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Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
271 points by vapemaster on Aug 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 263 comments
so much of my time is spent in chrome tabs / windows / and searches. someone's average chrome tab count is a badge of honor / horror. Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default. you can create tab groups for a session, or pin them so that they consume all your bandwidth and memory next time you open your session.

But that's not what i want.

i want rich bookmark behavior.

i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.

or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.

or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.

and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.

i'm not alone right?




I don't know about Chrome, but in Firefox:

    Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default
Not sure if it is the default, but my Firefox bookmark bar is always visible

    load common favorite news sites & blogs
    or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
Shift+Click on a bookmark folder does that

    pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole
Right-Click on one of the open tabs, click "select all tabs", right-click it again and click "Bookmark Tabs"

    i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set
I'm a heavy user of bookmarks, and I am pretty happy with the state of bookmarks in Firefox.

What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line. Firefox has a nice "Export Bookmarks to HTML" function, but it seems only available from the GUI, so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format. I tried for a while to extract them from the SQLite DB FireFox stores them in, but the layout of that DB is pretty complex and bloated. Even after a bit of fiddling, I wasn't sure I really correctly got the data out.


>so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format

Firefox automatically backs up current bookmarks in lz4-compressed json under $profiledir/bookmarkbackups ($profiledir by default being like ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxx.default). Can also autoexport to an HTML file by setting the following about:config prefs:

    browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML => (boolean) true
    browser.bookmarks.file => (string) "/home/user/bookmarks.html"
If later pref is omitted then file will be $profiledir/bookmarks.html.

An issue with depending on this functionality is the backup happens when closing the browser.


Yay, this is beautiful!

I had to set "browser.bookmarks.file" to "bookmarks.html". When omitting it, no file seems to be written.


I may misunderstand! But how often is the bookmarks autoexported to html? Can you set the interval also?


When closing the browser which may be an issue if someone keeps it always open.


tab stash is a pretty decent extension for quickly saving tabs and then restoring them later with one click

https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash

and unlike some other tab management extensions, it uses native bookmarks to store things which means you can still access the stashed tabs if you sync them to firefox mobile


I like the idea of stashing tabs for later. But doesn't saving to bookmarks remove the History of the tab in the process?

That's what I think we need is a way to save the whole session of the tab. Not just the last page. Or maybe a way to graph multidimensional browsing history.


Oh Damn, that's actually quite useful. I really like it so far


I use SessionSync for that, wonderful extension!


this is sweet... thanks for the suggestion


I use histre (http://histre.com) to accomplish this functionality, not only within Firefox but across browsers, computers, and even colleagues.

My favorite feature is being able to save all tabs within a window, send a link to a co-worker, and have them open up all the tabs. It takes like 5 secs, end to end.

Best of all: if they have the histre extension as well, they can instantly open all the tabs at once and even see my highlights - it’s like being able to send a browser window state to another person!


Thanks! I work on https://histre.com/ and lot of users say that this feature is very useful to them. Many of them say that they use separate windows for each thing they're trying to do, and before you know it you have 10 different windows with a lot of tabs each. You can save the states of all of them and restore them selectively, as you said. https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/

Bookmarks are too primitive imho. It is typically treated as just one link. It is useful to know the whole context around that. How did you get there? What else where you researching? Histre saves all that for you in a tree-style history.

On the other end of the manual work spectrum is elaborate note-taking about everything ("second brain"), keeping that organized enough to be useful etc, which takes too much time for nebulous benefit.

Histre takes care of all your knowledge management needs without making you do busywork.


> Not sure if it is the default, but my Firefox bookmark bar is always visible

you can set it to show/hide, but also to "Only show on new tab" which I use. That way I don't lose screen space, but and CMD+T (Ctrl+T on non-mac) will show my most important bookmarks in the bar right away.


This sounds nice, I just tried to do this and it doesn't work. Restarted FF and then my PC, still nothing when I open a new tab. It's too bad too, because I just realized how annoying my bookmarks bar is.

edit: It seems that if your new tab is set to 'blank page' it doesn't work, the default "firefox home' works though. For...reasons.


Middle click on a bookmark folder will work as well, opening the tabs in the same window, which is what I want to do most of the time. Shift-click opens them in a new window.


I've been including it as step one in my work routine for over a year now, it's so much easier to pick work back up the next morning when I can be exactly where I left off the night before


I actually had to do this yesterday for a small fuzzy search through bookmarks thing I’m building for myself.

It was something like:

    SELECT url FROM moz_places WHERE id IN (SELECT fk FROM moz_bookmarks)
You can find more info on that database here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Places/Places_SQL_queries_best_prac...


That only gives you the urls though.

You lose the names, the folder structure, the order and the keywords.

The HTML format FireFox can create is so nice, that for now I am willing to manually book them up to get that. Until someone can come up with a way to automate it.


You can get names, folder, and ordered by date added in a nice JSON format:

    sqlite3 -json /tmp/places.sqlite '\
        SELECT p.url, b.title, (SELECT f.title FROM moz_bookmarks f WHERE fk IS NULL AND f.id=b.parent) AS folder \
        FROM moz_places p \
        INNER JOIN moz_bookmarks b ON b.fk=p.id \
        ORDER BY b."dateAdded"'
The full folder structure might be a bit more complex to get, I only have them on the top level and can’t experiment. Not sure what the keywords, never used such a thing.

I only rely on the title, and I’ll extract the text content of the link for a full text search through it because usually I’ll remember something from the contents and will try to search that instead of something from the title. I can’t predict what I’ll remember.


  Right-Click on one of the open tabs, click "select all tabs", right-click it again and click "Bookmark Tabs"
Also, individual tabs can be added to the selection by Ctrl-Clicking them.


> What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line.

I've written a Perl script that print bookmarks from Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Edge as <title><url><description>, but maybe it's too raw.

https://github.com/kal247/App-bookmarks

I might add other formatting options (HTML or Template Toolkit) if there's enough interest.


> What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line.

I think a solution can be easily scripted seeing as firefox stores its internal data in multiple sqlite files.


I think FF has some sort of responsive /platform layout thing going on with the browser, my FF developer in a crappy windows laptop has a slightly different layout where the top menu is hidden within a hamburger icon on the right and that is different on my bigger mac display. Which makes sense, I don't have a lot of real estate on this machine (need to tell the work it's not going to cut it I guess)


Right-click the hamburger icon, toggle Menu bar and/or Bookmark toolbar.


>that is different on my bigger mac display

How? Maybe you're talking about Mac's global menu bar?


I do not know for Chrome BUT on Firefox you can normally ignore bookmarks in a bar or menu using a normally quicker and more effective direct bookmark search&narrow using the search bar starting with an asterisk.

Similarly the ampersand search in history.

We have nearly abandoned menu as UI elements because a CLI-alike search&narrow UI is better in general, just file managers remain lagging behind with their crappy UI...


For Firefox bookmarks: please look here for the query: https://github.com/IvoLimmen/mystart/blob/master/bookmarkimp...


Yes!

And useful stuff like `*` in the address bar to search just bookmarks.


I thought it was a commonly held thought that Google didn't want Chrome users using bookmarks because it directly competed with their search (and advertising).


Vertical screen space was very precious when Chrome came out. I remember their first feature over Firefox was moving tabs into the title bar and removing the menu bar, bookmark bar and bottom status bar, so saving about four bars of space for page contents.

Since launch, they've reduced the vertical space of the tab bar/title bar, even as screens gained more pixels.

Original design- https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_12.html

The competition- https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-of-Mozi...


Vertical space is still at a premium because most laptops use the obnoxious 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s why I keep my tabs on the right in Vivaldi.


Not to mention most websites love to waste vertical space. Navbars keep getting thicker, designers insist on having top bars even when the navigation is in the sidebar and the bottom is eaten up by cookie banners and chat/feedback popups.


I’m guessing the problem there is that mobile is far more unforgiving on horizontal space than laptops are on vertical space, so anybody building a webpage to target both ends up in the regime you’re talking about.


Good point. I suspect websites that start out as a Photoshop mock-up rather than a HTML5 prototype are more susceptible to this.


I've tried that, but you haven't lived until you've tried Tree Style Tabs in Firefox.


