
Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks? - ethanpil
How do you still use bookmarks? How do you organize them? Why are they useful to you?
======
Houshalter
Of course, and I'm surprised many people don't. Chrome handles bookmarks well,
automatically syncing them between different machines you are signed in on. I
used to have them nicely organized into different folders but now it's a bit
of a mess... It's especially useful to deal with tab explosion. Control+D and
you can just save all your tabs in a single folder (and never look at them
again.)

The biggest problem is linkrot. As a rough estimate 13% of links die every
year, and it's quite possibly much higher than that.
([https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs))
Without the glorious web archive, bookmarks would be unusuable. And I wonder
how many people know about web archive.. Youtube-dl may also be useful if you
want to preserve music or videos (despite the name, it works on almost every
site I've tried it on including audio sites.) Someday I intend to script
something up to automatically scrape all my bookmarks and make a local copy,
but it seems complex.

~~~
ekianjo
> The biggest problem is linkrot.

I am not using such service, but isn't there a way (i.e. addon) to generate a
copy of the page you bookmarked in order to remedy to that kind of issue ?

~~~
narrowrail
I used Scapbook forever, but started recently using:

[https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-
scrapbook/wiki/Features](https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-
scrapbook/wiki/Features)

~~~
beernutz
Holy smokes thank you for this link! I have been looking for a page archiver
that would actually pull down ALL the files needed for a page and fix the
relative links. All the others I have found simply ignore css includes like
fonts or css images.

This one works great!

Finally!!

~~~
zmix
Another option is the Firefox "Print Edit" Addon. It allows you to remove any
unwanted stuiff from the webpage and then save it as a single file (or print
it). This will include all the CSS, Javascript and raster-images as base64
encoded data-urls. What you gain, in the end, is a single HTML (not MHT) page,
that contains all the requisites and has crap removed (by you).

------
Cyph0n
I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience,
Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address
bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.

For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing
"postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back
appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years.
Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I'm searching that brings
back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)

My collection is at least 9 years old now. I've been maintaining the same
Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to
version. Now it's seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my
PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases
when I prefer to use Chrome.

~~~
govg
I used to meticulously organize my Firefox bookmarks into different folders
and subfolders. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine showed me the Tab
groups features (since then deprecated, but lives on as an extension), and I
don't think I have bookmarked a site since then. I disable loading until
click, and the browser shows me the entire set of groups if I close it and
reopen it.

~~~
lexicality
Good news! Our way of life will end in November!

[http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html](http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html)

------
jcrites
I don't use browser bookmarks but I do use bookmarks through pinboard.in:
[https://pinboard.in/u:jcrites](https://pinboard.in/u:jcrites)

With a paid feature called an archival account, Pinboard stores an actual copy
of each bookmarked article, kind of like your own private Wayback Machine. It
provides full text search over these articles.

I frequently save articles that I read so that I can refer to them later. It
doesn't happen often, but once in a while I will desire to access an article
that I read a few months or years later, and I find Pinboard well worth the
value for making it possible for me to actually identify the article and
retrieve its content regardless of whether the original link is still around.

I find this especially useful because it is my habit to collect citations for
various facts. When I find myself making a claim in conversation, I really
want to be able to access the original source where I learned about the fact,
and provide the evidence to back it up. Or to review the source to confirm
that my memory of it is accurate. Or sometimes I want to share a useful
article explaining some topic with a colleague or friend.

I do occasionally use the browser bookmarks a sort of clipboard or working
set, for 5-10 links at a time. I use Google Chrome and it syncs bookmarks
between my devices.

~~~
rootsudo
That's really nifty, but also seems something that can be hacked in a day.
Create a script to fetch the articles contents, and reformat it into a index
that can be searched.

I like the idea of pinboard. I want to copy it. But, I also want to be lazy.

~~~
criddell
Pinboard is $11 for a year. There are a million things I'd like to cobble
together and I'm happy to cross one off my list in exchange for $11.

I wish there were more services like Pinboard - useful, inexpensive, reliable.
Too often it's a _pick-two_ situation.

~~~
nebabyte
To each their own :)

~~~
criddell
No argument on that from me.

The other part of the equation for me is that $1 / month seems like the
correct price for a useful service. I think Pinboard has something like 20,000
users. If they are all paying $1 / month (I have no idea if they are), then it
feels like a sustainable business.

~~~
idlewords
It's something like that (I'm not being coy, I just haven't run the numbers).
It comes out to $200K/year on ~$15K of operating expenses.

More people should run niche sites! A vanilla Flickr reboot, for example, is a
livelihood waiting to happen.

~~~
nebabyte
Image hosting is so much heavier

------
ikawe
I probably have 500 bookmarks. I never click on them though.

Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in
chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm.

e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three
times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can
even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it
autocomplete from the address bar next time you start to type the URL.

~~~
mintplant
I do the same. Tangentially, I find Firefox's address bar autocomplete to be
far superior to Chrome's (better partial/fuzzy matching and combination
matches across URL and page titles). A bit ironic given one is the product of
a search company.

~~~
derimagia
Chrome has a flag in chrome:\\\flags to enable partial matches.

~~~
d0vs
What's it called exactly? I can't find it.

~~~
derimagia
Sorry I was thinking of autofill suggestions:

"Substring matching for Autofill suggestions" chrome://flags/#enable-
suggestions-with-substring-match

For the address bar it already does substring for me pretty well so I can't
comment on that, sorry about that.

------
kusmi
I used to, I now use zotero to save whole pages onto webdav, from there bunch
of scripts peel the ads off, scrape the text, convert to PDF, store in cms and
index for full text search on solr. Also hooked up Dropbox to do the same for
one click archiving from mobile. Since Dropbox and the webdav are shared
between my partners and I, it's a convenient way to build knowledge base.
Experimenting hooking up Telegram and slack as well to integrate everything
for no hassle user-end. The real pain in the ass is passing the URL itself,
consistently, without insisting users use another third party app.

*Forgot to mention the best part: Backend pools these full-text documents, cleans and parses for NLP, then generates meaningful tags, and organizes documents in an auto generated folder hierarchy which is based on word2vec/doc2vec and content clusters. Whole thing runs on a dedicated server with two 1070 GTX video cards for the NLP work which is training and re-evaluating constantly as new content pours in.

Altogether it was 2-3 years of work.

~~~
ravendug
Sounds awesome! Have you ever considered turning it into a product/service?

~~~
kusmi
I was considering piecemealing it out as Saas. The CMS component is heavily
dependent on Alfresco, which is a bit of a nightmare to work with, to the
extent I code around it instead of directly integrating the components. If I
find funding, I wouldn't mind splitting this off as its own project (apart
from our more wet-lab oriented work which has nothing to do with software).
I'd need to payroll a Java developer.

------
threepipeproblm
At some point, it occurred to me that almost all of the bookmarks in my ever-
expanding collection really represented "to do items" more than "reference
items".

As others have said, most things can easily be searched as needed. But I was
using bookmarks as placeholders, saying "I wanted to read x later", in most
cases... sometimes other things.

So I started treating bookmarks as various categories of todos. I do have a
reference folder, but it has less than a hundred items. I often use those only
passively -- i.e. when typing into the address bar, the starred link will come
up first.

All the other links are sorted into categories such as "files to download",
"new articles", "new buyables" and so forth.

Now that I think of Bookmarks as deferred work, it has changed a lot of
habits. My total number of bookmarks has slowly dropped, and I tend to handle
more stuff as it comes, or not at all -- or at least to be more conscious of
bookmarks as a cost.

An unexpected benefit has been a feeling of mental satisfaction, after closing
a lot of semi-forgotten, open loops. I now think a big unorganized pile of
bookmarks can represent a real liability, whereas if you actually go through
all those links and delete the weaker ones you get a concentrated pile of
goodness. You hit a point where you'd rather read your remaining bookmarks
than most news feeds.

------
mr_spothawk
I have tons of bookmarks. Pro-tip: make a bookmark, edit the bookmark, set the
title to "" <empty string>. Then you have it's favicon as your site launcher.

[http://imgur.com/a/mVFYh](http://imgur.com/a/mVFYh)

sometimes I make use of the features "open all bookmarks in this folder".

other times I use the bookmark to (as somebody else mentioned already) weight
consideration of sites I'm interested in getting results from.

aside: at hackreactor, I worked with some folks on the beginnings of a chrome
extension to grab your bookmarks, analyze the content of each site, and
suggest new bookmarks when you open a new tab. the suggestions part was
working already by the time I came around. then I got a job and that pretty
much fell out of priority... heh.

~~~
rz2k
This seems like such an obvious way to use bookmarks in the toolbar, and it
keeps me from using Safari more often.

~~~
mr_spothawk
I've mostly switched to Safari for personal stuff, and there's a New Tab
screen with all your favorites on it... works similarly, but not as pretty.
Still gotta stick with Chrome for work.

------
bm98
I'm a little surprised that the majority of the answers here are Yes!

I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and
I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical
people. I guess I was wrong!

Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I
bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link
that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with
maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.

My lack of bookmarks fits with the rest of my "online personality". I have
14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders
like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage
email folders or browsing bookmarks.

Also, the fact that I browse in a "clean" browser instance in SELinux that
saves no history from instance to instance probably contributes to my lack of
bookmark use.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I
> bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away.

I can't google NDAed documentation or forum threads. I can't google stuff
that's useful to a topic, but that I've forgotten about. Webcomics often have
terrible search indexes - and even navigation - so I'll bookmark my place when
archive binging exactly as I'd use a physical bookmark. I bookmark-bar things
I open so frequently (JIRA views, trello boards, etc.) that I don't even want
the overhead of googling / typing in the url. I bookmark difficult to google
topics - e.g. I still can't re-locate the win8 user you need to grant read
permissions to, to allow Win8 AppX/WinRT programs to bypass the sandbox to
read files (so you don't have to pack game assets into each .appx build).

But I don't bookmark things I merely access quite frequently, like HN ;)

> If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I
> email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be
> searchable forever.

Too much friction.

~~~
mintplant
> Webcomics often have terrible search indexes

Side note, OhNoRobot [0] has full transcript search of 2000+ webcomics.

[0] [http://ohnorobot.com/](http://ohnorobot.com/)

~~~
sah2ed
Would have bookmarked your link :) except that it doesn't seem to index xkcd
comics.

I tried "xkcd duty call" and it gave no results [0] while Google lists the
comic as the first result for the same keywords.

[0]
[http://ohnorobot.com/index.php?s=xkcd+duty+call&Search=Searc...](http://ohnorobot.com/index.php?s=xkcd+duty+call&Search=Search&comic=)

~~~
rocqua
I'd say XKCD is a special case. Considering the "There is always a relevant
XKCD" meme, I think google has a pretty decent grasp of what terms relate to
what XKCD comic. Not to mention the transcripts and explanations of
explainxkcd.com.

~~~
sah2ed
Another possible explanation is that Google's search engine is exhibiting, due
to the lack of a better term, a form of "transference" [0].

Google engineers are huge fans of XKCD as is evident from Randall Monroe's
well attended talk at Google some time back. In my mind, his talk was easily
one of the most attended talks, second only to Linus Torvalds talk on Git.

[0] I'm sure there is a standard term for software exhibiting biases held by
its authors when making decisions on behalf of users.

------
INTPenis
No and it worries me. I have a great memory normally, I speak several
languages and computer languages. I was raised in the era before search
engines when bookmarks were important.

But these days it worries me to say that I just visit the same three websites
over and over. Aggregation websites with links and content.

Sometimes I find myself staring at the url bar not being able to think of
anything to do because I've visited my three websites already.

Of course besides those three aggregators there are sites like google and
stackexchange that I visit indirectly. And any blogs, forum and such that I
might find through google.

~~~
taude
I don't think this is a bad idea. Let other's aggregate what's important and
filters up to the top. I'm the same way. I used to subscribe to a lot of blogs
and stuff, now I just visit Hacker News and my custom Reddit front page, and
read a couple articles that are popular, and then get on with my day.

If you find yourself staring at the URL bar with nothing to do because you
already visited your curated aggregation site, maybe you don't need to be
randomly surfing the Internet, and instead can accomplish some important work.
(This is a good place to be in as opposed to someone hot-tabbing to 10
different websites.)

~~~
narak
I used to feel this way but there is intellectual concentration risk. Reading
the same stuff as everyone else has created an echo chamber for me, and I
intend to seek diverse sources again like I did before the link aggregator
era.

------
jacquesm
I do, but I've also come to rely on a plug-in called 'scrapbook'. It allows
you to cut a snippet from a webpage and save it along with the url of the
original.

Very handy, and it also protects somewhat against linkrot.

I've tied it to a hotkey to copy any bit that is highlighted to the currently
open scrapbook. (shift-ctrl-b) without further notifications or interaction
other than the keystroke. Super quick and it doesn't get in the way of
continued reading.

~~~
hashhar
Firefox is looking to integrate an auto-redirect to the Wayback Machine in
case of link-rot. There's a Test Pilot experiement going on and it may be
extended to allow for auto-saving of bookmarks on the Wayback Machine when
bookmarked.

~~~
gumami
The wayback machine chrome extension that does this pretty well
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-
machine/fp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-
machine/fpnmgdkabkmnadcjpehmlllkndpkmiak)

------
Existenceblinks
My bank url is hard to remember, and search it on google is risky to be a
victim of fake sites. So anything fake-able is on my bookmark.

