keeps ALL of those tabs
in memory. And you can't close a group and come back to it later. Useless.

~~~
idle_processor
Multiple windows with <= 14 tabs/window.

I don't push 200, but 80 isn't rare for me (going by TooManyTabs extension
count). IME, Firefox slows down much faster than Chrome when browsing this way
(on Win7-64 w/ 4-8GB of RAM).

------
JulianWasTaken
Posting comments seems to be broken there for me (though I bet that's
Ghostery's fault) so instead I'll post it here:

My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they
force them into a tree structure.

They're not trees and I hate that I have to put them into one. Tags and labels
are where they should be, more like the way things like delicious had them.
Even though Firefox _has_ tags, they're not prominent and not the primary way
of organizing them, so they're not as easy to use as they should be.

Of course each browser has extensions that provide things like what I want,
but none polished enough to make integration seamless and make adding new
bookmarks painless enough to use, at least so far as I've tried.

The other important thing for me is being able to clip portions of a page and
being able to annotate a page with notes, references and comments.

For all of those reasons, I'm stuck using an even less tailored tool
(Evernote) to do my bookmarks. So, here's to hoping that improving bookmarks
ends up being the next frontier.

Oh and -- by the way, your email validation in the comments here is broken. It
thinks +'s are not valid.

~~~
Tooluka
Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly
1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?

Also if we imagine some person starting bookmark list from scratch, with tags
- he has to A) make complete tag system from the beginning (I've tried, it's
not easy) or he'll be forced to re-tag old ones later; B) type in tags (or
select) every time he bookmarks site.With folder trees I use one click to
drag&drop bookmark to the intended place.

Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them
completely.

On sets with 10-100 bookmarks type of index system is completely irrelevant -
you can even keep them in a plain list and still don't waste time.

~~~
JulianWasTaken
"Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly
1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?"

I would if it were easier to do so.

The extra 2 seconds to do it is the bottleneck, so trimming that is the
solution. When I click the star or hit ctrl-d in Chrome (I'm sure it's the
same in Firefox), the title of the bookmark is in focus. I almost _never_
change that, so that's useless.

Put the tag field in focus, and make tags autocomplete. That'd put me most of
the way there.

Of course you're right -- prepopulating the field with tags other people used
would be a much further step.

~~~
padenot
The tag field is focused if I ctrl+d in Firefox. Which is very handy indeed.

~~~
kbrosnan
Firefox has tag auto-complete as well.

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holychiz
I'm too lazy to tag my bookmarks so i hope there's a way to throw all
bookmarks into 1 buckets and have some way to search just on those bookmarks.
Is there a way to do that now?

~~~
kbrosnan
In Firefox I just star and occasionally tag. Organizing bookmarks is not
something I find valuable. Then using the (search
filters)[[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-your-
bookmarks-h...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-your-bookmarks-
history-and-tabs-awesome-bar#w_changing-results-on-the-fly)] to find what I
need.

* Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. * Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. * Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. * Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs. * Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed. * Add # to search for matches in page titles. * Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).

~~~
ThomasQue
Wow, thanks. Looking for a bookmark in a tree was a pain, but now it's much
better.

------
pasbesoin
I still miss Powermarks (EOL-ed some time ago). Anyone looking to improve
bookmarking owes it to themselves to look into it.

Amongst other things, it would grab a default set of tags from the page's
meta-content. (Of course, this was back before there was so much gaming of
same.) And tags were defined as a whitespace-separated list, which made manual
tagging very easy and quick. Search was also a whitespace-separated list, with
limited wildcarding. With several thousand bookmarks, it typically took me 1-3
seconds to drill down to the one I wanted. And it took only a few seconds to
define a new bookmark with a sufficient set of tags that I'd be able to
quickly find it again with an appropriate intersection (or, more likely, one
of several possible intersections, depending upon what I remembered of it at
the time of recall).

Of course, these days what with disappearing content and the like, one may be
better off relying more on local, offline caching/storing of static content, á
la Scrapbook, for example.

------
arctangent
I'm an enthusiastic user of Pinboard but over the past few days I've been
putting "permanent" bookmarks into Trello instead. This seems to be working
out OK for me.

By "permanent" I mean things which I know I will want to refer back to all the
time, rather than just things I might want to look at or read at some point in
the future.

A good example of this would be a Trello board for recurring payment services,
with a separate card for each provider (along with evaluation notes etc.).

I also have an extensive list of movies and TV shows to watch in Trello, and
this approach allows me to categorise/rank/organise them much more easily than
any bookmarking system I know.

------
etler
I'm still a big fan of delicious. It's not just having my bookmarks
decentralized and tagged, but also since it's easily accessible I can share
any tag set with anyone I know.

I basically use it as a mass dump of everything I find remotely interesting on
the internet. I just give links enough tags so I can find them again. That way
I can use it as a first buffer before doing a full on search. If I want to
find a chocolate cookie recipe I can just type in the tags "recipe cookie
chocolate" and if I've tagged a recipe like that before I know it's quality
because I've tagged it before. Even if I don't remember tagging it.

------
lavametender
Mozilla! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Just index bookmarked sites locally so
that I can haz search full text and show them hronologically! Please?

------
moystard
Installed the beta of their preview extension and it does not look good for
now. It is ridiculously long to load, scrolling is painful, and more
importantly (as other points can be fixed), I don't like the user experience
that is proposed here: it is painful to find a particular bookmark or topic,
you end up scrolling through tons of them.

I rather use tags to organize my bookmarks, even if it is less visual.

------
roller
For this purpose I prefer to use personal wiki such as tomboy
(<http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/>) or notational velocity
(<http://notational.net/>). They both let me quickly organize my bookmarks
along with notes in a hypertext format (imagine that)!

------
porker
Bookmarking, storing, saving - these are all important things that need
improving, but the scope of this doesn't go far enough IMO. To make bookmarks
useful the page needs to be archived (for when the page disappears, lost a few
that way), with full text searching and notes/annotations help too.

------
lttlrck
For me the future of bookmarks was just to re-Google. But somehow over time
that became less effective.

Now it is Evernote. With the Chrome plug-in for Google search integrated it
works _very_ well.

Why have bookmarks, clips, articles, other notes spread all over different
services?

~~~
moystard
I like keeping the ownership of my data as much as I can. Also, I find
Evernote really painful to use, especially for bookmarks. I had experienced it
a while ago; coming from Delicious at that time; and I had found it painful
and badly integrated in the browser.

~~~
idle_processor
Chrome and Firefox's URL/omni-bars will pull up partial match results for
bookmarks.

As such, the benefit outlined by the grandparent post is available without
having to hand that information over to a third party, unless you opt into a
cross-device or cross-browser bookmark syncing service.