I like tree-style tabs, and I use it when working on projects, but I find that it is a long, long way from what it could be, which is probably a direct result of the lack of competition

the settings UI is absolutely awful;

depending on which appearance you choose, it either looks ugly or blurs together;

it frequently has visual glitches;

could certainly be more customisable appearance and shortcut-wise;

doesn’t allow you to have a title or marker as the top level tab;

as far as I can tell doesn’t let you save a session of tabs;

has an unpleasant glitch where if you drop a tab in the wrong place it’ll disappear behind the current window and never be reachable;

the new tab behaviour irritates me;

and probably a few more complaints that I’d have to actually open it up to remember


Sideberry is a worthy competitor : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/


I might try it next week, but if you'd mention Sideberry's advantages over TST that would be great.


Sideberry lets you turn off the "tree" feature and just have the vertical tabs.

The whole point of vertical tabs is so you have enough characters visible to tell what the tab is. Tab trees waste this precious space.


Sideberry is more complete out of the box. TST is more flexible for low level tinkering. That's what I read somewhere for TST, I use Sideberry.


As far as I can tell, Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi that are the only browsers with some way to get vertical tabs.

I don't know much about Vivaldi. Can you tell me what its monetization model is? Does it strip the google crap out of chromium?


Vivaldi was started by Jon von Tetzchner, the founder of Opera, and is meant to be a power-user’s browser with an emphasis on customizability and keyboard shortcuts, along with a range of unique features.

They do strip Google crud like FLoC, don’t pander to crypto scams and are employee-owned, you can check out their statements on Vivaldi.com. The only valid reason not to consider them would be that they are not open-source.


And that's why Tab Center Reborn (formerly Tab Center Redux) FF extension came to live, while vertical space is scarce on modern monitors horizontal is ample normally.


Ironically, Chrome still wastes slightly more vertical space than an appropriately configured Internet Explorer did.


> Vertical screen space was very precious when Chrome came out. I remember their first feature over Firefox was moving tabs into the title bar and removing the menu bar, bookmark bar and bottom status bar, so saving about four bars of space for page contents.

Was it really? When Netscape Navigator came out, 640x480 was probably the most common resolution. It used significantly more vertical space than Chrome has ever done. What happened between then and the release of chrome to make vertical space more precious?

Desktop computers have had very abundant screen-space for a long time.


> moving tabs into the title bar

Of all of the terrible UI elements that have become fashionable, this is probably the one I hate the most.


I definitely feel like autocompletion in the omnibar is getting worse and worse, especially when the URL i'm looking for is bookmarked. The "this is just to make me google it again" thought does regularly crosses my mind.


google makes a point of deleting your history after a certain amount of time and does not give any option to change it. I find this extremely irritating


Why click on a bookmark if you can make your users google it?


And if the user is wanting to visit something like Ford.com, Google can charge Ford millions over time to be the first result, pitting them in a bidding war against Chevy for the top result (with tiny ad disclaimer) for a search for "Ford".


> And if the user is wanting to visit something like Ford.com, Google can charge Ford millions over time to be the first result, pitting them in a bidding war against Chevy for the top result (with tiny ad disclaimer) for a search for "Ford".

That’s not how it works. If you own the website Ford.com, Google won’t charge you millions to bid on the keyword "Ford". They _will_ do it if you are Chevy and are bidding on Ford.


Apparently it is how it works if you go by Basecamp's words

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

I'm making an assumption we're all talking about the ads above the results, as afaik you can't pay to shuffle the real results


You can't pay to shuffle the organic results.

As for how much you pay for a click on any specific keyword, it isn't fixed and depends on two main things. I am simplifying here.

1. How related (google thinks) your page and ad copy is to the intent behind the keyword. More related = (generally) lower cpc

2. The reserve price that google sets for that keyword.

It used to be a second price auction in that you'd only ever pay 1p above the second highest bidder. It has now changed in that there is a reserve price for each keyword based on your page, ad copy and google's valuation of that keyword. This reserve price can be lowered or raised depending on how good and related Google thinks your page and ads are. It can fluctuate lots depending on your input but if google's valuation is high you'll never get it to pennies per click.

Insurance for injury claims for example will always be more than £10 per click no matter how good your page or ad copy is. Google just knows that those conversions are worth tons so people WILL pay high cpcs for them.

So in the Ford Chevy example, Ford's page is much more related to someone searching for Ford, Google knows the intent is likely to find a ford page so ford would pay FAR less than Chevy.

Chevy's page likely isn't matching the intent that google assumes the user has so their reserve price and hence final cost per click would be much higher.

Competitor bidding on google search is expensive.

Brand protection - bidding on your own brand terms - is (in my 7 years experience doing this) always incredibly cheap, 1 or 2 pence per click.


Where did you get this information? I can't find anything about ads on the internet without 300 copy paste articles popping up about 10 great ways to write ad copy so couldn't just google it.

Temporarily intrigued, don't go too far out of your way for my curiosity.


I've put some links below that might explain it a bit better than I did. My info above is a mix of from google's docs as well as experience, talking to others in the industry etc.

Ad Rank[0] - this is the algorithm that determines essentially how much you pay like I mentioned. It's far more complex than my simplified explanation as it also takes into account context around the user. The device they're on, their previous searches etc. So a user who is on their 5th search for shoes and is now searching from their desktop may be more interested in a product page than an article since google may assume they're ready to buy now and they always buy from their desktop etc.

Ad Rank thresholds[1] - This is the friendly term for the reserve price I mentioned. It's the reserve price for a keyword based on all your inputs. Can go up and down depending on how relevant google thinks your stuff is at that moment for the user but generally google will set a floor for it.

Just more info[2] - more info from Google about how this stuff is worked out and what it means in practice.

If you google around "ad rank effect on cpc" you'll get more relevant stuff if you're interested.

[0] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1752122?hl=en-G... [1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7634668 [2] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722122

When you think about what google is trying to do with ads it does make sense. If they let anyone serve rubbish for any search, people will stop clicking ads and advertisers will stop using it. Google loses out.

It's in the users (arguably, depending on how you view ads), the advertisers and Google's best interest to incentivise advertisers to make their stuff relevant and good.


Appreciated, thank you!


$0.02 per click is not cheap for your own name, and this protection is more like protection in the mafia sense of the term.


> $0.02 per click is not cheap for your own name, and this protection is more like protection in the mafia sense of the term.

This is something you have to pay only if someone else is bidding on your own brand. Otherwise you’re already the first result and you don’t need any ad. This occurs only if you’re already a big player, and so $0.02 is nothing for you compared to what your competitors are spending. There’s nothing mafia-like here, it would be exactly the same (but much more expensive) in the physical world.


For Ford, $0.02 per click is millions, which is all I said.

> This occurs only if you’re already a big

I see this for a tiny local food truck and accidentally click their ad instead of first result many times when ordering lunch, when I'm trying to not cost them by going through Google's "protection."


> For Ford, $0.02 per click is millions, which is all I said.

Yes, and that’s peanuts compared to the money they make from these clicks.

> I see this for a tiny local food truck and accidentally click their ad instead of first result many times when ordering lunch, when I'm trying to not cost them by going through Google's "protection."

I don’t see what’s wrong in having to pay to get back the first place when someone else is already giving money to overcome you.


I think that's venturing into tinfoil hat territory. More likely telemetry told them that some percentage > 50 always toggle the bookmark bar off and they decided to make it the default. It's still there on new tabs after all. Companies like Google are long term greedy, they don't make unpopular UX decisions for scraps.


More likely there was a large amount of telemetry saying that the bookmark bar was visible but never used by a large group of users.

I can never imagine e.g. my mum turning the bookmark bar off, but I can certainly imagine her just totally ignoring it/not knowing what it is.


It's true though. You see something similar with the address bar: Chrome's is pretty horrible for accessing history or bookmarks, it instead tries to push you to do a search. Firefox has much richer information here.


Companies like Google are long term greedy, they don't make unpopular UX decisions for scraps.

Like not letting you add tags? not tagging definitely makes you use google search more.