Well I've marked a ton of urls and rarely revisit :( It's like having a
camera, take photos and forget them forever. It's a tool to help you forget
things, not to remember, sadly!

~~~
Corrado
Yea, I mostly use bookmarks for weird work URLs that are hard to search (ie.
local Jenkins instance) or hard to remember (ie. ADP timesheet). Most
everything else I just search for or look at my browser history.

------
morganvachon
I use them in three ways: My most used bookmarks live on my bookmarks bar in
Firefox with the text removed, so they are just icons of the favicon.gif from
the server, screenshot example here[1]. The lesser used ones live in the
"Folders" folder under a tree style arrangement. The third method is via the
"ReadLater" folder which contains links I didn't have time to fully read right
away, and acts as a sort of manual version of Pocket or similar apps.

[1]
[http://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0408/h_1491614673_38...](http://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0408/h_1491614673_3854456_f1ba5420ff.png)

~~~
socialentp
I'm the same way. I use bookmarks constantly and have all of the tools I use
for work displayed with no text so they are all just favicons. I also have
folders which contain infrequently used links (pretty much never).

------
ams6110
I have a home.html file that is my browser default page. It has all the links
I use regularly, organized in a few columns that I think make sense, but more
honestly I use it mainly by muscle memory. It also has input fields for a
couple of different search engines.

It's very simple, no javascript and just a tiny bit of CSS.

Any time I want to update it, add a link, etc. I just use a text editor.

------
interfixus
Of course I do. Some of them neatly stacked in labeled folders, some of them
just higgledypiggledy in the great unsorted. I have my bookmark history on
hand to way back before the turn of the century. A _lot_ of those links have
died, obviously, but it's a neat historical record of my foci, foibles and
obsessions over the years.

My data belong either offline or on serverspace I control myself. There's
nothing especially secret about it, but like my email (going back more than
twenty years), I wouldn't dream of storing data like that online outside my
own control.

The bookmarking, by the way, used to take place in Firefox. The ongoing self-
immolation of that once mighty browser has recently sent me to the Pale Moon
camp. And it's like coming home. I couldn't be happier, running on various
Linux'es on the household machinery. The Chrome/Chromium world hegemony is one
of those sad, scary things I shall never understand.

~~~
gkya
Do you think that Pale Moon will live? I'm not really happy with firefox
nowadays (not that I'm too much tied to it, a switch-away is as hard as
exporting my bookmarks), it's getting slower and slower, sometimes uses all
the ram and cpu on my Xubuntu laptop for no apparent reason, and I hate this
recent WebExtensions thing. I want to switch, but I don't want to use sth.
that's destined to die soon.

Why can't we have a Linux of a browser, that's built with large collaboration,
is highly customisable, and completely focused on being merely a browser in
itself. Kind-a webkit, but with minimal chrome... All that said, Xombrero my
ex that I'll always miss.

~~~
interfixus
It's a small project - I have no guarantee that it will. I shall do my little
bit to keep it afloat, though, as it is by far the most promising FF
alternative or fork that I have found. But then, I rely heavily on certain
add-ons which will soon go extinct in mainline FF, but may have a future in
PM. Your mileage may indeed vary.

I can't help noticing: Pale Moon is slightly faster in most regards, and it
gobbles slightly more than half of what recent Firefox does. This is Arch
Linux, I have no idea how the world looks outside that small bubble.

------
sleavey
I use the bookmark toolbar in Firefox, but I delete the text and leave the
favicons so that I can fit ~50 bookmarks in one row. I also have folders
containing bookmarks for particular categories, like "Work", "Stuff to watch",
etc.

~~~
morganvachon
I just posted about doing this before I read your comment. I wondered if
anyone else did the same as me. It started out as a way to fit more than a few
bookmarks on the bar, then I realized that I recognized the icon faster than I
could read the text, and squeezed all my most used bookmarks on there.

Great minds do think alike! :-)

~~~
excalibur
A lot of our sites all use the same favicon. I keep the names short and sweet,
but I keep them named.

When I ran out of room on the bookmarks bar I just started organizing things
into folders on the toolbar.

------
hueller
I use pinboard.

As far as native bookmarks, I don't like that browsers have kind of black
boxed their bookmarks and require individual proprietary cloud sync for these
things (I realize Firefox has a self hosted option, but it's kind of outdated
and last I checked the documentation was spotty. Even then it's only FF).

I know there's also the Netscape Bookmark Format which is kind of sketch, but
at least it's something. I tried writing something that exported on close, I'd
sync them myself, then imported on open, but it was pretty hacky (edit: also
browsers exports are often very different so there was some normalization
there that was fragile). There should be a way to setup an endpoint to
natively sync this stuff with an open protocol and then all your bookmarks on
all clients look the same. If you don't like that service, export someplace
else and change your endpoint. Browsers should just be boxes for structured
content.

~~~
hashhar
Do you have any opinions on what an open bookmark format should cover? I'd
like to hear those. Could be a good and relatively simple project I could
mentor on.

------
JohnBooty
Hells to the yes.

To take things a step further, I'm not entirely sure how I'd function without
them.

(I'm sure I'd find a way, but it would be an adjustment and a loss)

Firefox's fuzzy searching in the URL bar makes bookmarks awesome. My
"workflow":

1\. Bookmark anything I might need later by clicking the bookmark button. It
presents a little tooltip-like popup that lets me edit the title and tags if I
want to.

2\. Sometimes I edit the title/tags and sometimes I don't. I make this call
based on a quick judgement call on whether the default will allow me to find
the article later. Suppose the article title is "MySQL Adds Froitz-Based
Blammo Filtering." Well, that should suffice. But if the title is merely "10
Awesome New MySQL Features" then I might want to edit the title/tags to
mention something about "Froitz-Based Blammo Filtering" if that's what I'm
interested in. [1]

3\. Then I usually never use the bookmark ever again.

4\. BUT, sometimes I do. And Firefox's fuzzy match implementation lets me type
"mysql froitz" and get a match on this bookmark 100% of the time. Chrome's
matching is stupider & I'm not sure about Safari. Safari makes adding
bookmarks less convenient than FF or Chrome so I assume finding them is
harder. (Maybe it's not, I don't know)

I don't know about Firefox's bookmarking performance characteristics. But, I
know that I've been adding lots of bookmarks forever and it "just works" and
it feels instance. The fact that I've never had to think about it beyond that
point is a compliment of the highest order. That's one of the many reasons why
I remain a dedicated Firefox supporter.

__________

[1] This is just a theoretical example, of course. MySQL does not actually
receive new features, awesome or otherwise.

------
rmason
I have thousands of bookmarks. One thing I've wanted Google to do for the
longest time since I started using their browser was to let me limit searches
to my own bookmarks.

I've got a fair degree of organization with folders and sub-folders but still
spend way too much time trying to locate a specific bookmark. I've learned to
edit the subject line because often you're bookmarking something called 'home'
or a cryptic Github path.

------
pmoriarty
I have thousands of bookmarks, and gave up putting them in to folders years
ago. Now I just tag them with every relevant keyword that I can think of when
I make the bookmark, and search them that way.

Firefox's bookmark manager is very primitive, though, and I've long been
meaning to migrate my bookmarks over to org-mode in emacs, where I have much
more powerful searching, metadata, editing, linking, commenting,
restructuring, and navigating options.

~~~
hashhar
What would you like to seem improved in the bookmark manager?

I'm currently working on the ability to rename the bookmarks inline in the
tree instead of the input boxes on bottom in the Bookmark Manager (the one you
get from Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+Shift+O).

~~~
pmoriarty
Searching tags, bookmarks, and bookmark comments by regular expressions would
be awesome.

It would be nice if I could, say, rename a tag. So, for example, if I had a
tag named "map", I'd like to be able to rename it to "maps" and have all
bookmarks with that tag updated. Same with deleting a tag from all the
bookmarks that have it.

I'd like to be able to:

\- see a list of all my tags, in various sort orders, and be able to navigate
through them like folders (expanding and collapsing their contents).

\- perform operations on the bookmarks with a certain tag. For instance, to be
able to take a certain subset of them and move them to another tag, again much
like what was possible with folders.

\- make comments on tags that include a full markup language (org-mode markup
ideally, but some regular markup would be better than just vanilla ascii).

That's just off the top of my head. There have been other features which I've
wished for over the years that Firefox's bookmark manager didn't have but I
knew I could easily get with org-mode in emacs.

~~~
edeion
FWIW you can rename tags in Firefox: from Show all bookmarks, unroll the Tags
menu in the left pane, click the bookmark you want to rename, fix the name in
the right lower pane. It can take some time to update.

Many things can be done from the "Show all bookmarks" window. But they can be
_very_ misleading.

(The following may not be very relevant nor clearly stated. Sorry if I can't
convey my point.)

For instance, when you want to delete all bookmarks associated to one tag,
it's not just going into the Tags menu and deleting the corresponding tag:
this would only remove the given tag from the bookmarks but leave the
bookmarks bookmarked (which is the right thing to do when I think of it).
Instead, the only way I found is to search from "Search Bookmarks" for the
bookmark name and delete from the resulting list (making sure I don't delete a
bookmark that just happens to share the tag name in other fields. Sorting by
tags may help a bit.)

For complex things, I once had to open bookmarks with sqlite and edit them by
hand. Scary experience even though I made backups. (How would it deal with
Weave, at the time, was my main concern.)

------
aurelian15
I configured my webrowser such that it clears my browsing history whenever I'm
closing my browser and mainly use bookmarks for fast auto-completion when
typing in the address bar. With respect to organisation, I generally don't. I
just use the "star" button to mark websites as favourites. I synchronise
bookmarks across devices using Firefox Sync.

------
JanecekPetr
Additionally to what everyone said already, I have two other uses:

1) I have a set of bookmarks specialized for search. Chrome can do this
without bookmarks, but Firefox needs them. I'm talking about bookmarks like
this:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch)

Note the %s in the middle, that's where queries go. When you save this as a
bookmark and add a keyword to it ("gg" in my case), you can then search images
on Google like this:

\- Alt-d (jump to url bar)

\- gg fluffy kittens

I have a few dozen of these: Google, G images, G translate, G maps, local
maps, Wikipedia English, Wikipedia Czech, various dictionaries, whois, wolfram
alpha, grammar check, YouTube, Maven search... You get the idea.

2) A huge curated collection of bookmarks to Java libraries. Something similar
to all those awesome-java collections that are lately popping up, but more
complete, in my browser, indexed for search and neatly grouped into like a
hundred folders.

~~~
kleptako
instead of making your own specialized bookmarks, DuckDuckGo has bangs
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

------
theknarf
Bookmarks are where links go to die. So yes I do "use" bookmarks, but never
revisit them. What I instead do often is either keep the tabs open or, save
them as notes in a note taking app. I feel that the note taking app makes it
easier to organize stuff into "projects" as that how I usually work.

------
double051
Definitely! I still keep the bookmarks bar visible on Chrome and Firefox to
have quick access to my favorite and most visited pages. All of the links have
abbreviated names to fit more on the bar. #1 is Hacker News, of course.

I also still 'star' interesting links and categorize them into folders. Very
handy to have Chrome sync the bookmarks across all of my machines.

~~~
pharrlax
>All of the links have abbreviated names to fit more on the bar.

I started deleting the names entirely and it was life-changing. Text wastes so
much space on the bar and you can memorize the favicons very quickly.

~~~
socialentp
I completely agree it's easy to memorize without text. I even lump them into
logical groups using the vertical separator favicon from this site:
[http://separator.mayastudios.com](http://separator.mayastudios.com)

~~~
hashhar
If you're using Firefox you have native separators for bookmarks.