"Do you like the browser bookmark manager?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24511454 :

> Things I'd add to browser bookmark managers someday:

> - Support for (persisting) bookmarks tags. From the post re: the re-launch of del.icio.us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985623

>> "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916

>> Notes re: how [browser bookmarks with URI|str* tags] could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116 *

***

WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment "Integration with W3C Web Annotations" https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/issues/4

***

W3C Web Share API & W3C Web Target API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449716


I think both tags and folders would confuse people. I'd personally like them to remove folders and have only tags, but you can already imagine the HN comments ... google screwing with bookmarks to make you use search more ... not compatible with other browsers (import/export) ... monopolistic ... lock-in.


My browser home page is a page of bookmarks I originally made in 1998 and it's still going strong: https://david.kitchen/bookmarks/

I update it occasionally (last updated the HTML to XHTML 1.0 in 2000, but last edited the bookmarks a month or so ago)... but these are my frequently used bookmarks.

I also use Pinboard ( https://pinboard.in/ ) for the long tail of bookmarks where I can search the full text of the bookmarked page. If I see something half interesting it goes to Pinboard, and later I can find something with just a remembered keyword or two.

For me, bookmarks remain my primary entry into the web, and is how I open every browser and new tab... it's my personal curation of how I perceive the web and how I launch into it.

I used to rely on the browser bookmarks back in Netscape. But it feels like it never improved and with every browser since it's just been relegated and gone downhill a fraction more. I still use the Bookmark Toolbar in Firefox, but really just for ephemeral things which I keep for a week or so before either deleting or moving to Pinboard or my home page. I consider browser bookmarks impermanent, partly because I use a mix of browsers for different purposes but partly because the discovery is terrible and it may as well be a black hole.


The same story here. I had started in 1999, and have been editing the same page since then.

I can also search Google, Wikipedia, etc., directly from the same home page.

The only core difference that I maintain that page locally on each device and use local file sync.

Firefox on Android stopped opening local HTML files, without them giving a clear reason why, and I stopped using it.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/7546


I recommend the extension "Group Speed Dial" to manage this neatly. https://fastaddons.com/


You can already do all the things you ask for, in Chrome.

Control+shift+B is the shortcut to hide/unhide the bookmark bar. If you unhide it, it remains visible, even next time you restart chrome. You can create bookmark folders. Then right click on the folder -> "Open all" or "Open all in new window". Etc. It's intuitive, efficient, and prominent ("Open all" is literally the FIRST item in the right-click context menu on a bookmark folder).


This 1,000%.

Also you don't even need to know a magic keyboard shortcut. On Mac at least, literally the first menu item under "View" is "Always Show Bookmarks Bar". (You can right-click on the bookmarks bar as well for a menu to keep it always visible, also intuitive.)

There's literally an entire Bookmarks menu, both in Chrome's menu and in the Mac menu bar. The third item is "Bookmark all tabs..." and below that is the list of all your bookmarks. You can also bookmark all tabs by right-clicking on the empty area of the tab bar.

Bookmark functionality is all over Chrome. It's there in every new tab page. Heck, a recent update brought a brand-new Bookmarks sidebar to Chrome as well.

Sometimes it's a legitimate complaint that features are too hidden... but in this case it seems like the poster hasn't bothered to even glance at the interface. This post makes utterly no sense.


You can do it in Firefox too


This recently changed. Firefox will turn it off for you, but the same keystroke does not turn it back on. In other words, it _used_ to be a toggle, but now it switches in one direction only.

There is a fix; add in about:config an item "browser.toolbars.bookmarks.2h2020" set as boolean False.


I don't know how people think Firefox has feature-rich bookmark manager, probably never used a browser that cares about power-users. Firefox can't even open Bookmark manager in a new tab, whole bookmark feature hasn't improved in 15 years.

Vivaldi has the best bookmark management in UX/UI.

> i want to be able to quickly load common favourite news sites & blogs.

Right click on a tab > Bookmark all tabs. Vivaldi creates a new folder "Saved Tabs ($time$)". Press F2 to open quick commands and write "Saved" and it will auto complete all the folder starts with "Saved"

You can create Session for currently opened tabs too.


In Firefox, bookmark manager in a tab: chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

"You can encounter issues when you want to create a new folder, moving a bookmark to another folder may not work as well."


I second Vivaldi. The people I know who tried it never went back.


I have been using Vivaldi for years now, on mobile (Android). Gave up after their recent update. Why? Because they changed the layout of the "reload" button. Previously, I could simply double-tap the "V" menu to reload the current tab. Now I have to either pull down (which is not always feasible) or find the "refresh" button in the far left part of the "V" menu, because double-tapping now brings the settings screen. Not sure what genius in their UX dept thought that opening the settings screen is more important than re-loading the current tab but they should change it back.


Vivaldi's "reading list" feature is better than just a simple "bookmark".

You can read it offline and sync it from mobile browser to PC browser.


tried Vivaldi for a while.It doesn't have bookmark tags went straight back to FF. FF has the best bookmark features IMHO


Hasn't improved in 15 years but at least you can still search within / by month. Can't do that in Brave.


You also forgot the Speed Dial. Allowing you to populate (what essentially becomes your) New Tab Page with the bookmarks of your choice. Greatly helps reduce the time taken after a browser restart to get going


>Firefox can't even open Bookmark manager in a new tab, whole bookmark feature hasn't improved in 15 years.

For me this is a strength.


My go to solution for bookmarking is https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager

(Available for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... and Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-session-manage...)

It understands whether a bookmark should be opened as a pinned tab, and the tree structure of tabs saved together as a window if you use tree style tabs (in Firefox). It also saves the history of the tab, so going back on history works

It can even open the tab session window in a tab instead of the small tooltip, by clicking on the expand button in the corner. For me this is a killer feature

The only issue is that it is oriented towards saving whole windows (or even whole sessions) rather than a single tab. There is UI for saving just a tab at once but it's a bit hidden. But for your intended use cases, its workflow is perfect

> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.

> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.

Saving a whole window at once is much better for this

> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.

Saving whole windows at time is much better for restoring your working memory, specially if you use tree style tabs.

Anyway the author has a patreon https://www.patreon.com/sienori (no affiliation, I'm just a fan/user)


I fondly remember using Delicious extensively for my bookmarking need in 2000s [1].

Now I just print to PDF any websites to bookmark into relevants folder of my local cloud drive and sync them automatically so I can access them later from any of my devices.

I think seamless bookmark is a simple case study of local-first software and that it can be a killer application for it [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

[2]https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/


I think firefox has everything you need already. I use librewolf in linux but any firefox on a desktop OS should behave in the way I describe below.

> i want rich bookmark behavior. This points needs specifics. What do we mean by rich? what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve?

> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs. > or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites. This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each. One click and half a second... very efficient!

> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole. > and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set. In a rabbit hole window with X tabs -> right click on the tabs area -> select all tabs -> bookmark tabs -> then from there you can create folder 'rh 17 August' Next time you open a browser, just right click on that folder and open all. When done, just delete the folder. Once you learn this, it's a one or two second process so it's very efficient in my view.

You might argue that this option could become a one-click thing (ie a right-click menu item called 'save all tabs as bookmarks' and use an automated name) but that brings a whole new range of problems (cluttered interface for users that don't want this, and therefore decrease in overall UI efficiency)

> i'm not alone right? No, many people like me relies on bookmarks. I share the frustration others shared around the bookmarks toolbar being hidden by default. However, by using standard behaviour I manage to make bookmarks work in a pretty efficient way.


> This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each. One click and half a second... very efficient!

Even more efficient, you can Ctrl left click the bookmark folder, or even more even more efficient, middle click. Of course, this requires you properly curate your bookmark folders, my News folder has some two dozen bookmarks, and I definitely don't want to open all of them. But this "open all" behavior isn't recursive, so you can just put stuff you don't want to open every time in subfolders.


You'd have to find the bookmark folder first. The bookmark manager is old, crufty and hard to use. The bookmark bar is unusable with the keyboard, only usable with a mouse, and badly. Bookmarks lack metadata such as "added at date" or "added on company laptop".

And don't even get me started about mobile browsers...


And history is equally bad. Internally the browser stores each individual visit to a page, and also the full history trail in case you clicked on links, but the built-in UI only shows the last visit for each URL and nothing else.

Additionally, when I do a history search, there's no way to jump from a search result back to the chronological view (though as soon as I open the result, the chronological view becomes useless anyway because it only shows the most recent visit, which after opening the page becomes of course "right now").

The problem is that quite often I might not remember the exact search terms to find a page again in my history, but can remember and find some other pages I know I visited beforehand/afterwards/etc. If I had the full chronological visit history (plus access to the link trail if necessary), I could just look through that, but with the built-in UI that's not possible.

Unfortunately, it seems that to this day, the best extension for solving this problem in Firefox predates the Webextensions cutoff and as usual the new Webextension API isn't quite set up for fully re-creating it because you can only query for visits by the exact URL, and so no modern add-on exists that is really a full replacement. Thankfully somebody hacked the original add-on to still work in modern Firefox, though of course it needs one of the Firefox varieties that are allowed to load arbitrary add-ons (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).


Because the effort to maintain a growing list of bookmarks organized is too high for most people. So most people don't use bookmarks, so browsers are trending towards putting less effort into a feature people don't use.

Sometimes when I'm investing effort in looking for URLs of one particular thing I create lists of links using markdown and hosted publicly on Gist.

Eg:

https://gist.github.com/PierBover/0ab4326cb80f47d3f95607d052...

https://gist.github.com/PierBover/cfad93ad4fb3e569ab360f0f32...

https://gist.github.com/PierBover/6eaa538f4ebfe6d56b070f9d92...


> I create lists of links using markdown

text/uri-list is the superior format


Personally, I think it is because search is a important revenue stream for the browsers. It makes little sense to put too much effort in to a feature that will limit the usage of the thing that earns them the most.

At Opera Software, where I worked for a decade, both speeddials and bookmarks was important streams of income, but it was nothing compared to the income from searches.


> i want rich bookmark behavior.

> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.

> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.

That is behavior that Firefox had more than 15 years ago, and still does. I used it frequently, until I learned about RSS, which is a vastly superior solution to the same problem.

Is it really necessary to post weird e. e. cummings-style art pieces about how you long for functionality you already have?


You're almost right!

You're not alone. I am with you.

To add to your little annoyances, I'd add one as well – categorizing the bookmarks.

Even if I end up bookmarking a site, I find it hard to organize it nicely in a place that I can go to later on.

I'd love to put some hashtags on bookmarks to search for later.

Just me?


After reading your comment, I went to the bookmark manager in Firefox. Looks like Firefox supports tagging bookmarks. But finding them again using tags seems a bit cumbersome. You have to go the the menu to search bookmarks and then enter the tag.


ctrl + L to go to the address bar then type * <space> to search in your bookmarks.

Replace * with ^ to search in your history or % to search in your open tabs. You can also try @google or @wikipedia to search on those websites.

I love those shortcuts! This is the kind of features that make Firefox far superior to Chrome in my opinion.


Firefox allows tags


This is actually a big reason why I use Firefox despite the weaker security: the bookmark ergonomics are just that much better.

When I'm browsing, I don't want links in the top bar to tempt me to context switch, so my bookmark bar is off and my left hand rests next to my keyboard. If I want to navigate to a site, I either type in the URL if I remember, or hit Ctrl+B to pull up my bookmarks. I put the bar on the right hand side so it doesn't move the starting position of page text, and select using topic based folders (usually within a top-level folder). The whole process is very comfortable. Often I'll be lazier than that and just prefix with a * to directly pull up the link via search.

Its honestly so far ahead of everything else, I feel like I'm on another planet when people say they prefer Chrome for productivity.


What do you mean by "despite the weaker security"? Did I miss something about a security hole?


Firefox's sandbox is a little underwhelming on Linux: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...


Interesting, thanks for sharing. I will stick with Firefox despite all this because I don't trust Google and Microsoft with my data but this is good to know.

With how many exploits Google needs to patch each release it's a little surprising how many security measures seem to get bypassed regularly for them to have any effect.


there's many other browsers which simply don't have their own engine. For my taste, Vivaldi is the best choice for power users.


I got burned many times when losing hard drives or computers, upgrading computers, switching between computers or just using different browsers, that bookmarks tied to the browser are ephemeral and shouldn't be trusted.

I effectively solve this by creating custom websites to service those needs. RSS was invented for some of those purposes and still exists today. "SaaS productivity" is out of scope for a bookmark and I wouldn't trust a browser extension.

You want a UX that's tailor crafted to your workflow? Build one. Or find a service/FOSS project that has one built for you. I'm not sure expecting a basic feature of "save this website URL in a CSV file" should be elevated to anything more.


Bookmark syncing has been around for at least a decade. I haven’t worried about syncing bookmarks in Chrome since then.


It looks like this is a Chrome only service, so when my chromium installation gets janked and I have to switch to Firefox, then my bookmarks are lost again.

It also looks like this is a Google service which means if Google sunsets this service, which is not unlikely considering their history, then my bookmarks are lost.

It looks like it's also tied to my Gmail account which means if I don't have a Google account, have multiple Google accounts that I want to keep separated or lose access to my account Google account, my bookmarks are lost.

All the above scenarios, with some degree of generality, have happened to me before in one form or another.


Firefox sync works well and isn't tied to any other account, you can also backup the bookmarks file in your profile folder for extra safety.


I swear I don't understand of some people seems to be using browsers... Let me know if the following sound weird to you, this is what I usually do...

I have 3 browser windows:

- Chrome window with personal Google Account and 2-5 tabs

- Chrome window with company Google Account and 2-5 tabs

- A third browser window as a media player (https://github.com/curzel-it/pipper)

Bookmark bar is set to always visible, and I have exactly 10 bookmarks: Company browser:

- Mail

- Backlog view

- Sprint view

- Company doc tool (Confluence, Nuclino, ...)

- Calendar

- Gitlab

- Some other link Gitlab

Personal window:

- Gmail

- Hacker News

- Whatsapp

If I need any reminder for reading something later I will use the reminder app.

I will try my best to either read right away or just discard.

Once I read a tab I close it. I can reopen it later, no need to have more than 10 tabs at a time... Right?


This sounds a lot like how I work too. If I have to open a bunch of tabs it’s usually temporary and I’ll want to get rid of them again at the earliest opportunity.


same here! it doesn't sit well with me when there are a bunch of tabs open. if I haven't categorized it in my tab groups it's something not of importance and i have to clear them all within the day


Exactly!


Others have commented that Chrome does this already.

Edge also does all or almost all these things. Bookmarks bar might be disabled by default, but iirc it is a right-click away, and only has to be configured once.

Safari also supports everything here. The “Tab Groups” feature in combination with the bookmarks bar (which safari also supports) makes it super easy to maintain persistent tab sets or just keep certain things separate (the research rabbit hole use case). Tab groups persist between sessions and sync across devices.

I think safari tab groups are intuitive, efficient (no performance impact that I can see), and super prominent.


After a year of using an open source and self hosted ecosystem, I recently went all in on the Apple ecosystem. My main concern was avoiding trusting Google and other companies with advertising-based business models. I think Safari is really the best browser out there these days in terms of avoiding ad tracking, plus it has the most efficient energy usage of any browser on my M2 Mac. I've been pleasantly surprised by the tab groups feature, especially how seamlessly it syncs across devices and persists across sessions. It's everything I've ever wanted from browser bookmarks. I also like that when I try to open a website that's already open in another tab, it switches me to that tab automatically. I'd be more comfortable if I could easily export the tab groups to a text, yaml, json or xml format that I could convert to bookmarks in another browser, but other than that, it's perfect.


> Edge also does all or almost all these things

I'm not a heavyweight user of bookmarks. But I do love vertical tabs and grouping, which can be collapsed. Moreover, they can be saved to collections (to get rid from tabs) and collection can are restored as groups. Notes can be added to collections or entries, tho I don't use it

Anyway, not that there would be some kind of search for collections - not even the URL bar detects items in there.

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/02/tab-groups-in-microsoft-ed...


Bookmarks don't work. What does work is saving a snaphot of the page, including content (and maybe the trail path). There is no way of 'archiving'. This is why I like pocket..

The rabbithole is a trap btw..


Firefox has several extensions that do exactly this and don't sell your data.


Too bad I really can't stand the UI / behavior


> Firefox has several extensions that do exactly this and don't sell your data.

Pocket is owned by Mozilla.


There was a product on Product Hunt the other day that solves exactly this. Kid you not, I bookmarked it and then had to hard reset my PC so the bookmark got lost. So very meta this whole thing


savage. but case and point!