------
ravenstine
I do but only in the sense that I use it as a sort of bucket that I throw
things in and almost never look at again. Basically, no.

~~~
bbrian
Of course I use bookmarks, and never revisit them!

I have some bookmarks.html files from old browsers somewhere that I treat as
memories – snapshots of what I was interested in back in college etc.

------
chamakits
For my personal use? No

For work, absolutely. I have a couple of top level directories on my bookmark
bar:

KeyLinks

InterestingTech

PrevWork

CurrWork-<2-3 words describing topic of work>-<Date started>

Under KeyLinks I keep well...key links, like the links to the wiki entry on
how to setup dev environments, link to the Holiday calendar, link to the Jira
dashboard showing my team's sprints, link to the company roadmap, etc. Pretty
much just links that I'll have to refer to periodically.

Under InterestingTech are articles or things of interest I stumble upon on my
day to day, but that I don't have time right now to look into.... This one is
honestly a bit of a bottomless pit at this point...

Under CurrWork-* I keep all the links related to the work I'm doing right now.
That means wiki entries related to it, StackOverflow links I had to use to fix
something, Jira tickets, Jenkin jobs, internal web-app links, code review
link, etc. You name it. If it's in any way related to my current work, and
it's a site, it's there.

And when I'm done with the current 'CurrWork-*', I remove the leading
'CurrWork-' and move it to the bottom of PrevWork.

I have an awful memory, but this in combination with an emacs org-mode file
for each 'CurrWork' iteration I have, I manage to be able to refer to things
I've worked on in the past when people ask. After they give me a minute or two
to get my bearings of course.

------
lucb1e
I do occasionally, though usually Firefox' "awesomebar" will get me there
anyway so there is not often a need.

My girlfriend does make extensive use of it for all sorts of things.

I think my mom uses it as well. My brother and dad I'm not sure about. Not
sure what that says for a confidence interval, but many people still do. Then
again, I'm sure there must be clusters of people (when clustering by who knows
who) that never learned it's there, or who choose not to use it.

------
skraelingjar
I still use bookmarks, but rarely go to them.

All of my bookmarks are resources, something for me to read or use at a later
time. Some are for things I want to learn, some are for things I knew but have
lost to time, and others are just.. out there. Like this:
[https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm](https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm)
I have no idea why I bookmarked that (or when).

Another example: This week I decided to learn Rust. I was listening to a
podcast and the host mentioned rustbyexample.com and I visited the site and
realized previous me had bookmarked it thinking I would decided to learn Rust
at some point and it would be a nice resource.

Maybe something that would look at my recent history and say Hey X has been in
your bookmarks for months and it's related to all the Y pages you've been
visiting.

None of them are organized, I'd pay for something to automatically organize
them.

------
aerovistae
My chrome bookmarks are one of the 3 pillars of my cloud identity, along with
my gmail and my dropbox. You could just say my google account and my dropbox.

I have hundreds of bookmarks, covering dozens of categories of research and
reading. One of the largest subcategories includes hundreds of references that
I may or may not need for future projects including software (stackoverflow
questions, tutorials, bug solutions, framework and API references,
optimization articles, in-depth guide articles, and so on), woodworking,
economic/governmental/civic/legal research, fitness, electrical engineering
and general circuity/wiring, real estate, recipes, piano repair, audio
production, and so on. These are all intended to be kept until needed, most
likely indefinitely.

Then there's a category for more temporary things that I need in the moment
and am unlikely to need again, including news/blog articles I haven't gotten
around to reading yet, solutions for bugs that I need to fix, torrents I
haven't gotten around to downloading, and collections of references for small,
specific projects that I won't need again afterwards.

So basically I use Chrome bookmarks as my personal address book for "things on
the vast internet which I wish to return to eventually."

For major things I use daily, like youtube or gmail or facebook, I don't
bother bookmarking them-- for those I just use the address bar's semi-
intelligent autosuggest....Ctrl+L to go to address bar, then I just type g and
hit enter, or y and hit enter, or f, etc. The only website I need to type out
beyond 2 letters is twitter/twitch.

I guess this may sound odd, but Chrome has begun to feel like a natural part
of my mind. The bookmarks and my gmail are an extension of my memory. My
interactions with the net are an extension of my thought processes. I have
seen other people make similar remarks about their phones.

------
j0e1
Oh yes! I use them in FF and have organized them in folders with tags for
hassle-free retrieval across devices.

I find them extremely useful for tutorials/learning new stuff which I know I
need/want to learn but just don't have the time at the moment. Whether or not
I end up coming back to them is a discussion for another day ;)

Most of my bookmarks are via HN.

------
juki
I use Emacs / Org Mode for bookmarks. I use a few different browser profiles,
and usually always want to open a bookmark in a specific profile. Having all
bookmarks in one place is much easier than figuring out which browser I need
and then finding the bookmark in it. Plus this way I can use other Org Mode
features with them too (adding any arbitrary notes/tasks to them, todo
keywords for a reading list, refiling/archiving, etc.)

Basically I just add the properties URL and BROWSER to any entry I want to be
a bookmark. I have the numpad key 4 bound to a command that opens the url
(works either in the org file buffer itself, or from an agenda view). I also
have the numpad key 1 bound to an agenda search for the tag :bm: (searching
for a property is too slow), so I can easily get a list of all bookmarks,
which can then be filtered by tags, category, top-level headline and regexes.

------
alexdumitru
I do, but I've always find it pretty hard to use them, because I forgot what
exactly I bookmarked and in what folder.

------
slowkow
I use diigo. The free version lets you cache the page, annotate the page with
highlights, and tag your bookmarks. The extension for Chrome works very well.
They also launched some PDF annotation features, but I haven't tried that.

[https://www.diigo.com/](https://www.diigo.com/)

~~~
vinay427
Unfortunately it appears that the free version does not include page caching,
according to this table:
[https://www.diigo.com/premium](https://www.diigo.com/premium)

------
tempestn
I use browser bookmarks frequently, but have few of them. I tend to use them
primarily for utilities and other sites that I visit somewhat regularly.
Basically the two main cases are 1) sites I visit so often that it's handy to
get there with a single click as opposed to a couple of characters in the
address bar, and 2) sites with strange urls and/or ones that I access
repeatedly but infrequently, so might not remember where to find.

For anything I want to remember for later, or keep for reference material, I
clip it to Evernote instead. Find that much more useful, as normally when
you're looking for a piece of reference material it's going to be able to
remember some keywords from it than the title or where you filed the bookmark.
Also means you can easily reference it even if the page is missing or changed
in the future.

------
aswerty
I'm a big fan of bookmarking but I found the browser features didn't fit my
needs all that well. So I built my own browser extension which I really like.
Hasn't taken off at all and development has kind of stopped for the time being
(other work has put it on the back burner) so it's still just available on
Chrome.

Using it I hit Ctrl+M (the shortcut to open it) and then I have my top 20
sites key bound. So HN is Ctrl+M -> h. All my other bookmarks can be accessed
via a search feature which you can tab or "/" to get to on opening the
extension. I hate lists/folders so my bookmarks are all hidden away behind the
search function. The extension is built for either the mouse or keyboard so I
have a lot of flexibility in how I interact with it.

The site for it is: www.devmark.io

------
vbezhenar
First of all, I use reading list. It's kind of bookmark in Safari. If there's
interesting webpage, but I don't have time or mood to read it, click and
close. If I answered and want to check it later, click and close. Once a week
I breeze through them and delete, so it won't stockpile like a mountain.

Second is Favourites (like bookmark bar), I can access it from blank page. I'm
saving webpages, that I visit often, news, important forums, etc. Also
webpages, that I'm using currently in work (e.g. Postgres documentation, if
I'm working with it right now.

Rest is just organized by topic list of webpages that I could use later. I'm
not using it that often, but sometimes it might be handy.

------
zengid
I used to but now I dump everything into Pocket. I would only say it's useful
because it satisfies my need to horde interesting information.

------
navs
Personally, I've stopped bookmarking everything I find somewhat interesting.
Now if I do find something and it will be used in the next week/month, it's
often part of an existing project or idea, and so it gets thrown in a text
file that's versioned.

I started doing this after accumulating a huge index of bookmarks spread
across saved.io, Evernote, Google Bookmarks, iCloud, Firefox, Opera, txt
files, Google Spaces and the other dozen or so bookmarking/collaborative
knowledge sharing platforms showcased on Product Hunt.

I'm surprised there's no digital equivalent to the Hoarders TV show. I suppose
thousands of bookmarks are less impressive than a garage full of old
newspapers and rats.

~~~
icc97
Yes, I quite realise that with my bookmarks its the equivalent of on-line
hoarding. I keep all of mine in pinboard though so it's fairly well organised
hoarding.

I was using delicious up from 2004 - 2014. I just realised I never actually
closed my account there. Think I'd better close it to keep the hoarding to a
minumum.

------
AceyMan
I treat URLs like any other document: I click+drag the favicon off the address
bar and drop it in the target folder in explorer (file browser in Windows),
which creates a dot-url shortcut.

Why keep resources in a unique silo? You wouldn't keep all your
PDFs/Word/rtf/&c in a "<ext> manager app", so why do URLs have to be kept in
one?

Also, this way they all get backed up since I keep all work docs on my network
drive.

I'm surprised no one else follows this pattern, but I've never seen anyone
else use it, nor have I won over any converts via its sheer awesome factor
<shrug>.

FYI, works in FF and Chrome, but not Opera. (Bummer, because I like Opera
generally, and it's my default Android browser.)

~~~
kakarot
The problem is that major browsers don't offer a way to offer a view into this
data model. The integration is important for an efficient workflow.

~~~
a3n
Firefox and Chrome both will display a local directory. In fact I exploit that
for my no-software written personal wiki, github.com/a3n/miki. I bookmark the
directory of the top of my wiki, and drill down into directories to get at my
pages, except the pages I've bookmarked.

I see no reason why a browser couldn't do that with URLs in local directories.

EDIT: Unfortunately I don't think the first part, drag/drop from browser tab
to file manager folder, works in Linux. Tried it with nemo, dolphin and
nautilus. But _viewing_ and clicking on directories and contents from the
browser works fine.

EDIT EDIT: Dragging a _tab_ didn't work for me. But dragging the icon from the
address bar worked fine. Except in Dolphin, which gave me something weird.
nemo and nautilus were good. And the "files" clicked in the file manager
opened in the browser. And of course, opening them from the browser directly
also works.

~~~
kakarot
That's a pretty neat use-case, thanks for sharing. I could see it being useful
for my own personal knowledge database as well. Unfortunately it doesn't help
with my regular browsing workflow, which revolves around a bookmark bar filled
with textless favicons arranged by color.

------
m-p-3
I still do, but I find Google Chrome bookmarking system to be a bit too
simplistic.

I mean, Google is usually strong on that from with labels in Gmail, Keep but
for some reason they never implemented that in their bookmarks. It would makes
more sense than using folders IMO.

~~~
doseofreality
It is to Google's advantage for you not to use Bookmarks. They _want_ you to
rely on using Google to search in every case possible.

------
nevatiaritika
I use the bookmarks bar to neatly organize my frequent links. And I kind of
have an OCD when a link is misplaced in the wrong folder. Of course, then,
some folders, I never visit again but some, very very frequently.

Also for the habit of reading/skimming articles and often hopping from one URL
to another, I use One Tab. Super efficient to collect links in one page:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en)
On the negative side, my work PC has over 800 URLs and home PC about 1500+

------
jdbernard
Absolutely. I trust Firefox Sync more than third-party services. I have a
fairly comprehensive hierarchical structure. I only bookmark things I really
care about, but even still have hundreds of bookmarks in tens of folders. It's
useful because it makes these sites show up immediately in the address bar as
I start typing. API done for example. I just start typing the library/API name
and the address bar autocompletes the part to the doc index b/c that's what
I've bookmarked. One step shorter than bouncing through Google.

I also bookmark articles that I think I'll reference in the future, that
supports or contradicts something I believe strongly.

------
cyberferret
All the time in Chrome. I have a fairly rigid structure in my Bookmarks
folders, where I categorise all my hobby and professional interests. I like
that it is synchronised across all my devices too.

I used to use Pocket a lot to do similar things, but categorising, and
browsing the saved links was a little too cumbersome.

Plus I like that I can search just within my plethora of bookmarks if I want
to reference something I know I saved a year ago. [0]

[0] - [https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/02/quickly-search-just-
ch...](https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/02/quickly-search-just-chrome-
bookmarks-or-history-with-custom-searches/)

~~~
derimagia
I recommend checking out
[https://vimium.github.io/](https://vimium.github.io/), provides a lot of
shortcuts (You don't even need to know vim despite the name). "b" brings up a
box like this:

[https://i.imgur.com/qqDKqZ6.png](https://i.imgur.com/qqDKqZ6.png)

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
Yes, I use them a lot, but find the organizing tools pretty lacking. E.g. I
program in Python and keep a bookmark for many Python modules in alphabetic
subfolders so that I can quickly jump to the docs. It's rather boring to
maintain this setup. I also dance tango and I'd love to bookmark many Youtube
videos but here the tools are really primitive: there's lots of ways to
organize this (by type of video, dance style, by principal figures, by dancers
-- sometimes more than one couple -- by music maybe) and no easy way to do
anything other than a silo of "all things tango".

------
khedoros1
Yes. Anything essential goes in the bookmark toolbar (mostly thinking about
internal sites at work). I save a number of keyword searches (like "yt" for
youtube, "wp" for Wikipedia).

For personal machines, I've got about 5 machine+OS combinations, with 2-3
browsers on each that I use for various things. I chose not to set up sync
accounts in any of the browsers (I've already got too many damn accounts to
manage, thank you!). So I sometimes save a bookmark if I'm in the middle of a
long series of pages about something, as a sometimes-completely-literal
"bookmark".

------
ernsheong
I am currently developing PageDash, a personal web archive web-based app. The
key difference is that I want to preserve the page exactly just as I saw it,
with the help of a browser extension.

Reason for this is that I love saving pages that I encounter. I use Evernote
Web Clipper a lot, but it frequently fails to keep the styling perfect.
Secondly, a lot of archivers can't save pages behind an authentication layer.

To be notified when it launches, let me know here!
[https://goo.gl/forms/X1IBqaA03kekR2Db2](https://goo.gl/forms/X1IBqaA03kekR2Db2)

------
stevewillows
In my Bookmarks bar I have 'General', which breaks down into about fifteen
categories. Each of those is broken down into several folders --- its very
organized. I go through it once a year or so to clear out links I'm certain I
won't need in the future (usually project ideas).

I use Bookmark Box to sync with other browsers by way of Dropbox. Its not
perfect, but it works.

For the rest of the Bookmarks bar I have my most common links -- a few
spreadsheets (in Drive), some web apps, and a folder for forums I frequent. I
also have a bookmarket for Pepperplate, which I use on a regular basis.

------
Myrmornis
No, but I use pocket. I put links to technical stuff in there that I intend to
read, but I rarely look at it. Maybe I'll start remembering to after this
thread. I noticed a while back that pocket allows you to dump them in a text
format; I was intending to do that and store in a git repo or my gdrive, so
that I would be more confident I'd have them for the rest of my life. I sort
of don't really know where chrome's bookmarks are kept, which makes me less
inclined to use them, but that's almost certainly lazy/ignorant of me.

------
abrkn
I have hundreds of them in Chrome, ported over from all kinds of browsers and
services over the year. I never use them. They just sit in the bookmarks
toolbar and annoy me.

------
chrsstrm
Literally thousands...

Organized in ~150 folders all with subfolders. Ditched the bookmark services
when Chrome started syncing data across devices. There are three features I
would love:

    
    
      1. The search box in the manager does a full text search of the content on the bookmarked page instead of just the title (at the time it was marked, not updated).     
      2. The ability to search by URL with regex.    
      3. Show the date I bookmarked the page.