Not sure if auto'correct' or a mishearing of 'in'->"'n'", but in case the latter just FYI: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/case_in_point :)


just me typing too quickly for my own brain, thanks for the correction!


I bookmark very aggressively when I browse. I use Firefox and have search suggestions turned off. So, when I start typing in the bar Firefox instead suggests from my bookmarks. I wish that worked slightly better, since it only searches titles. Would have been cool if some key words were distilled from the page when bookmarked.

In Utopia the browser would crawl a bit from the bookmark to make a completely personal search engine.


Even if you have search suggestions on, using "*" at the start will limit the suggestions to your bookmarks.

"^" does history which is almost indecently useful.


And "%" to search in your open tabs. I also use @wikipedia or @amazon quite often.


I have set about 100 keyword searches too. Though I wish to use either Albert or Rofi for richer "as you type" suggestions and results.


Does it not even use the 'tags' feature? I don't use them but often think I should come up with some rough scheme and start tagging them all, but if they're not used in search...


I usually attach a few tags, but it’s not practical to tag to the fine grained level I would like to search by.


The one feature that's missing from browser bookmarks in my opinion is aliases. If I could bookmark a page, and then assign it an alias like "hn" so I could just type "hn" in to the address bar to go to that bookmarked page, that would be so helpful. It's possible to do this in Chrome by abusing the site search feature (add a new site search, give it a name, use a URL but don't put a %s search query in it... now it's an alias[1]), and there are plugins[2], but it could be so much better if it was a proper browser-level feature.

[1] https://speedtestdemon.com/productivity-hack-chrome-aliases-...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alias-bookmarks/og...


Firefox has this feature. When you edit the bookmark, you have the "Keywords" field that says "Use a single keyword to open the bookmarks directly from the address bar".


When I name a bookmark in Chrome and then type its name (or parts of it) in the address bar, the bookmark shows up. I need an arrow down (or more, in case of more results), which is definitely suboptimal, but it more or less already works.


I had this problem due to the massive amount of bookmarks I had, but I found an easy way is to add an unique identifier at the end of the name. For example, for HackerNews I'd add hknws to the end of a bookmark so I only have to write those chars and find it easily.

That said, it has to be really unique since browsers usually search for both title and url of the bookmark. I also have the issue that sometimes I want to search in a specific group of folders, so I'm currently working on an extension to scratch that itch.


Firefox used to have this (it probably still does), it was called "keywords"; it wasn't very useful for me honestly.


To go to hn i just press ctrl-l to go to address bar, then 'n', and chrome already knows the rest, so i press enter.


It's really strange how bookmarking capability has regressed. I was using seamonkey for a long time just because it had bookmark folders. RSS sorta kinda achieves the same effect. Qutebrowser sessions and quickmarks are nice, but not quite the same level of ease.


I've noticed that a lot of people I know, even people who work in IT, have regressed on this point - they do not know how to use bookmarks, they just search for something and hope they land on the right page, and if they can't find it they ask someone else to send them a link... The regression of bookmarks in browser is probably partly related to this regression in user behavior (and associated telemetry)


I suspect this is Google’s influence through Chromium. They want us searching again, not saving.

Some pages are difficult to find again as time goes on though, so I’m a heavy bookmark user myself.

I used Firefox for 20 years and it’s better for bookmarks. Edge is only acceptable at best. My time resisting Chromium was over though. Time to give up that hill for me.


It's interesting how many different things in desktop computing have regressed over the last 20-something years. It's not just bookmarks.


I want to be able to create tracking bookmarks that take me back to the last page of the domain I was on. Like if I create the bookmark on GenericBlog.com and read to GenericBlog.com/page5 I want to go back to Page 5 when I click the bookmark.


You're not alone, I want even more:

or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.

I want to open a tab with a page that's an index consisting of the bookmarks of some folder in the bookmarks bar. That's obvious to me: when I'm researching some topic, I drag the interesting finds onto a folder in that bar.

Once I have a list for consulting later, I would like that list to be presented as a list of links, much like Hacker News front page, not as a menu. Menus are BAD ui for links.

Of course I'd like to add icons, re-order, save, nest, group by month, etc.

I've found that Firefox saves all bookmarks (and history) to a sqlite database, so it must be easy to program a little tool to do most things I want.


You can do mostly that in Firefox itself. Bringing up the bookmarks side pane (CMD+B on a mac). Right click on any folder -> "Open all bookmarks" will open the full folder. Creating folders and subfolders is as good as categorizing will get, so you could organize your bookmarks by month by creating folders per month.

I also recommend using Firefox Containers (mostly for privacy and security reasons), and then you can also reorder you open tabs by container.


Thank you, but that's not what I meant. I don't want to open all bookmarks. I want to list them in HTML, like the front page of this very site.

Actually that was how Firefox used to export bookmarks, as one HTML page with clickable links.

Edit: I've just checked and Firefox still can export the whole bookmarks collection. What I would love is the option to export just a folder, not the entire database.

Edit2: Now, if I just want to export a folder, I must export the whole thing, open the result in a text editor and paste the html in some of my "launcher pages".


I don't see a big difference with having them in a HTML page, vs. the side bar. You get a full list of your bookmarks with icons in a vertical-sorted way, including search. What difference does it make?


It makes a big difference to me. I use what you say sparingly for organizing, but once it's sorted, there are several shortcomings: limited horizontal space, the fixed presentation (it would be nice to add notes or images, change sizes, etc.) and in general the fact that it's an internal format that I can't manipulate.

To summarize: I don't want just a way to launch the bookmarked pages, but to create a page based on a list of bookmarks that can contain more than the bookmarks themselves.

A related feature (related for me anyway) is backing up pages. I use the extension SingleFile, but I would love to have a system integrating bookmarking, authoring and local backup.

I guess you'd understand me better knowing my workflow when I'm collecting information for some new topic: searches, visiting a dozen of pages, following links, selecting what's useful... the bits of information are spread across pages. I need to keep the links for reference (better with both the bookmark and a local backup), but often it's much more convenient to make a page with text snippets, maybe including images.

Anything that makes this easier is useful to me.


Okay I get your usecase, but adding images and notes to bookmarks seems to be a very rare/custom/fringe feature request (not even Opera had this), so I wouldn't see firefox or chrome here neglecting their users. Sounds like something for an external tool or extension.


Actually the only thing I want is "bookmark folder as HTML list" to clipboard, to file or similar.

I didn't say anything about neglect, this is no trial :)


I use bookmarks extensively and the bookmarks experience on Edge and Chrome is so horrible that they have been relegated to 3rd class citizen in my workflow, I ONLY use those browsers when I MUST. All the bookmarking for me happens in Firefox, it shines in this regards (can it be better, of course, but it is leaps better than Chrome/Edge!). I think the problem is the Instagram-mentality, where everything is ephemeral and very short-lived, preserving long-term is always an afterthought, if at all. With every firefox update I can't help but fear that they'll gut the bookmarks feature-set to bare-bones :-|


The most irritating that "history" is so unintuitive.

You open the history, search for some keyword -> say you get 50 results.

Then you want to go through result 1 to 50 to find the page. But nooo, the results arent "fixed" in their positions. If you go to page 2, it jumps to position 1. If you go to page 3, it jumps to position 1.

In current Firefox it is even worse: now it just closes the whole history window, so you cannot quickly scroll through those 50 sites. The history window closes after you pick one (and moves the site as first on the list).

It seems that Chrome can at least keep the history fixed.


Shout-out for raindrop.io. by far the best bookmarks manager I've ever used and damn I've tried em all


Second for raindrop! Having a dedicated app outside of any browser was initially what pulled me over. Simple UI that does just enough, without trying to tack on endless features that I would never use (like many alternatives do). The webpage archive feature itself has also saved me a handful of times.


> I've tried em all

_shameless plug_

Have you tried websktop.com?


Actually, with Firefox you can do all of them (will write a list because I'm tight on time, sorry).

> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.

Put them to a bookmark folder and click "Open all in tabs".

> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.

Again, same. Stuff bookmarks to a folder, "Open all in tabs".

> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.

Restore your previous session in Firefox or use "Tab Session Manager" plugin.

> and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.

Which can be done.

Ask your specific questions as a reply, and I'll answer ASAP.


> click "Open all in tabs"

Or middle-click, or ctrl+click, or shift+click on the folder. (The latter will open them in a new window rather)


I have so many book marks that are very old, and it is so very rarely that I look for something through them. For the past decade or so I use a markdown page as my "new tab" and that page has links to the places I normally go, and a section for places I go now but probably won't later.

That part is a bit of a temporary bookmark section. And the prior part is where all the important stuff is that I use all the time. Of course I prune it when usage changes. Old stuff goes away. If I need it again, I'll find updated more recent/modern material.

Bookmarks focus on categorization, which fails miserably when you could instead organize by usage. What should be made more easily presentable: 25 years of Common Lisp links, or a section on a single page that links to the Common Lisp resources I'm using right now? How many of the older bookmarks aren't even valid or interesting anymore? Probably most of them.

That's just me, and I'm sure there are people who might agree, and many more who would hate the entire concept and need to tell me why it's wrong.

Bookmarks are basically link hoarding. They quickly become useless.


For quickly loading bookmarks, I made an extension that lets you open or add a bookmark by typing a keyword for it into the address bar:

https://github.com/binarynate/omnibookmarks

I use it constantly (probably hundreds of times per day) to load common pages I use for running by business and living my life.


This looks useful! Thanks for linking


You're welcome, and thanks for your kind words!


personally I have switched to a plugin called "OneTab" in all my browsers. its super nice because it just adds a button to your browser to store all open windows in OneTab, which basically is just and endless html page on which i can search on.

This leads to me saving all open tabs onto it when im rebooting and later on just removing those that i dont like quickly by window instead of one by one. It has import and export functions too so i dont need to worry about it. Furthermore because it also has an inbuild douplicate scanner.

IMHO its been a long time since I made a REAL bookmark. Otherwise browser completion has become really good, for instance "yc" will show me hackernews so its much quicker to just tab into the address bar and be on my way.

Funny enough, the bigger my screen gets the less of advertisement icons I want on it, so removing the fav bar really has gone unnoticed by me. I have more grief with firefox removing the reload button from the adress bar, but i bet thats just a random setting somewhere.


the plugin is probably more comfortable, but I think "bookmark all open tabs" chrome and firefox have. something I recently learnt is that in firefox you can search all open tabs by starting with % in the adressbar


well true but the advantage of the plugin is more that its not really that persistent.

For instance: when I research a new topic i sometimes have 20 open tabs out of which i really want to bookmark none, but as long as i am working on the issue i want to be able to use them still. This is where onetab shines, because it lets me remove all, lets call them virtual bookmarks, that have been gerated by one specific window. Henceforth i can use a window more like a topic of interest and am totally able to "hibernate" on research. and when i come back i just click "open all tabs" on the index and will be goot do go:

https://www.one-tab.com/

I believe my actual point was, that I have much more stuff that i like to store temporarily, instead of a "permanent bookmark" and the ability to remove bookmarks by "window" really allows me to ogranize myself better.


There is a feature I am not sure enough people know about that makes this slightly better.

On Firefox you can add tags (ctrl D to bookmark plus comma separated tags). If you then type the tag in the search bar it will show all the bookmarks with that tag.

I found it incredibly useful to find bookmarks, instead of a polluted bookmarks bar or a strictly organized tree of bookmarks.


I run a remote 'home page' that lets me add/remove links via a web-form (it's written in PHP). I have this home page set on all my machines/browsers. That was I'm in total control of my 'bookmarks', and their are not trapped on a particular machine or inside a proprietary sync system.


I used to use Shaarli (https://shaarli.readthedocs.io) to accomplish sort of the same thing that you described. And, shaarli worked great for me *for years*! But then, when i delayed migrating from my VPS (where i self-hosted shaarli, and needed badly to update version of ubuntu on the VPS) and i failed to upgrade to a newer version of shaarli, i sort of got myself stuck, and never set it up again on my new VPS...sure, i still have all the bookmarks (they're just saved in plain text within php easy to get), and you know what? I sort of abandoned all those bookmarks from my legacy shaarli setup, and have never once needed to look up a bookmark! Meaning, i guess i was saving these things for pretty much little/no reason, so i never set up shaarli again. This is by no means an issue of shaarli. Its simply that i came to a realization like folks going through digital minimalism must feel, that "hey, i guess i don't need X after all".

Lately i have the need to save a couple of bookmarks again (though only a few)...so instead of using shaarli, i just saved them within firefox and set up the firefox account syncing, and it seems good enough for my needs. But, going back to my original point, yeah shaarli fit my need quite weel as far as saving remote bookmarks. If you ever don't want to maintain your own php setup, i encourage you to take a look at shaarli; really fast, stable, crazy low on resoiurces...all around great utility!


Is it protected in any way or publicly accessible? Always wondering how people handle this


It's secured behind a cookie based login.


The reason I don't use bookmarks in browsers is that I can't stash a copy of the page for offline use and I need to properly categorize it for it to be usable later.

The best way I've found is to use the MarkDownload[1] extension for firefox, and download a markdown version of the page into my notable[2] folder. That way, a markdown version of the page I'm interested in becomes part of my notes, becomes taggable, searchable, gets synced, etc. And I don't need to spend time properly categorizing it. All the bookmarked sites and their content become fuzzy-searchable (fzf). Very convenient.

1. https://github.com/deathau/markdownload 2. https://notable.app


Aside from everyone pointing out most browsers do everything you ask, there is a new (-ish?) feature in Chrome history called Journeys. It's an interesting approach to solve the 'reasearch rabbit hole' and has been useful for me but would be better if it was exposed in the UI in a better way.


i would love if bookmarks would act more like outliners such as dynalist or workflowy.

i would like to able to focus in on one folder on the sidebar and have nothing else showing. currently when you have things organised in folders and subfolders, the 1st level of subfolders are indented, the 2nd level are indented even more and eventually you have to scroll sideways to see things.

and having shortcuts to get back to frequently used folders, or at least be able to search for a folder in the sidebar. at the moment firefox only searches for bookmarks, not folders

being able to edit bookmark names and links directly without having to open separate editing window. vivaldi's sidebar does a pretty good job of this and also has a note section which can be very useful to remind your future self in a few years why you bookmarked something


> at the moment firefox only searches for bookmarks, not folders

Yes, annoying. I've set Firefox to export bookmarks to .html each time it closes and then use scripts to search in that HTML for folder names. Messy, but beats manually scrolling around in a very long list of bookmark folders in the Firefox UI.


Why bookmark when you can "just" google? says google while paying wads of $$$ to browser vendors.


There is nothing better than the boomarks manager in Opera Classic 12. Nested folders/categories, quick search/filter, additional notes/description for each bookmark, "recycled bin" for deleted bookmarks. Vivaldi tries to replicate it but still missing some features. Opera Classic was the best browser but sadly died. The source code is available on Internet (probably a leak) but it's a huge effort to change the rendering engine.


In Firefox and Tor Browser, I restrict the location bar completion to bookmarks, disable search, which makes a large number of bookmarks very fast to use.

Then have some Firefox "query" bookmarks selected by keywords like "g" (Google Search), "gi" (Google Image Search), "gm" (Google Maps), "d" (DDG), "w" (Wikipedia), particular shopping sites, shipping tracking number lookup, etc.

(I just realized that this is not so different from my 1996 solution, from when browsers and search engines were much more limited: https://www.neilvandyke.org/webjump/ )


In Firefox Android I pin the most used sites in the home page that opens when I touch the URL bar (and hides when I touch outside it) or the tabs button. I use my phone to routinely check those sites so I don't bookmark them on desktop. When I want to access them there I click the URL bar and type the first letter of the URL, n for this site. The browser remembers the full URL.

On Firefox desktop I also enable the bookmarks toolbar. I put there the links to the documentation of languages and frameworks I use most. I also got hundreds of bookmarks collected since forever but I ended up not using them anymore. I park pages in tabs. One browser window per customer (different virtual desktops) and a couple of them for me.


Why are bookmarks done the way they are currently done at all?

A bookmark is generally not highly private. It would be reasonable to sync it as one syncs their notes.

It is the kind of thing one may wish to annotate in various ways.