------
abhinickz
I use Chrome new "Bookmark Manager" Extension:
"[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/g...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik?hl=en")

You can Access, Search, Import, and Export bookmarks from:
"chrome://bookmarks/" URL and Pressing "CTRL+D" give you option to save to
folder instantly.

Sometimes when I don't remember the bookmark folder location for
example([https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com)), I
simply type something like 'news' or 'ycom' and chrome will show me some
predictions which will be combination of Bookmark, Google search, and History
with different icons or text.

Currently typing 'ycom' shows me five option 1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/](https://news.ycombinator.com/) with Star Icon.
2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2](https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=2)
with History Icon. 3\. ycombinator (Google Search) 4-5. More History Link.

and If I don't remember anything I just type some random words on Google to
get the web link!

I also use Google Keep Extension:
'[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep-
chrome...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep-chrome-
extens/lpcaedmchfhocbbapmcbpinfpgnhiddi') to organize bookmark easily with
labels and colors.

------
hkjayakumar
Yes, I do. As a university student, it's really useful to be able to view
different course webpages, schedules, important dates, etc - all links that I
would access frequently (almost every day)

Apart from that, I also use browser bookmarks for links I want to (or have to)
view in the near future. It acts as a constant reminder since it's always
visually present.

I use Pocket for articles/links I can afford to view during my free time.

------
dorfsmay
I use wiki's, because "links" only make sense in a given context, so at work I
add the noteworthy links in the local wiki, and for my personal use I keep a
series of text files of notes on particular subjects, where I add links.

I do however use bookmarks on my laptop to point to locally installed document
such as the full python library doc, in order to be able to access those when
offline (eg: in a train).

------
superasn
I do especially because Chrome syncs them everywhere including my mobile
phones, laptop and desktop.

It's also useful to bookmark in browser because the address bar gives priority
to your bookmarks over auto-complete and history.. So it's much easier to
access those sites too.

P.S. I organize them by folder, so it's most likely design -> landing pages ->
dark -> bookmark or personal -> finance -> bookmark, etc.

------
mud_dauber
My bookmarks bar has my top-30 list (mail, feedly, HN, ...) I tried a folder
system but found the amount of overhead to be WAY too cumbersome.

I capture stuff to read in Pocket. If I eventually find the link to be
valuable (news: almost never; how-tos: much more often), I move it into a
Google Keep "PostIt".

The value-add is that I can add pics, notes, links to Dropbox docs, etc in the
same PostIt, and organize them as I see fit.

------
David_R
Mac users...take a look at URL Manager Pro.

Macintosh-only stand-alone local database for URLs; Costs $25; url-
manager.com. I've been using it for years...have 10s of thousands of
bookmarks...it's where I keep all my research...has saved me many times. All
data in one local file (or Dropbox)...easily portable; no annual fee.

Click on the icon in the menu bar to save the current web page Title and URL;
optional field for Notes permits you to add keywords or large excerpts from
the site or article.

Organize the database/outline by making folders/sub-folders. Fast db search;

Mac OS X app : Customizable toolbar, standard Window Menu and Fonts Panel,
Font Smoothing, Sheets and Drawer Windows, Cocoa Status Item and support for
Dropbox. Includes Yosemite Share extension and Spotlight importer.

Import and Export : URL Manager Pro can import from and export to Safari,
Firefox, Chrome, OmniWeb, Camino, iCab, Mozilla and Netscape. It lets you
'harvest' bookmarks by importing XML (XBEL), HTML and text files for bookmarks
and URLs. Export entire db or any one folder to HTML or text format.

------
iand
Yes. I use the bookmark toolbars in ff and chrome with icons and no text for
common pages (like this [http://imgur.com/a/uZBB8](http://imgur.com/a/uZBB8)).

My only other use is for groups of pages that I'm referring to or want to come
back to as part of a project. I usually delete them after a few weeks.

For long term bookmarks I use pinboard.in

------
taude
Installing the Quick Tabs [1] Google Chrome plugin has completely changed my
use of browser-based Bookmarks: with cmd-e an intelligent search box pops up
giving me instant access to my history or bookmarks folder.

[1] [https://github.com/babyman/quick-tabs-chrome-
extension](https://github.com/babyman/quick-tabs-chrome-extension)

------
unholiness
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the chrome feature that's mostly replaced
bookmarks for me.

Just like aliasing commands in the terminal, you can alias web pages in
Chrome's address bar. So, when I type "je" in my omnibar it has an
autocomplete option "Jenkins", and pressing enter will take me to the URL I
set for the Jenkins home page.

This feature is poorly named "search engines", and yes, it is extensible to
putting extra strings at the end of that URL (which could be registered as a
search term within that site), but I've been using it for years, and 99% of my
use is simply mapping arbitrary strings to arbitrary URLs. It works amazingly
for that. No mouse movement digging into bookmark folders required.

[http://lifehacker.com/5815291/create-short-aliases-for-
frequ...](http://lifehacker.com/5815291/create-short-aliases-for-frequently-
accessed-pages-by-telling-chrome-theyre-search-engines/amp)

------
sacado2
Yes, but only for

\- tabs I haven't read yet, but I need to restart my browser for some reason,
and I want to be sure the tabs won't be lost ; in this case, those bookmarks
are disposed of as soon as the browser restarted

\- content I'm pretty sure I'll want to read back in a few time

I only use the bookmark bar, so I have to limit what I save. When it gets too
big, I clean it up.

------
rdpollard
I use bookmarks to keep track of the hundreds of client-specific subdomains on
a site I manage for work. I start typing the name of the client in Chrome's
search bar and I've got instant access to the URL. I can't think of a better
way to handle that (though I'm open to suggestions if you're using something
better).

------
mastax
Bookmarks manager from Chrome is quite good, I think:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/g...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-
dialog)

------
richardw
Yes, lots, in Chrome. I have folders directly in the shortcuts bar, with e.g.
"Money", "News", "Proj" and current projects usually have their own folders.
One I use a lot is "Topics", which has many subfolders for e.g. "Analytics". I
use the Other Bookmarks list for things I use regularly but not often (e.g.
once a month).

I definitely would like some improvements. My "Topics" folder is huge and I
don't really need it loaded each time the browser loads. Just save it in the
topic and let me find it later. Also, if Chrome has my shortcuts, why doesn't
Google highlight those in search results? And maybe auto-link the saved
shortcuts to the terms I used when finding them in the first place. There's a
lot of meta data in that action - search-search-search, save. Google knows
quite a bit of my thought process (via keywords and sequence), so use that.

------
AJRF
I do for sure. I do this thing where I save a bookmark without its title, so
it just has a little favicon icon on my bookmark bar, and it is very nice and
clean.

I also have folders for Work, Blogs and one for improving myself as a
developer. I love browser bookmarks, but am not exactly a poweruser, but I
would miss them very much if they were taken away.

------
tomfitz
No.

I use Google Keep to store URLs, typically with some note, for example: *
"Specialized Sirrus bike rear derailleur. Model number: DO20. URL:
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0047D192E/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0047D192E/)
" * 2015-03-01: Visited doctor. They referred me to physio, and told me to
read [http://www.arthritisresearchuk.org/arthritis-
information/con...](http://www.arthritisresearchuk.org/arthritis-
information/conditions/back-pain.aspx) for exercises/stretches to relieve
pain."

Google Keep supports tagging and search, so I can usually find things. For
things I want to read later, I either put it in Pocket or use Google Keeps'
reminder functionality.

Chrome integration looks decent (save web pages as an image), but Firefox
integration is lacking.

------
vojant
Not anymore.

Just google everything when I need to find something. In the past I was using
bookmarks to track blogs I follow but these days there is too much content. I
just google/HN search stuff when I need to find something. I tried going back
to bookmarking stuff/save for later but I just never got time to go back to
the them.

------
mspaulding06
Currently I use a variety of techniques for managing content I would like to
revisit on the web. I do use bookmarks mostly for often visited websites and I
always using syncing if possible with Chrome and other browsers that support
it (Brave does now!). I've also discovered some browser plugins that really
help with this. OneTab is absolutely indispensable and will store all of your
currently open tabs so that you don't have to keep them open. That's great
when I've got several tabs open on a single subject that I want to come back
to later. I've also started to use Pocket for most blog posts and random
things that I want to read some time in the future but can't right now. The
nice thing is that it is accessible from all my devices so I can put links
into Pocket from my phone and then go to them from my desktop computer.

------
theonemind
I use firefox. It's easy to bookmark things by clicking the star. I almost
never pick them from menus, but you can limit awesomebar searches to bookmarks
by typing "[asterisk]", so I can find, say, all of the interesting github
projects I've ever bookmarked by typing "github [asterisk]"

~~~
hashhar
I've got to say the Awesome Bar should have a first run demo of some kind.
Once I got familiar with it I can't go back to anything else. Firefox has too
many features for it's own good and it's sad so few people know about them.

------
gkya
I use them quite a bit. They are the only completion source I allow for
firefox, so when I type something other than a URL on the URL/search bar, I
either hit the down arrow and select a matching bookmark, or hit enter and run
a search.

Structurally my bookmarks are an ever growing list, they all go into the
bookmarks menu in firefox. I occasionally tag them too. Most bookmarks are
part of my "online library", I keep them so that if I ever want to send a link
to sth. I liked to someone, use them in an article, or maybe read again. I
have a separate read-it-later list in an Org-mode file.

Some of the bookmarks are shortcuts, mostly to different dictionaries in
WordReference, to Collins english dictionary, and various websites I browse
often, like Reddit, HN, my school's, and my own website that I check every-so-
often when I upload sth. new.

------
dpcan
Yes, and I sync them with Chrome on my phone.

The Bookmarks Bar really has the only ones I regularly use though. Wish it was
2 rows.

------
vorg
I use the bookmark ribbon in Chrome as a "to visit soon, or return to" list.
Stuff I would normally look through the history for.

My most desired feature in Chrome is being able to right-click a link and add
it to my bookmarks. Presently, I have to open the link in a new tab/window
(using right-click, then T or W) then go to the tab/window, click on the
bookmark star, then close the page (i.e. before it finishes loading). If I
want to avoid loading a page I don't want to look at right now, I'll right-
click on the link, then E to copy the link to the clipboard, then go to a new
tab, bookmark it, right-click on the new blank bookmark link, then E to open
the editor dialog, type in some suitable title, tab to the address text box,
paste in the URL, then click Close. Either way, it just isn't simple.

------
pasbesoin
Years (and years) ago, there was PowerMarks by Kaylon. It was great. Cross-
browser, pretty good automated, over-rideable indexing -- space-separated
words/symbols, very quick to maintain, with fuzzy matching. Rapid,
"instantaneous", incremental search against thousands of bookmarks.

It's gone, now, and I've never seen its equivalent.

These days, I use an extension that saves a local copy of the page. As others
have mentioned: Linkrot.

But it's not nearly as quick or convenient to return to a page as it was in
PowerMarks. Although, the extension I use does have search -- manually
triggered, and thereupon taking some time to initially build the index.

But I end up saving more "read later" stuff in it, as opposed to just
reference links. So it ends up being a bit noisier, and size means I end up
with multiple stores having multiple indexes.

------
susam
I don't use browser bookmarks.

I save my bookmarks in a text file, commit it and push it to a remote Git
repo. I have this Git repo cloned on every system I use. Since the Vim editor
is part of my daily workflow, visiting one of the URLs in the text file is a
simple matter of pressing `gx` while the cursor is on a URL.

This is useful to me because I have this repo cloned on every system I use for
various reasons, e.g. it contains my daily notes, productivity scripts, etc.
So it makes sense to keep all my bookmarks also in this repo. Also having the
bookmarks in a text file provides me the flexibility to add arbitrary
notes/comments for each URL I save. The fact that I don't have to use the
mouse and I can use Vim search or motion commands to find a bookmark is a
bonus.

------
smonff
All my bookmarks collection inside browsers always end up turning to a
horrible stack of junk: I don't know how to get rid of the old stuff, you know
something that interested you at some point won't be interesting later but you
never know...

With the intelligent address bars of the browsers, you can search and find for
most of the recent stuff that you used, and even sometimes very old stuff.

I don't use bookmarks anymore, and I feel like the bookmark bar is most of the
time a useless distraction.

If there is things I really want to keep, I post it in a public Shaarli[1]
instance where I force myself to use tags, description and informative title.

[1] [https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli](https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli)

Edit: removed markdown

------
pritambarhate
I use bookmarks a lot and using Chrome I sync them on multiple machines. Yet,
I find that bookmarks management is a neglected feature in Chrome. I have
hierarchies of bookmarks, and while creating a new bookmark it's very hard to
find the appropriate folder, especially when I remember the name of the folder
vaguely.

If any Chrome Developer is listening:

It will be amazing if there is some form of autocomplete to specify the folder
for the bookmark. Right now on Mac, finding the folder in the drop-down is
very hard. To find a folder, typing needs be fast. I almost never find the
right folder, if the folder name contains a space. As after the space it
starts to match from the first letter in the folder names if you take a brief
pause to start typing the next letter.

------
joveian
I use bookmarks in two basic ways. One is that I have Firefox customized to
have two rows of header and on the right half of the top row (which has tabs
on the left) I have favicon only bookmarks of sites I look at frequently (like
hckrnews.com) so I can open them with one click. I have eighteen such
bookmarks plus a link to browser preferences. I have seven folders of
bookmarks, either just with the folder icon, one or two characters of text, or
a single emojii character for identification. Three of these contain links to
my favorite articles (Firefox is bad at scrolling in bookmark folders :( ).
One has links I occasionally want to use but not often and one is supposed to
have things I want to go back and look at somewhat quickly but not quickly
enough to be worth a top level link (I need to clean it out, though, I've
collected too much that I am not going to go back to). I'll sometimes create
temporary folders about a particular topic.

I bookmark most pages I view as unsorted bookmarks (especially helpful for
news sites that have essentially no way to ever find old articles) and then
ones I am more interested in I add to another folder that I occasionally
divide into smaller folders (to avoid needing to scroll) and put all of these
smaller folders ordered chronologically in a folder to the right of the tabs.
I usually search the bookmarks first when looking for something, but I don't
tag and too often neither the title nor url contain the right keywords for me
to find it.

I would really love a more unified bookmark/history system along the lines of
Vivaldi's calendar history, but being able to create icons that will flag the
current page (to be able to look through just the more interesting history)
and other icons that would cause the current page to be saved to a particular
folder as a bookmark. Then at most one click would reproduce my current system
other than occasional reorganization. Since I can't predict in advance most of
what I want to refer to again, I want it to take as little time as possible to
bookmark things. I liked the star in Firefox better when it didn't pop up the
folder selection unless you clicked it twice.

------
fela
I stopped using bookmarks after I realized I wasn't using them, thanks to a
combination of:

1\. Autocompletion: for any website I use regularly I just write a substring
of the url or Title (Firefox does this especially well). This covers probably
70% of my browsing.

2\. Google. This might take slightly longer in case I want to find a specific
article I had read some time ago, but it still seems less effort that having
to bother with bookmarks, in my experience: either you have a very long list
of unsorted bookmarks, in witch it's hard to search, or you have to spend time
sorting them into sub-folders.

Now that I think of it, the following would be a very useful Google feature:
+1 an url so that it becomes much more likely to bubble to the top in future
searches.

------
__jal
I do, for frequent access stuff. Work-related things, personal apps that run
in various places, frequently visited sites. The trick is to keep the number
low, otherwise I'll never use them because they're impossible to navigate.

For reference material, I built something sort of vaguely like pinboard.in
into a home-brew app that I run for myself. It handles search, a modified form
of tagging, and a timeline-like view, and I get to it with a JS bookmark
(tada) that lives in-browser and sends selected text as a search.

(The app itself is a ridiculous mess, having grown as a sort of cancer in a
different app I wrote for myself that now does several unrelated things. Maybe
someday I'll pick that crap back apart into something releasable.)

------
blakesterz
The only part I use is the bookmark toolbar, which I use HEAVILY. Just
counted, I have 30 in my toolbar. I never use any other bookmarks now though.
I still have all my old bookmarks in backups going back to the late 90s
though. Fun to look at every once in a while.

------
rvern
Smart bookmarks! Bookmarklets! RSS bookmarks! Awesomebar fuzzy matching! Along
with bookmark keywords and bookmark syncing! Firefox's implementation of
bookmarks is right next to Wikipedia and ad blockers among the crowning
inventions of the World Wide Web.

------
snlacks
I use bookmarks, but rarely for clicking from the bar. Chrome and Edge promote
bookmarked sites in the nav bar suggestions when I'm typing. I usually use
descriptive names of the content so I can find stuff I liked or go to often by
typing a couple letters.

------
davidp670
I stopped using Chrome bookmarks b/c they got too messy but now I use Bookmark
OS which I really like. It kinda like Mac OSX but for bookmarks in the browser
[https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