Instead of bookmarks what I really want is markdowns files that describe my relationship with that site. I want a split screen text editor on my phone that edits the notes field in that file. I want the option to save an offline copy and fulltext search it all. If not, the text file could default to an algorithmic summary.

And most importantly, this should be in a folder of my choosing that SyncThing can access.

I've been thinking about making an external bookmark manager that uses Android's share feature.


Completely agree. This is what I do:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32506923


You are supposed to use Google every time you want to know something rather than engaging in subversive activities like curating your own lists of knowledge!

Even in Google-sponsored Firefox bookmarks are less accessible than 15 years ago.

We should bring back web rings.


You may like Arc, still in private beta but I have been using for a couple weeks and have completely switched. Fresh take on the browser imo.

https://thebrowser.company/


I drop links into a markdown file by topic, along with a short description about what makes the link interesting to me. It's more work than creating a bookmark, but I don't end up with thousands of bookmarks without sufficient context.

If you export the markdown to HTML, for instance with a static site creator, it's very easy to open many links by just middle-clicking them, or search the context with the browser's search function.

Might not be what you're looking for, but it has worked out better for me down the years than having an ever growing collection of bookmarks with limited searchability and indication of relevance.


Bookmarks have had their lunch eaten by lots of other browser features. Most importantly of course browser tabs, and url autocomplete, but also smaller and more recent ones like tab groups, pinned tabs and session restore.

None of these replace a bookmark list on its own but between all of those features my need to use a traditional bookmark list has become so small that I just don’t bother. The UX for bookmarks is there but it feels like a paper address book for telephone numbers these days.


In Firefox, I use "Bookmark search plus 2" add-on to find which folder a bookmark is saved in. Many other features I don't use, but including folder names in search is very helpful.

In the past, the "description" field was available for folders and I used it to store bits of information. I just realized yesterday that the description field is not visible for folders. I fired up an old PC running XP and the description field data is still there.


I'll give raindrop.io a try next week to see if it meets my needs, but I think in the end I'll have to roll my own since there are some features I want that I simply haven't found in any bookmark app or extension.

Some of these are

-pin bookmarks or folders and sort the rest of bookmarks in that folder

-search bookmarks by name or tag in a group of folders

-have something like sessions where only a custom groups of folders are visible


I've been on a browser trying spree looking specifically for which has the best bookmark manager. Or at least [cough cough brave] not the worst bookmark manager.


It's so bad. But the rest of the browser is so good, I keep using it.


Imagine if your word processing program held all documents -- your work product -- in its proprietary database.

I have been of the opinion that a set of bookmarks is a work product in the same sense. In that sense opening a browser instance might be matched to intentionally opening a portable bookmarks or comparable file.

Why I onload autoformat all my links from a source "links" text file. (I keep an editor tab open to this file, for live maintenance.)


You’re so absolutely right. Bookmarks is wide open for improvement.

I search for something. I save it. I’d like my search to be included so next time I search it includes the thing I found last time. Let me tag it. Let me filter my bookmarks for the last month or two. But do it all simply, not some horror show of checkboxes and text boxes.

Wider than bookmarks, I’d like to save the project state and go back to it later. Folders, browser windows, IDE, documents, bookmarks.


I previously used Workona, that let you create groups, and you can send the tabs to those groups, it kinda worked, but was clunky, now (because I use macOS) I use tab groups from Safari, it works pretty well, but I hope other browsers take note and implement something similar (extensions can do it too, but I don’t want to rely on extensions for this, extensions can be dangerous, so I want to keep the minimum possible).


I'm not sure I understand the problem. There is a bookmark bar in chrome, it is only hidden when you are on a website. If you want to open a bookmark, you create a new tab, and then there is your bookmark bar.

If you need the bar to always be there, I'm sure there's an option about it I just don't agree that the bookmark bar needs to be taking up screen space 100% of the time you're browsing.


> Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default

I haven't used Chrome in a while, but doesn't the bar show up when you open a new tab (and hides when some site is on the tab)? I thought it was a nice intuitive behavior for most people.

> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.

> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites

You can move those sites into a folder, and one-click-open that folder.


Agreed, I actually find bookmarklets quite useful... You can have it run custom javscript snippets... and I like them better than extensions.


I came here to post this exact thing, love bookmarklets.


I just use an external tool like good old del.icio.us now known as https://yabs.io


What you want is not what "bookmarks" are.

You're asking for a combination of bookmarks+start page+history. You can have all of those things, and it's probably not too difficult to build an extension which provides the cohesive system.

The data is already in your browser. The challenge will be deciding exactly what you want and what the UI should be.


Shameless plug for my browser extension: https://dailylauncher.com

I had this same problem so I solved it and now can't live without it :)

If you don't like my opinionated interpretation, you can search for other "startpage" browser extensions that offer similar approaches


Because Google believes they have the ultimate search engine that can find anything you want (and can show ads in the meantime). Also this is why navigating Google docs is hard, there is no quickly navigatable traditional file/folder tree, at least not easy to use like a regular file browser in Google Drive.


You're largely alone.

For news, people use RSS readers. For productivity - nobody's using more than a few tools, they keep them open. For rabbit holes - there's a save all tabs feature in chrome, you save into a folder.

It sounds like you're testing the waters to see if there's demand for this and, there isn't :)


He's not alone. I also have a lot of bookmarks and would like to be able to use them more easily.


> He's not alone

No one claimed that he's alone, except someone in your imagination.


> You're largely alone.

I mean that's literally what you said, my imagination had nothing to do with it.


I'm selfhosting a wallabag server, which lets me access my bookmarks on all my devices, without the need for another 3rd party service. Probably not what you're looking for, but I started looking into private bookmark sharing and this is what I ended up with. It's a pretty ok solution.


i've had a couple of bookmark-type extensions built over the years but quality was usually garbage, including the ones i wrote from scratch, so they all eventually got abandoned.

i still am able to do much of what i want natively - def not all.

like, i have a 'News' tab that i right click to open 32 media sites that give me all the ways the world is prob going to end today.

i have a bunch of 'search engine and site search' shortcuts that get me to all sorts of places - right click the location/url bar and go from there.

google/chrome type-ahead/lookahead pulls up a few of the sites i like to go to.

i've recently gotten better about opening the bookmarks with a shortcut and then searching for a keyword for some bookmark i want.

last time i built my own bookmark extension, i had 8,000+ bookmarks, i think. prob never looked at most more than once.

maybe google is just too good?


I'm currently working on a bookmark extension for Chrome, initially targeting my own needs, but I hope to make it available to others eventually. I'm wondering if there are any insights you could share about what factors led to the quality issues you mentioned.


sometimes i just outsourced stuff to people who were not technically capable enough. even good-ish devs can have trouble with the javascript event loop / promises / etc.

outside of that, i think quality can tumble when a solo dev starts to lose interest -- i.e. burnout.


Safari offers this with a great deal of flexibility. I often use Tab Groups and the ability to open new windows by loading a folder of bookmarks.

I don't use Chrome, but one reason I can imagine would be that Google would prefer you search for content/websites (so your eyeballs inevitably land on Ads).


Browsers generally are pretty bad and have only seen minimal evolution in terms of UI/UX. There are interesting experiments running now, like the Arc Browser, but conventional ones are pretty stuck. Tab groups in Safari/Chrome were the biggest thing we got in recent years.


Modern WebVM improperly named browsers for legacy reasons do exists for surveillance capitalism sake, not for the end user. Bookmarks in that sense are not much "first" nor "second class" citizens, it's the human a second class human-{data,money}-cow to be milked.

GAFAM interest (and their equal "competitors" in Russian Fed. and China) is that the human live connected to their services, dependent on them FOR ANYTHING, having bookmarks means less search engine usage, having RSS means less aggregators usage, having local MUA, perhaps even on a local maildir NOT leaving messages on the server since perhaps you have yours at home and on it many different mails from different services, some even yours directly, means less webmail usage, witch in turn means less "cloud storage", calendar, ... usages.

To elicit more money not only they need surveillance, they also need users pay to be surveilled in exchange of breadcrumbs (the useful part of the service they offer, witch is NOT negligible BUT compared to their earning it's actually a breadcrumb service) and lock in. The best way is full integration because we are "fully integrate minds" and if such integration happen on someone else computer that owner own us de facto.