~~~
TenJack
Bookmark OS is being featured on Product Hunt right now!

------
mtrycz
I have something very simple, A folder called FFR = For Future Reference,
where I'll keep the most interesting stuff. Trusting Trust (and Overcoming
Trusting Trust), Windows' NSA_KEY, and the like. Most are in the folder with
no further hierarchy, but some are categorized into Security, DIY, UI/UX, Gift
Ideas, etc.

I also have bookmarks at the root level for things that I will Definitely See
Tomorrow™, which I never erase, because hey, They could be important.

Since it's the weekend, have this extremely educational video about languages
[https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)

------
hashhar
Absolutely yes. It serves two primary purposes for me:

1\. Archival. If I like something and will need to refer to it/revisit it
later (more than a month, say) I will bookmark it.

2\. Frequently used pages sit neatly on my bookmarks bar so that I can get to
the websites I want quickly just by glancing at their favicons.

Organisation:

I primarily organize in 3 levels.

Top level: This is where frequently used stuff goes. I have configured FF to
only show favicons for these so they take little space. eg. HN, GitHub,
Outlook, Reddit and Bugzilla.

Second level: This is where things go for archival. I have bookmark folders at
the top level that represent a category. eg. Books, Movies, Tech, Coding. Each
of those can be further categorised. An example is my Tech folder is broken up
into Articles, Blogs, Podcasts, Material (projects, GH repos etc.).

The void: This is the final level or organisation and is just a catch-all
folder called Sort-These-Out where all stuff I'm too lazy to organise (or
which isn't well defined right now, or things I'll get back on another machine
maybe (Linux vs Windows)) goes. It currently has 13 bookmarks. Not bad.

PS: Did you know you can send tabs across Firefox instances on different
machines by right clicking and hitting "Send Tab to Device"? The best thing
ever.

EDIT: Forgot these two features.

1\. Keyword search. Kind of like the bang query syntax from DuckDuckGo you can
set up a keyword to search a single website by creating a bookmark. So I can
go 'gh mycoolrepo' for searching on GitHub.

2\. Tags. Firefox allows you to tag bookmarks. It helps me a lot when, for
example, I want to find all bookmarks related to vim (but don't necessarily
have vim in the page title). I'm working on an autotagger that integrates into
Firefox to save me from having to tag them myself.

[1]: [http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Firefox-Keywords](http://www.wikihow.com/Use-
Firefox-Keywords) (See method 2 for easier variant.

------
rwanyoike
Yes I do, I use bookmarks to save time. I have them organized in different
folders, with a few for "temporary" bookmarks that I clear out regularly. I
try to limit my bookmarks to landing pages, online tools and references -
stuff I know I'll revisit, while I send article/news bookmarks to Pocket or
Feedly (RSS).

A problem comes up when searching for bookmarks that don't have keywords in
their titles. I use a WebExtension [0] to update my bookmarks with website
descriptions, increasing the odds of finding them.

[0]: [https://github.com/rwanyoike/bookmark-
refresh](https://github.com/rwanyoike/bookmark-refresh)

------
kijin
Yes, every day, as part of a two-tier system.

I use browser bookmarks for pages I visit every day, or for pages that I
intend to view again in the near future. An icon on a toolbar right on top of
the browser is much easier to access than a link stored in a third-party app
or website.

Of course I could just keep all those pages open in background tabs all the
time, but I don't like clutter. Having too many open tabs also consumes a
nontrivial amount of CPU and RAM. Bookmarks are also safer in case the browser
crashes and fails to restore all the open tabs.

I use Pinboard for pages that I might view again at some time in the future,
for research or some other purpose. The archive feature is very useful for
this.

------
hellofunk
Unfortunately yes. And they are a mess. I have different bookmarks in Safari
and Chrome, and on desktop and mobile. I have them synced between devices but
the UI for navigating them is completely different and this doesn't help me so
much.

I have so many Chrome bookmark folders that I don't know where anything is.
The only way to find one is to just search in the Bookmark Manager. It sucks.

It also doesn't help that my preferred browser on different devices is a
different browser.

I hope you are asking this question because you want to do something about
this State of Affairs. I would gladly enjoy a good service that solves this
problem in some innovative way that my brain cannot come up with.

------
mirimir
I use bookmarks in Firefox in three ways. Sites that I use frequently go in
the toolbar. Sites that I use rarely go in folders in the toolbar. Sites that
I just want to remember go in "other bookmarks", and later I search for them.

------
Steven_Bukal
I have lots of bookmarks, mostly for a few purposes:

1 - Pages I want to autocomplete so I don't have to remember and type the full
address or verify that I'm on the true site for my bank and not a phishing
site

2 - Content to do something about in the future. Stuff to read later, stuff to
download to my local machine, etc.

3 - Resources that I want to remember exist and be able to find. For example,
I've got a page saved that produces blank graphics in whatever dimensions you
want for use in stuff like web design. Forgetting what it is called, I could
look it up in my bookmarks pretty quickly instead of having to open photoshop
and create such graphics manually

------
a3n
I do, but only for frequent things, and I'll clean that out periodically.

For longer term bookmarks I use pinboard.

I use a middle-ground for a few things: I may bookmark, say, news sites in
pinboard under the "news" category. Every tag and combination of tags on
pinboard has an RSS feed; I bookmark the "news" tag's RSS feed in Firefox, and
everything tagged shows up.

The RSS is not for the content of the target sites, it's for what goes in and
out of the news tag. So I might add another news site to my pinboard news tag,
and vi-ola, it shows up in my Firefox RSS bookmark. Delete something from the
pinboard tag and it's gone in Firefox.

------
kxyvr
I have hundreds of bookmarks stored across dozens of folders based on topic.
I've been burned in the past with Google changing their search algorithm and
not being able to find material easily, so I just bookmark everything I want
to refer to later now. To that end, I primarily use Firefox and periodically
archive them using the "Import and Backup" option from the bookmarks folder.
That works alright as it produces an HTML file with the entries, but I'd like
something more program independent. Does anyone know a good utility for
offline archiving of bookmarks in a mostly browser independent way?

~~~
vinay427
Chrome can import the HTML file that Firefox and some other browsers generate.
I tried this a few weeks ago. It isn't application-specific.

------
mrmondo
More heavily than ever, I have every bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar, all in
folders such as 'home' and 'work' for local URLs, 'checkout' for things I've
found but not researched, 'git' for URLs to my GitLab / GitHub projects etc...
pretty much every fancy bookmark management service or replacement has
massively disappointed me, overly complicated or requires running background
services (like xmarks) etc... the only reliable one is the built in Firefox
sync, then I use a plugin to export bookmarks to HTML on quit which exports to
a directory in my Dropbox directory.

------
nebyoolae
I do still use bookmarks, but only for places I go a lot, and I sync them via
Chrome. Pocket is a godsend for the "cool links" that I check out when I have
time and then usually archive away, never to look at again.

------
nsarafa
Ironically, I just cleared out my chrome bookmarks today. Found it far too
difficult trying to find the correct folder hidden in a long list of old/dead
folders/links. After I purged, I stumbled upon the chrome bookmarks manager
browser extension that makes the process of adding a bookmark much easier as
you can type to search ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/g...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-
manager/gmlllbghnfkpflemihljekbapjopfjik?hl=en))

------
savethefuture
I do, but I have them export and upload to my server daily so I can keep them
in sync. I don't organize them, I just use search and find. They're all
relevant links I wish to look at or read at a later date.

~~~
adentranter
How often do you find yourself going back and searching for a specific
bookmark? And do you find it within one search?

~~~
savethefuture
Weekends, or if its something really important that night. I just view the
exported bookmark document in my browser off my server. CTRL+F

------
nafizh
Surprise no one mentioned pocket. I use the pocket chrome extension. Compared
to the bookmark system, using it is a breeze and much more clean. More
importantly, I can also find them back later with my poor memory.

------
comboy
The thread is already pretty long and it looks like I'm the first one to
mention [https://google.com/save](https://google.com/save) \- works quite
well.

~~~
elviejo
Thanks I just went there and found stuff I had saved before and never visited

------
ungzd
Yes, but in single folder (maintaining tree structure is pain) and rarely
access it. Del.icio.us was very convenient, seems that it still exists but
seems that they deleted all old data and may close again soon.

------
csydas
I do and have for our support team for our company when we hire newbies. We
have a pretty standard "load-out" of commonly used pages and sites, both
internal and external, which are commonly used for support calls for the
product. A newbie might not have use of every single link, but having a
curated list of "this will be useful at some point, just keep in mind that
it's there should you run out of ideas" really helps them get past the initial
hurdle of learning the ins and outs of the product and the other elements that
support it.

------
madiathomas
I have seven folders of bookmarks. Each for different topic/subject. Whenever
I come across a new link which I will need to refer to in future, I store it
so that I can open it from the bookmark. If I am not going to need the
bookmark or no longer interested in a certan subject, I delete the bookmark or
the whole folder. Some of the bookmarks have been there since 2010 because
they are of the tools I still use.

I use Chrome. I like the fact that the bookmarks are synced to my Android
phone and work computer. That way they are available whenever I want to use
computer.

------
Merem
Of course I do. Just checked everything and my bookmarks number just above
1000. The ones I use the most and websites I need in the immediate future are
organized in the bookmarks toolbar (I'm using Firefox). Apart from that, they
are put into separate folders regarding various topics as well as a list with
"random" links which I can't put anywhere else. They are useful to me in the
sense that I don't need to remember all those 1000+ links as well as it being
the fastest way to access a website (it's faster than typing).

------
zehfernandes
In the last few years, major bookmark services closed their doors. The
browsers' bookmark system tries to organize links as folders and tags — but
again, it’s an old model. Chrome's bookmark system has many usability
problems, the​ main one being that​ you need to click three times to save one
link in a specific folder.

I proposed a new mental model using infinite history. You can see some
animated examples here:

[http://zehfernandes.com/bookmark-is-dead/](http://zehfernandes.com/bookmark-
is-dead/)

------
Sebatyne
I stopped using browser bookmarks to use a web app (the bookmark manager of
officejs, [https://www.officejs.com/](https://www.officejs.com/)), directly
integrated within any browser by updating the default search engine. Having
them synchronized on a webbdav server, after loging into the app I can access
them from any browser on any device. Then all my searches in the browser bar
go through my bookmarks first, and it redirects me to a real search engine if
no match has been found.

------
scriptkiddy
I do.

I never have to worry about them going away and I can organize them into
folders any way I like. Plus, they can be exported, imported, and shared. I
use Firefox, so accessing the bookmarks is as simple as using a drop down
menu. I actually use a bookmark tool bar for my ost frequently visited sites.
This way, when I want to go to HN, for instance, I just click a single button
and I'm there.

I've looked at other bookmarking software/services, and I still find that
plain old browser bookmarks still fit every use case.

------
dingdingdang
Yes, extensively - have them arranged in the Firefox bookmark bar with along
with folders to drop down for categories like "search", "news", "projects",
etc. For everything that needs remembering in a more tertiary sense I bookmark
without folders but use tags. FF's system, similar to Chrome's, that can
synchronize across to other computers and phones while keeping encrypted stuff
in the cloud makes bookmarks a lot less volatile in nature than they used to
be.

------
tarboreus
I just keep links in easily searchable text files. When I need something I can
just search for it. Emacs orgmode allows for nice links, you can open the page
straight from the text file.

------
Globz
Yes I still do, at this moment I have 3413 bookmarks across different folders,
coding, work, recipes, Gaming, etc.

I am currently running Bookmark Checker (chrome extension) and did set the
parameters to "error connect" and at this very moment it is reporting :
"Bookmark check status: Total bookmarks : 2238 of 3413 error connect: 2117"

so many dead links :(

I did not know about pinboard and I am really tempted to give it a try so I
can do a full html archive without the fear of losing again 2000+ bookmarks in
5 years from now.

------
AldousHaxley
YES! So many things to read, and I hate having a million tabs open at once.
Even if I don't get around to something until months later, bookmarks are an
indispensable tool.

------
btb
Only the bookmarks bar at the top of the browser.

For most sites I use keyboard shortcuts + the autocomplete in chrome. Aka to
visit hackernews: Ctrl+L and then "news.y" and hit enter.

------
petercooper
No, I created a simple Ruby script that stores them in a text file and lets me
easily search them at the command line. Syncs through Dropbox so I have it on
all my machines :)

------
psiegmann
I'm quite happy with a set of project specific bookmarks to get people up-to-
speed quicker. We have web-{dev/acc/prd}, cms-{acc/prd}, jira, confluence,
buildsystem, log-{dev/acc/prd}, etc

We maintain the bookmarks in yaml and generate the html to import into
firefox/chrome/ie. Script: [https://github.com/psiegman/bookmark-
generator](https://github.com/psiegman/bookmark-generator)

------
smnscu
I'm a diehard fan of classic bookmarks. I tried pinboard, pocket, and other
services, but for me the browser bookmarks with some form of organization
works best. I like and use all Chrome shortcuts and nifty features for
bookmarks, and even if the browsers seem to be going into a different
direction (see Chrome's "smart" bookmarks), as the saying goes they will have
to pry them from my cold, dead hands.

(At the moment I have 519 bookmarks in 73 folders)

------
alphydan
I need to access 3 pages and 7 google drive folders almost every day for work.
Those are the only browser bookmarks I have because they save me 20 - 30
clicks/day.

------
zmix
Absolutely! You will always search the needle in the haystack with Google. But
you will search the mouse in the haystack with bookmarks. And with the history
set to "not expire" that mouse may even become the size of a dog.

I stopped categorizing my bookmarks into folders a long time ago, however.
They just end in a single folder. Though, I love to use 'tags', which I use
for important stuff, that I want to distinguish from other important stuff.

------
kakarot
I use a single line favicons across my bookmarks bar and remove all text from
them. They are organized by color in a rainbow-like fashion.

It looks beautiful and works well. I just have to maintain a mental map of
what general color a website's icon is and while my mouse is gravitating in
that direction I'm mentally retrieving the actual icon. It's a great visual
memory exercise in the beginning but eventually you wonder how you did it any
other way.

------
jhwhite
I do but I'm very slowly moving away from them in some instances.

If I come across articles I like I save them to instapaper instead of
bookmark.

For work...I've pretty much created my own wiki of bookmarks using OneNote.
Employer uses SharePoint and some pages won't display or work correctly in
Chrome, so I use IE for work intranet. So instead of bookmarks I have a
notebook and put tags in the notebook for easy searching and I can put a good
description of the site.

~~~
hashhar
I started using OneNote extensively after seeing how Mike Conley (a Firefox
dev) uses Evernote to organise bug info, knowledge etc.

I personally use it to pick out snippets from podcasts I listen to, some code
snippet or a technique I find interesting or just collections of links related
to a topic. It serves good for "heavier" bookmarks. I can annotate everything.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmaFLMwlbk8wKMvfEEzp9...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmaFLMwlbk8wKMvfEEzp9Hfdlid8VYpL5)

------
ronreiter
Reading list is not bookmarks. And of course we do use bookmarks, especially
those who work in companies that require frequent access to several systems.

------
Moto7451
Yup. I use Safari on my Mac and everything syncs nicely between my devices
care of iCloud. I use folders within the bookmark bar to organize things.

------
Huhty
Yes, I have Chrome synced between all devices and PCs.

------
sriku
I use but don't rely on bookmarks as I usually want to add some information
when saving a reference. My tool of choice is Zotero [1] which I started using
during researcher days and never looked back. If you organize your references
into collections, then zotero can make some nice summaries for you.

[1]: [https://www.zotero.org](https://www.zotero.org)

------
svartkonst
I do, semi-organized into folders. Mostly for archival purposes. If I come
across something, a product or library och guide or whatever, that I want to
save, I bookmark it.

I don't use the bookmark tabs, and I'm not regularly using what I have in my
bookmarks, they're more for safekeeping, and to remind myself aobut things.

Plus it's fun to take a look through the bookmarks and rediscover things.

------
Grue3
Yes, I use the star in Firefox URL bar (yeah, I know, they moved it recently
for some reason) to mark the websites I'd want to revisit and add a bunch of
tags to them. Then, if I forget about something, I can always search by tag.
These are filed as "Unsorted bookmarks". I pretty much never use Bookmarks
menu, because searching by tag is more efficient.

------
harijoe
I tried to address this problem some months ago with a chrome extension. Feel
free to try and provide feedback to it :
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oh-hi-
mark/fcmdkga...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oh-hi-
mark/fcmdkgabkdkmdnbppfliniacpgadhcpo)

------
damat
I'm not only just using bookmarks but even pushed them to more advanced level
with own extension for
Chrome:[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-
startpage/dg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-
startpage/dgbkppglifchfjpombkeaijnpppcfibf)

------
vermooten
I've still got 100s of bookmarks from the late 90s, still in their original
sub-folders. Most are dead now, which is a shame.

------
seltzered_
No, I don't use browser bookmarks or bar shortcuts. For me at least, I feel
like those needs have been replaced by:

\- pinboard. Been using it for many years

\- DuckDuckGo's interrobang search to quickly access pin board bookmarks /
maps / etc.

\- the browser URL bars own autocomplete

\- this may have happened also since until recently, I used different browsers
on mobile (Firefox) vs desktop (safari)

------
DanBC
Yes.

I make sure I use a descriptive sentence when I save them.

They're useful to me because the people creating the pages don't know about
SEO and Google fucking sucks at giving me the pages I need unless I use weird
contorted search phrases or remember the exact name of the document.

I have 12 icons in my bookmark toolbar that I use daily. I have a few that I
don't use very often.

------
mehdix
Oh, yes I do use them a lot. I store my bookmarks flat, with no structure. In
Chrome, I add keywords to the title upon bookmarking and later I do keyword-
based searches. In fact, I developed my own Chrome extension to search
bookmarks: [https://goo.gl/paiU3o](https://goo.gl/paiU3o)

------
sigi45
Yes. I hide my bookmarkbar on tabs and only see them on new tab.

I have in my bookmark bar the most used sites. I have a few folders for topics
and for work bookmarks.

Bookmarks help me to close a tab. It gives me the feeling that i still can
read it but i don't have to do so now. Sometimes, depending on the content, i
pocket it instead of using a bookmark for it.

~~~
damat
I have just the same use cases! Could please try my extension for bookmarks on
the new page: [https://goo.gl/cjl0Pg](https://goo.gl/cjl0Pg) ? Any feedback is
very welcome

------
ivm
No, I run a local MoinMoin instance with database in Dropbox and arrange
different topics in pages there, including links.

------
steverandy
I use a browser called Colibri
([https://colibri.opqr.co/](https://colibri.opqr.co/)).

It has something called Links, where all URLs that you added are sorted by
date. You can save a URL quickly with keyboard shortcut (CMD+D).

I also organize the links that I frequently visit by topics in the Lists
section.

------
IE6
Yes but not like I used to. When I was younger and had time I would bookmark
things, organize them, and use them to navigate to sites of interest. Now I
simply use bookmarks as a dumping ground for 'something I need to see but
later because I am tired now and not using the internet for anything serious'.

------
jakub_g
I use bookmarks at work, mostly as a big jar of deeplinks to wiki pages,
dashboards etc etc - I do not organize them nicely into subfolders, just rely
on my memory on how I named them and parts of URL. The more often I use the
page, the shorter the keyword. I use CTRL-L and bookmark name to open pages
all the time.

------
etiam
Yes. In a "folder" hierarchy in the built-in Firefox bookmarks manager. I
often wish for a better interface to move around in the tree though (e.g.
filter for a bookmark or folder and see what's stored close to it) and some
sort of aliases for multiple classifications would be handy sometimes.

------
wtbob
Yes, I use them. I prefer them to any online service because they are
completely under my own control. I do wish that I could securely sync them,
but ever since Firefox completely broke the security of their Sync system,
there's nothing I can rely on to safely sync for me. It's not a huge deal

~~~
grigory
Can you expand on "Firefox completely broke security if Sync"? Do you have a
specific incident in mind, or an architectural change, or..?

~~~
wtbob
The old Firefox sync protocol used secure keys to encrypt user data; the new
protocol uses one's Firefox account password to encrypt it. A memorable
password is a low-entropy password, which means it is an insecure encryption
key.

Mozilla's protocol purports not to reveal passwords to Mozilla itself, _but_
the security of the system rests on Javascript files delivered from … Mozilla.
They can, if they wish, target a user and serve him suborned Javascript which
send the plaintext password back. Unlike a tampered build of Firefox itself,
which might actually be noticed, this could be a one-shot attack.

Worse, not just Mozilla as an organisation can do this: it can be compelled to
do so on behalf of any government which has the power to compel it (or those
employees capable of targeting someone).

It's a terrible, terrible change.

------
girishso
After having thousands of bookmarks on different services. I decided to build
[http://tweetd.com](http://tweetd.com). It indexes the links you tweet.

Edit: Although, I realized that just full-text searching through bookmarks
won't pop the most relevant links to the top.

------
scarface74
Yes. But, except for work related URLs, I rarely go back and use them.

If it is an interesting web site with good articles, I subscribe to the RSS
feed.

My bookmarks stay synced between my iPhone and Chrome on Windows using Apple's
iCloud Chrome plug in. It stays synced between Chrome on different computers
using my Chrome account.

------
markatkinson
Yea it turns out my bookmarks are a graveyard for things I'll never read. The
Android HN app I use let's me Mark articles as read later and most the time it
works offline so I tend to use that more. When I find myself on a plane with
no reception I dip into my list of offline HN articles.

------
goodJobWalrus
I do, but I consciously keep only a small number of them (ideally not much
more than 100) and regularly purge.

~~~
newbear
When do you make time to purge? I find that I procrastinate tasks like
reviewing. How often do you do it? Daily? How much time do you set aside?

~~~
savethefuture
A good way to do this is after you've read/viewed/gotten what you want out of
the bookmark, delete it right away.

------
ramigb
Yep, I also built a chrome extension to manage bookmarks ...

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks%2B%2B/li...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmarks%2B%2B/lipplgkpgmnpfkbiompechagoogdafom)

------
jiiam
Yep. When I'm doing a somewhat specialized research I bookmark interesting
results and add a tag for future reference. Usually the time after which they
are forgotten is ~1 week, because they either served their purpose or became
irrelevant, but sometimes I still use some of them.

------
astrikos
Right now I use pocket, but I want to try stash!

I will definitely write a short review, but I need 10 people to view the link
to help me access it first:
[https://stash.ai/landing?source=f520deef](https://stash.ai/landing?source=f520deef)

------
nicky0
I use bookmarks for mundane services I use semi-regularly: online banking,
government services, electric, gas, water company, insurance company and so
on.

Also admin stuff like webhost control panel, bugtracker, iTunes Connect etc.

Arranged in favourites bar in folders by category.

Saved articles go in pinboard.in however.

------
rdiddly
I use bookmarks, I just don't keep them in the browser anymore. I have
individual ones scattered throughout my filesystem tree by topic or function,
mixed in with documents and whatever other files. Much better having just one
hierarchy to search through for stuff.

------
jasonkostempski
I used to use and painfully maintain them for reference materials but they
proved to be less useful than just reGoogling, so I stopped. ReGoogling isn't
great either, I'd like an easy to use PKB but I wouldn't want it to be
directly built into my browser.

------
tjbiddle
Not really - ⌘L to get to the address bar, and then autocomplete handles the
rest as I start typing for 99% of use-cases. However I know I used bookmarks
semi-recently when I was working on a project where I was regularly using
websites that I don't normally use.

------
justaaron
of course I "still" use browser bookmarks. Bookmarks, back/forward buttons,
it's amazing but you don't actually need to kluge more poop on top of browser
behavior to make it usable! Believe it or not, they made it right the first
time.

------
Jayakumark
Have more than 150,000 Links in Pinboard. I Bookmark every new site that i
like when i come across. Wanted to start something similar to producthunt from
those, but never got to it. May be someday would make it like a Yahoo
directory but that day never comes.

------
ehnto
I use bookmarklets to perform tasks on sites to make them more readable.
Actual bookmarked websites is less common but I have a few. Normally it is for
short term "I will forget this otherwise" sites that get removed when I no
longer need them.

------
nol13
Very very rarely, but have a few.

Mostly just browser history, or I'll ddg it again as a fall-back. Doesn't work
as well in Chrome (or im doing it wrong) but FF awesome bar seems to pull up
the links I need within a few keystrokes the majority of the time.

------
nhumrich
I love Firefox's keywords for bookmarks. I can type `gh` and be taken to
GitHub, or `dh` for dockerhub, etc. Chrome can only do this for searching, not
generic bookmarks. It basically is like a shell alias for all my favorite
websites.

------
trojanh
Since in today's age there no unified platform , it doesn't make sense to use
bookmarks to me. I use Pocket an alternative which does the bookmark smartly.
It stores the webpages oflline on my mobile so it becomes very handy.

------
jesus92gz-spain
I do. I have my Chrome browsers in sync, categorised in folders. I do also
have "Read later" bookmarks, as I sometimes find interesting websites or news
I cannot read entirely because I'm busy or whatever other reason.

------
wazoox
I use the same set of bookmarks in Firefox migrating and evolving since 1997
and Netscape 1.0 on IRIX. Some are surprisingly durables. In any case even
with URL rot they are useful as reminders of pages I want to keep as
references.

------
alkonaut
No. Autocomplete in the URL field only.

I never save anything for later, I either read it or forget it. I only
regularly visit a few dozen sites, so usually the site is completed in the URL
field after 1 character (such as "n" to load HN).

------
guilhas
[https://darkle.github.io/MarkSearch/](https://darkle.github.io/MarkSearch/)

= Or =

Zim wiki with With copy paste urls "Copy URL + Title" (Chrome) "Multiple tab-
handler" (Firefox)

------
smdz
I use it, but not in its original way.

I would bookmark a link in Chrome just because it automatically shows up (in
type ahead) when I search for similar keywords in the address bar. I have too
many bookmarks to categorize and remember.

------
kk_cz
yes, but only via bookmark toolbar - if you create folders here it acts like a
pull-down menu that you have always on top of your browser + plus adding and
categorizing new bookmark is as easy as dragging the site's url into matching
folder. I haven't seen the "regular" bookmark manager or "add new bookmark"
dialog in ages.

About 5-10 most used links are simple 1-click buttons, rest is sorted into
folders.

Most of these aren't content websites, but rather different webapps, or links
into webapps (like direct link into some intranet forms that are used maybe
2-3x per month)

------
josho
I used Stache to save a copy of the site and thumbnail. It was a pretty nifty
app, but is pretty much end of life from insufficient sales.

There is an opportunity to do something better than bookmarks, but not likely
as a business.

------
candeira
Yes, but very few of them:

Bookmarks bar: bookmarklets for pinboard, ffound, whatfont, etc. Plus
bookmarks for Toggl and certain other work-related services.

Bookmarks proper: one folder per client, with links to documentation, issue
tracker, etc.

------
c_r_w
Chrome, synced. 99.99% of my bookmark clicks goto the Bookmarks Bar.

Mostly I save bookmarks to close a tab, doubtful I will ever look at it again.
Mostly those are for tech research.

I also use "open tabs on other devices" extensively.

------
robertlf
I've always lamented the fact that the major browsers don't make it easy to
see how old your bookmarks are and provide a way to highlight and delete ones
that you haven't clicked on in awhile.

~~~
hashhar
You were saying... [http://imgur.com/a/vFobm](http://imgur.com/a/vFobm)

See the column headings. These values even sync across devices on Firefox.

------
DavideNL
Yes... and also i recently discovered Bookmacster (macOS) which locally syncs
bookmarks between Safari & Firefox & Chromium etc. (without having to upload
all your stuff to a cloud.) Very handy!

------
squiggy22
I wish Google would create a separate index of all the stuff I bookmark, and
provide it as a subset of the Google search experience. I too find myself
Google searching for info Ive previously browsed.

------
timkofu
Yes. Chrome (backs them up to the cloud, so they survive re-installs, and are
synchronized across my devices) + the Bookmark Search plugin is like a
personal search engine of links important to me.

------
sametmax
Yes. Stuff to real later, stuff I want to share, resources I might come back
to, quick grouped access to tools I use regularly (but not frequantly), links
related to each of my dev missions, etc.

------
Kiro
No, I just save links as plain text in my Evernote. This means I can add
comments and other meta data very easily and I have everything stored in one
place without having to rely on the browser.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I can't live without my bookmarks, I have a lot of them, well organized and
tagged, I search in them more than google when I'm looking for specific
articles or things related to code

------
rachkovsky
I do and I don't.

I don't use browser bookmarks/favorites, but I have created and use zeerka.com
browser homepage that keeps all the links I need, accessible in any browser,
taggable, searchable.

------
pjc50
Yes, in small quantities and _not_ synced. They're for sites I visit
regularly, or essential intranet pages at work.

Stuff I want archived for reference or I want to read later goes to
Pinboard.in.

------
grafoo
the thing that always bugs me is how to use bookmarks when working with
multiple browsers. the various bookmark service platforms never fully
scratched the one itch i was feeling => simply save a bookmark and let me add
some tags to it.

right now the only browser based bookmark i'm having is a bookmarklet that
takes me to my own bookmark store ( see
[https://github.com/grafoo/webdmp](https://github.com/grafoo/webdmp) if you're
interested.)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Have you tried pinboard? I loved delicious back in the day (when it had an
impossible-to-remember chain of subdomains!) and pinboard gets as close to
replicating that functionality as I've found. I'm still planning on writing my
own client to resolve a few minor issues, but the api looks solid too.

~~~
grafoo
delicious was awesome, very sad story that it didn't work out for them. right
now i'm pretty happy with my self baked solution, though reading pinboards
about features it sounds interesting. thanks for the recommendation.

------
nottorp
Of course I use bookmarks. Not for sites i visit regularly, the browser takes
care of that, but for reference articles I'll need later. I just use per-
subject folders, nothing fancy.

------
vortico
Yes, and in vimperator they're really easy to use. Press "A" to bookmark, "A"
again to remove, and "t" (tabopen) to search for a page in your bookmarks.

------
tluyben2
I use them a lot; there are a lot of obscure searches I do to which I bookmark
the result with keywords that make me find it in one go instead of doing the
search mambo in Google again.

------
roystonvassey
Since I find most of the useful content I read either on HN or Reddit, I tend
to use in-built mechanisms such as the like/upvote/save options to bookmark
things I like.

------
wsc981
I use bookmarks. Mainly to keep autocomplete of important URLs intact after
clearing browser history.

And also to keep track of important endpoints when I work for a new client (I
am freelancer).

------
ertucetin
Also I use Diigo it's a very cool and intuitive tool so I highly recommend it:
[https://www.diigo.com](https://www.diigo.com)

------
neurobot
Still use bookmark. create folder inside folder (folderception).

Also, I used mozbackup, to backup my profile (all of them, including
configuration, bookmark, history, etc).

I used firefox for my primary browser.

------
pensatoio
Of course. I believe just about any technically capable person uses bookmarks.
I've never met a programmer who didn't and such is the primary audience of
this site.

------
Veratyr
I use mine as a queue for things I intend to look at later.

What I really wish for is a way to save all the important aspects of a page
for future viewing and organise it in a particular way.

------
tetraodonpuffer
only the toolbar for quick access to the sites I use the most, and those are
kept only as the site icon so I can have many, for everything else I want to
keep I use pinboard

------
s_m
I use bookmarks for things with weird, unmemorable URLs that I use on a daily
basis: shortcuts to JIRA boards; Jenkins configs; traffic conditions to kids'
daycare.

------
kome
I use Pinboard (for free) to manage more than 4000 bookmarks. And I use it
often, it's my personal search engine. It's great. But it can be improved a
lot.

------
windlessstorm
I email myself the interesting and important links with added note. Gmail have
powerful search option to go through any link I am looking for, no problems so
far.

------
asdfasdf45
Evernote web clipper (for Chrome)!

It's bookmarks on steroids, saved for offline, taggable (no assumption of
organizing data in a tree), and synced.

Probably the only useful Evernote feature.

------
probinso
bookmarks fall into two use cases for me.

1 - important instant recall, across the top of my browser is a interface bar
littered with favicons (and no text). I know the name of every site on that
list, but don't ever want to type them.

2 - approximate match/personal search. Modern browsers will autofill your url
bar as you type things associated with the metadata of a bookmark. This
offloads the memory of things i found interesting 8 months ago.

------
rurban
Sure. Chrome syncs them and does autocompletion. Some shortcuts are also used
as icons on the bar, but autocompletion is the most important feature.

------
Procrastes
I do. I have several top level folders, Daily, Reference, Demo and Personal,
then few links on the bookmark bar for Production, Staging and Tickets.

------
swrobel
Not for what seems like an eternity. Autocomplete from my history has replaced
them for me. Actually, I do on mobile, just on quickstarter screens.

------
8note
I use them for work to keep track of all the different systems' uis I need to
use, but otherwise no: the address/search bar does better

------
vinodht
[https://geekmarks.dmitryfrank.com/](https://geekmarks.dmitryfrank.com/) \- is
very handy

------
ge96
Yeah just because I've been lazy and haven't finished my chrome extension that
I've been off/on working on to deal partially with this. I research random
crap and like to store that information into one of my servers. I've got the
basic read/write down. I'm having a problem with the stupid window
disappearing when it's not focused, this is intended/not something I'm going
to get around. So I have to work on using background-process/page and cookies
(I have yet to use cookies)

------
PixZxZxA
I bookmark things that I visit frequently (HN, Todoist etc) and save things to
Pinboard that I want to read later or save for other reasons.

------
wakkaflokka
On this topic, does anybody have a good recommendation for a Google Chrome-
Pinboard bookmark real-time bookmark sync service/extension?

------
continuational
I use them to make sure I can find the site again via Chromes autocompletion.
I don' organize them and I never open the bookmarks view.

------
taranw85
I use a website called Mochimarks. It lets you set reminder dates on
bookmarks. I mostly use that to check up on threads products, or blogs.

------
Safety1stClyde
I have a web server on my home computer, so I make a "bookmarks" page on there
which I can use to visit web sites I want to go to.

------
steel88
Sure, i use Papaly for everything , great service .

~~~
gotrythis
Second Papaly. Changed my life. Totally depend on this service.

------
daledavies
Yes, excellent for research and saving stuff for later. I do tend to purge
after a year or so though because bit rot usually sets in.

------
gcr
Sort of.

I use Safari's reading list extensively.

I also keep snippets of things I want to keep inside my emacs org-mode folder
so it's instantly accessible.

------
LocalMan
I rely on Chrome and Firefox Bookmarks. But I have too many (thousands) and
find that Xmarks doesn't help all that much.

------
th3reverend
i bookmark for:

1\. work; internal websites can't be found on google and i can never remember
them. 2\. to clean up open tabs related to a task that i have to postpone; i
bookmark them en masse and come back to them later; discard when done. 3\. i
have a dozen or so websites i visit daily; right click the folder of bookmarks
and open them all at once.

------
bgrohman
Yes. I use multiple browsers, too, so I built a bookmark manager web app for
personal use with grouping, tagging, and search.

------
meddlepal
Not really no. Even the stuff I do bookmark I do so more as a "I might need
this six months from now" kinda thing.

------
nickbauman
I use them for workflow markers. Things I do everyday, like review pull
requests, check specifications, access dashboards.

------
fariz_
I use toby! [https://www.gettoby.com/](https://www.gettoby.com/)

------
pacomerh
Sure, they sync through devices, many levels of folder nesting, easy access!,
drag drop, pretty raw, basic & handy.

------
hsivonen
I have some. I don’t organize them. I just use them to make rare things not
fall of the Awesomebar search in Firefox.

------
vkorsunov
We create Bubblehunt ([https://bubblehunt.com](https://bubblehunt.com)) - this
is search platform, where you can create own search system for bookmarks,
links and any other resources.

This service automatically indexed page, get relevant results from your
information space, delete duplicates and non-active urls.

This is alpha-version and it would be awesome if you give feedback and ideas
what we need to improve.

------
weitzj
Yes. I use the bookmarks favorites bar, create a folder per project and
synchronize across all devices via xmarks.

------
Avshalom
I have thousands, maybe tens of thousands. The library window never closes. I
really don't organize them.

------
michalpt
Nope :) For articles I use Pocket, anything else such as interesting websites,
apps etc goes into Wunderlist.

------
midhunsezhi
I use them very rarely. Pocket has become my preferred source for storing,
managing and sharing my links now.

------
pcr0
I stopped using them in favor of Pocket.

------
faragon
Only for short-term. For things over a month of age: key words + web search is
faster, at least for me.

~~~
tjl
That really depends. Sometimes, things can be pretty generic or the main site
can be badly organized. In that case, I find that a folder in my bookmarks bar
with links can be a lot faster. Even without using the bookmark, autocomplete
in the bookmarks bar can be faster than a search engine.

In other cases, it can be a pain to get specific enough. If I want the English
version of Chihayafuru Volume 1, but on Bookwalker, not Kindle/Comixology? How
much typing am I going to have to do? Note that if I'm not specific enough,
I'll get a bilingual edition meant for Japanese people to learn English as the
first result. It's an imported physical book and not a digital one, either.

------
taklya
I do use bookmarks but now I use Refind which allows me to store the bookmarks
with tags and socially.

------
kkanojia
I use bookmarks for my regular links and pocket for one time links i want to
go back later and read.

------
weslly
More than I would like to.

I have a pinboard account but always end up just dragging links to the
bookmarks toolbar.

------
pavanky
I have frequently used websites in my boomark bar. There are about 20 of them.
That is about it.

------
paullth
Yeah 1000s of them, all organised into hierarchical subject based folders.
Very useful to me

------
qerim
I used to manage my Bookmarks in Chrome , however after some 'Sync' incident,
I lost a few of them.

I now use [Papaly]([http://papaly.com](http://papaly.com)). It is really well
made. I have my Bookmarks on different Boards. You can view share your
bookmark boards with the community if you wish.

------
tehabe
I bookmark a lot of sites but I rarely go back and use them at least it feels
like it.

------
tobeportable
Not in the browser, just markdown files structured like those github *-awsome
repos.

------
zitterbewegung
At work yea . Everywhere else I memorize urls or use search / keep a tab open.

------
butz
Yes, who's asking? Is one of mainstream browsers planning to ditch bookmarks?

------
NTripleOne
The side panel in Vivaldi has completely replaced any use I had for bookmarks.

------
seajones
Simply put, a bit. Not much, I can find most stuff again just by searching

------
hrez
Yes and xmarks.com plugin for cross-browser sync and backup/history.

------
j_s
Personally I use the QupZilla browser because private browsing automatically
starts separate sessions per-process. Before I throw them all away I collect
all the urls in a big text file using Windows UI Automation... it's messy but
just barely better than nothing.

Never thought about the following (search vs. bookmarks/history) until the HN
discussion last week, though I have always typed in google.com before
searching just because browser search money seems like a bad incentive:

 _There is a reason for that – as a rule, browsers don’t really want you to
use history. They want you to search and find things multiple times because
search royalties are part of their business model._

A couple of full-text-of-every-page-visited Chrome add-ons textually
equivalent to a single-computer version of
[https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/) $25/yr hosted "archiving and
full-text bookmark search" subscription (unfortunately for me I don't like
Google/Chrome/anti-privacy enough to use as my main browser):

[https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon](https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon)
"Chrome extension for full text history search"

[http://fetching.io/](http://fetching.io/) "your own personal Google -- a
search engine for all the web pages you've seen"

[https://worldbrain.io/](https://worldbrain.io/) "Full-Text Search the Pages
you Visited and Bookmarked"

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recoll-
indexe...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recoll-indexer-1/)
"copies the web pages you visit to the Recoll web indexing queue"

Source: _Vivaldi browser v1.8 released, with calendar-style browsing history_
|
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13984122)
(last week)

Also mentioned: Tree Style Tabs Firefox add-on "shows my tabs in the context I
opened them from" | [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

GraphiTabs Chrome add-on |
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclem...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphitabs/dcfclemgmkccmnpgnldhldjmflphkimp)

 _Edit: Added intro w / my own anecdata._

Another idea: custom browsers per-site-you-use, per HN user megous:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226170)

 _For each use case that is not a free browsing I create an electron app, that
never executes any code from the web or uses any external style_

------
astrostl
Yes, but only for regularly-visited things. The rest is on Pinboard.

------
make3
I use pocket instead.. it's amazing with a e-reader like kobo..

------
bhauer
All the time, using folders in the bookmarks bar as drop-down menus.

------
bootload
yes HN itself. I don't bother organising them, search is provided. The
articles posted by myself, others are as good as it gets. Moderated/insightful
comments are a bonus.

------
tscs37
Shaarli + Wallabag. So no.

I usually try to tag my bookmarks but it rarely happens.

------
skdotdan
I bookmark webpages all the time but then never find them again.

------
ecesena
I only have 3 or 4, hn is on of them, and I use them mostly on my iphone/mac
(with the active bar), when I open a new tab I can open those sites with a
single tap, pretty convenient. Beside this no, I've never organized them.

------
xylon
Of course I use bookmarks, how else could I remember websites.

------
sidcool
Yes, Chrome syncs my bookmarks across devices. Pretty nifty.

------
nullsynapse
Yes, but I use Alfred and Chrome Bookmarks to search them.

------
smrtinsert
yes. synced to accounts, for reference material that required complex searches
to arrive at - or material I only browse seldomly, such as fitness plans.

------
known
I always keep open textpad and copy all interesting urls

------
senorjazz
I bookmark everything but go back and read nothing :(

------
KevanM
yes, I have a limited set organised into what I'm doing at work.

The only personal ones I have are news websites and a lunchtime reading
folder.

------
scelerat
I miss delicio.us.

~~~
flurdy
I miss del.icio.us more

------
philippz
Definitely. But more often i use Pocket instead

------
digitalpacman
Uh yeah. Bookmark bar is the best thing ever.

------
lohengramm
I constantly use the bookmarks bar (Firefox).

------
vasili111
I use Chrome and miss opera 12 bookmarks.

------
kevinwang
yes, i use them extensively. They're a godsend for the homepages of all my
college classes.

------
blizkreeg
Pocket is how I bookmark now.

------
jdiscar
I thought about this a lot... so this'll be long. I thought of how bookmarks
were used and came up with:

\- Things you want easy access to, but have annoying URLs, like your company's
wiki page (Solved by Favorites/Bookmarks Bar or Dashboard)

\- Things you want to finish looking at later (Solved by Read Later /
Reminder)

\- Things you want to keep track of, like blogs (Solved by Read Later /
Reminder)

\- Things you want to be able to find later (Solved by Full Text Search and
Tags)

\- Something you might want to see again, but not anytime soon (Solved by
Personal Archive)

\- Something you simply liked or are favoriting (Solved by Personal Archive)

\- Note taking / Research (Solved by Tags and Boards)

\- Idea inspiration (Solved by Tags and Boards)

\- Things you want to show other people (Solved by Social)

\- Things you want to get for yourself (Solved by Wishlist)

\- Things you want other people to get for you (Solved by Wishlist)

My main problem with using bookmarks was that I rarely went back to them.
Normal bookmarks are essentially a personal archive and google search usually
finds things much better.

I realized there were a lot of bookmarks I'd like to go back to, I'd just
forget about them. Maybe I'd like to read something when I got home from work,
or maybe I wanted to check back in a week for an update (or release date), or
I wanted to keep a list of items to show someone later (usually funny videos
or gifs.) It was pretty difficult to do that no matter how I organized my
folders or tagged things.

I eventually built my own bookmark site
([https://www.mochimarks.com/landing](https://www.mochimarks.com/landing))
with all the features I wanted. The main features (apart from the expected
tagging/full text search/browser integration/notes/etc...) were
settable/automatic reminders, wishlists, and recommendations. Wishlists let
you rank bookmarks. Recommendations could be new stuff from friends or the app
could recommend that you look at stuff you liked that you hadn't visited in a
while.

After having my app for a while, I've found I use bookmarks a lot more. I
mostly use reminders and have a few stuff pop up to check each day. Reminders
are killer for me. But when I'm bored I like to sort my wishlists. I don't use
tags much... I really only use #Programming, #Interesting (usually really good
articles), #Funny, #Music, #Blog, and #ArtBlog. I'll use the recommendation
features to check on my blogs and to share links with my friends. I use Read
Later a lot, but rarely actually go back and read things later. But when I do,
I'm really glad the feature is there.

------
pmkary
nope, but I use things like top-sites and Opera's startpage

------
exabrial
Yes. Mainly the toolbar

------
flurdy
No. Not for many years

------
steiger
I never really did.

------
geggam
delicio.us / delicious.com

back in my day...

------
shurcooL
It's great timing for this question for me. I've recently made a change in how
I use bookmarks, and I've become very curious about how other people deal with
them.

Some history. I've used bookmarks like anyone else since before IE6 days. When
Chrome 1.0 came out, I've switched to it and been using it as my primary
browser since. When Chrome added ability to sync (bookmarks and other things),
I've started using that.

So for the last 5+ years, I've had all my bookmarks synced between my main
computers and mobile devices.

There were 3 stages of how I used bookmarks.

First stage was me trying to organize things into folders, based on content.
It seemed to make sense, but didn't really scale well. I ended up not liking
my bookmarks after a while because I never actually used existing ones, only
added new ones.

The problem with organizing by folders is that they're exclusive. If I run
into a new blog I want to bookmark, it would normally go under Blogs. But if
it's game related, I have a Game Dev folder that has Blogs inside that.

I feel like labels would work better, since then you can just apply multiple
labels to bookmarks and be able to find them more logically.

Eventually, I gave up on that, but realized that I mostly cared about
bookmarking things "just in case" and so that they'd show up in Chrome's
omnibar when I type or search for things.

So I changed my "add a bookmark" strategy to a simpler one. I created a top-
level folder called Stream (inspired by Photo Stream from Apple devices), and
it would be just a single place to dump all bookmarks, based on time. Latest
ones always end up on the bottom. No trying to organize by content, because
organizing by "when this bookmark was added" was actually more meaningful and
helpful, but primarily easier.

That worked for a while, but even so, over the last few years I realized I
didn't like my bookmark situation. I had hundreds of bookmarks from last few
years, and I had forgotten about most of them. It felt like baggage, mental
overhead.

So, just a few weeks ago, I set a goal to go through all my bookmarks and
delete them. For any bookmark I couldn't delete, I added it to a text file and
just organized that in an free form way.

I ended up removing 90% of useless bookmarks. They were either 404, no longer
useful or relevant, out of date, or easily findable via Google when I need to
look that topic up.

The 10% remaining were high quality things that I actually cared enough to
want to keep in a .txt file for now.

So, I went from
[http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/12tdxyh7suc7h.html](http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/12tdxyh7suc7h.html)
from last few years, to just
[http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/1f2drzhc3w3hk.txt](http://instantshare.virtivia.com:27080/1f2drzhc3w3hk.txt).

Feeling good about that so far. I'll put the .txt file with my other .txt
files for now, and see if there's anything more I wanna do with it later. But
for now, it works well enough, and I'm feeling a huge sense of relief from no
longer having those bookmarks in my browser.

As a bonus, I now feel better about being able to switch browser I use, and
not have to worry about importing/exporting bookmarks. I just don't want to
have my bookmarks tied so tightly with the browser I use, it makes sense to
keep them externally.

I really like the observation someone here made about bookmarks usually being
used as "TODO" items. Articles to read, interesting blog posts to consider
going through, etc. I think that really makes sense why it feels bad to have
so many unused bookmarks accumulating.

------
aorth
No.

------
psyc
Never did.

------
cabalamat
Yes

------
_pdp_
Nope

------
nunez
no. haven't in years.

------
jbmorgado
I do bookmark them, but I end up almost not using it.

The only thing that actually kind of works for me is to bookmark stuff in
"sessions" and then open the all tabs the next time I want to work on
something. For instance I was trying something very specific involving deep
learning at my job, then I had to do some actual work to prepare an article
and I put that DL project aside. So, I make a bookmark folder with all the
open tabs and closed the window. Now I got back to that DL experiment opened
the all tabs again and that kind of worked for me. But this is not really a
reference system, it's just a _" sessions"_ system.

As for the traditional role of bookmarks, I don't think they will ever work
for me without a single main thing: _Full text search._

Every few months I try to clean the mess my bookmarks have become since I
can't find what I need and a few months after everything is a mess again.

The tag or folder system simply just doesn't work for me, I keep too much
stuff to check later as ideias and then I can't really find it because I have
this folder "check later" where I have dozens of separate ideias and I can't
really just find that one idea I had.

The solution seems to be some kind of full text search, where I can have a way
to describe in a fuzzy way what I was doing, something like: "python, maps,
names, germany" and go back to that post I remember where they where doing
some analysis of the "last names of people in germany in different regions"
and that I, of course, don't remember the name anymore.

I recon it's a very specific problem that only makes sense for people that
think the same way like I do, but I'm also quite sure there are a lot of us
like that and that this is the kind of solution that at least would help us a
bit using the bookmark system.

------
frik
Yes and bookmark-bar enabled.

@browser developer: don't remove or hide the bookmark feature. Allow me to
bookmark the same link in multiple folders. Don't nag me with your cloud sync
(no thanks), but add a feature to sync to a private cloud like
Owncloud/nextcloud. Don't remove advanced features, don't simplify things
without fully understanding the features. RSS support in bookmark-bar is
pretty useful.

------
spectistcles
I use them in Chrome all the time, I have thousands — I basically search them
as kind of a personal google... for those "Oh I remember reading an article
about that once, let me find it"

~~~
jbmorgado
Yeah, but how do you find that only from the title? Many times the title
doesn't really represent what I remember about the article and that was in the
corpus of the article.

~~~
spectistcles
Yeah it's a bit hit or miss because of that — I really wish I could literally
make my bookmarks a private Google of content I've seen. Usually there are a
series of things I try like "I think it was on X site" or a few keywords that
I think were in the title. It works for me maybe 80% of the time.

------
iamacynic
yes. the 50 links i have to use over and over every day managing a business
are all on the bookmarks bar.

for example: i have a bookmark that shows me every invoice issued in the past
30 days.

------
draw_down
Yes, of course!

------
jelder
No, and I judge pretty harshly anyone who does. A few shortcuts/bookmarklets
on the bookmark bar is acceptable.

~~~
m-j-fox
You can judge me, but I use bookmarks to keep track of citrixes that I need to
log into sometimes and also for documentation sites that I occasionally
reference for work.

I don't believe in bookmarking interesting articles I hope to read one day.
Those go on the someday/maybe todo list (which may as well be called the not
today/not ever todo list).