That's is. The original web, the "modern Mundaneum idea" [1] is not the actual web, the actual web is not the original companion of usenet. Is just a few-giants-own-nearly-all arena.

[1] see Paul Otlet, Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum history


I don't use the bookmarks feature of the browser except for temporary purposes. I run my own bookmark server at home, so I can have a much richer experience, independent of whatever browser I happen to be using.

I've been doing this for decades now, and it is pretty much perfect for me.


I use this extension called one tab (https://www.one-tab.com/) which saves all the currently open tabs into a list which can be given a name!

This is the most helpful extension that I've installed on my browser.


Somewhat similar to Tab Groups in Safari.


Raindrop.io is what I use. Moved over a couple months back, and deleted all my bookmarks from chrome.


Firefox on Android seems to have just given up on bookmarks.

You can't even EDIT THEM (seriously) let alone order them in folders or pin them etc. Open, edit or share, that's it, and the last of which I think perhaps three people have ever done, and only by accident.


Yes, mobile Firefox was great until version ~60 something. You could install all the extensions from the store. But now there's like only 18 extensions for mobile.

But there is another way to organize bookmarks like one would expect.

_shameless plug_

You can use Websktop webapp for this. That way you'll have a fully customizable grid of bookmarks. It could look like this:

https://i.ibb.co/5T3pnXH/mobile.png


editing and creating bookmarks, as well as organising them into folders, as well as opening multiple bookmarks/folders simultaneously and bookmarking multiple tabs at the same time all work fine for me on Firefox on Android


Weird. I have a single "Bookmarks" menu item. Opening that shows them. I can tap to open, or "X" to delete. Long-press to select (multiple) which reveals a share icon and a triple-dot with open, open in private or delete. That's it. There is no edit or move operation.

(I noticed adding to a folder appends, and for a while was carefully shuffling between folders to sort, then realized they'd given up on bookmarks so I should too.)


I think Vivaldi is the only Browser, where I think the bookmark-thing is good. It is on the side, allways open if you like, and you just can drag a site into it. All others have it on top somewhere on a bar and you have to go thru menus to add something.


Google doesn't want you to use and organize bookmarks in Chrome simply because they are the biggest ads and search engine company, so they will earn more money if you search more instead of relying on your bookmarked library.


I feel this way about tabs. Mobile browsers get it right by assuming users will have a million tabs open that accumulate over time because they forget to close them. Desktop browsers don't handle that gracefully.


You’re not alone, this is possible in Nyxt. HTTPS://Nyxt.atlas.engineer. You can narrow a list of bookmarks and open them in new buffers in one click. You can also bookmark a set of buffers in one click.


Beats me. Browsers should have something like Zotero directly built into them.


I actually dont mind bookmarks being hidden away but I would love an interface similar to spotlight but for opening bookmarks I never know where i've put them only that they have blah in the name!


Try and get an invite for Arc. It solves these problems. Honestly i thought this post was just a secret marketing plug by one of their employees haha, but no one mentions it in the comments so far.


I'm recently using Raindrop.io precisely because bookmarking is terrible in browsers.

I want tags, and better search and classification, and previews, and so much more.

Raindrop does all of that and works very well


I tried raindrop.io but I really couldn't get used to it. Will try again.


Might want to try Websktop as well if Raindrop is not up your alley.


FF already has everything you mentioned.Perhaps has the best tag system.


Is this related to this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32506168


That’s why I build Anybox: To pick up where built-in bookmark manager left off.

If you’re on the Mac, you should give it a try.

https://anybox.app


That looks interesting!

Does it also have a way to deal with sets of "related" links? For example I might want to save and archive a webpage and its discussion on HN together or a collection of multiple blog posts as single entity. Currently I use org-mode but, even with org-capture, it is not frictionless and the mobile integration is lacking.


I’m afraid not. But this is an interesting idea.


Looks great. The front page doesn't mention which browsers it integrates with: is it Safari only, or does it plug into Firefox and Chrome too?

But it's a subscription!

Bookmarks are data. I don't want to have my bookmarks under the control of something that will lose them or make them inaccessible any time.


It has browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Edge. Not just Safari.

Anybox has lifetime option. It stores data on CloudKit and has many ways to export your data. I will never take user data hostage.


Join the waiting list to try the Arc beta by The Browser Company. Very fresh take on a browser, quite a bit of your list, particularly bookmark behaviour, is in Arc.


Based on the comments (lot explain how to do X in Firefox), it seems the question should be "Why are Bookmarks 2nd class citizens in Chrome"


You are not alone. I found raindrop that meets my needs.


cool i'll check out raindrop, thanks for the tip!

but i just wish there were some talented engineering teams at the leading browser creators (cough couch google, mozilla, MS, apple, etc) that would integrate this as a first class feature. a design goal, not a supported extension.


Firefox has a decent bookmark system. What I do usually is star it (one click) and I think you need to click it again to edit it, you can then add tags to it.

Search is a lot easier then.


i think if there was any browser to add something like raindrop natively it would be vivaldi. they seem to do a lot things differently than other browsers


Vivaldi don't have tags hence useless when it comes to bookmarks.


You can use nicknames as tags, atleast that's what I do. Most of my actual bookmark management is actually done in Zotero though.


nicknames cannot be used as tags since it doesn't support auto complete/filter by tag etc. You should really check out FF tag system.Its really awesome.Vivaldi doesn't stand a chance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRIyAu79OrM


> nicknames cannot be used as tags since it doesn't support auto complete/filter by tag etc.

Well, Vivaldi does support autocompletion of nicknames. Just tried it with HN (save it as a bookmark and add hn as a nickname)


Right? Going big on user-centric bookmarks directly cuts into the big guys biz models. We need a new "underground."


I wish there was a way to have useful bookmarks, I generally find history easier to use to find pages I want to reopen.


Check out the chrome extension Toby. Does most / all of this very well and stays synced across computers.


I reckon I’ve just ticked over 10,000 days of web browsing.

And I’ve never once used a bookmark. Not even once.

Maybe I’m the second class citizen?


Hopefully you're doing ctrl+L. Just as long as you're not clicking in the url bar, selecting and deselecting it multiple times before you press END and then mash the BACKSPACE and then start typing h t t p : / / ...


Ctrl+L?! Surely you mean F6 instead?


vimium addon replaces your urlbar for an actionbar that pops up and you have a way to enter urls, or search/browse bookmarks it also replaces browser keys with vimkeys so you can use your browser completely with keyboard, I don't think there is a better interaction for browsing ....


I want context based bookmarks. Bookmarks that appear when I'm on a particular site. Give me that.


Session manager that saves all pages during session and chrome tab/tab grouping states is way to go


bookmarks have low value now days

the reasons I stopped using them (and wanted to keep 'em)

1. links dont always take you back to where you were in a website (javascript) 2. links change often and end up broken 3. google search usually pulls back up what I want


Just use a Session Buddy extension, rather than just heavily relying on Bookmarks.


You are not alone. I do bookmark a lot an later on don’t find or remember things.


Because it's the junk drawer of the internet.


Just get a SessionBuddy or similar extension.


you might like tab stash. As the name suggests it allows you to stash tabs in groups and reopen them later


meta:

why has there been so many Ask HN questions without the “Ask HN:” before the title recently?


The reason why bookmarks suck is the same as why a significant percentage of web users struggle with tab overload.

The mainstream vendors became extremely conservative about introducing bigger UI changes and generally innovating on user experience (because of the sheer number and diversity of users as well as classic enterprise internal MO).

That’s why we’re still stuck in the 90’s paradigm of browsing web documents where today the browser is also proto-OS running web applications and a data pre-processor (used to retreve+download from Net into local apps or to upload+classify from local apps to Net).

Even though it’s technically possible to save multiple tabs as bookmarks and reopen multiple bookmarks as tabs (with a single action), very few people do.

My theory is that they became obsolete because: 1. The bookmarks bar is very limited with active real estate and quickly becomes crammed, and thus useless for long-term use which begets large quantities of data 2. To search bookmarks you need to open Bookmarks Manager which is too cumbersome even for occasional searches (most users probably don’t even know about it) 3. Editing and maintaining them is also cumbersome due to a lack of proper tools (batch operations, quick preview, etc) 4. The older the links, the harder it is to remember names and keywords, and our visual memory is often the most reliable point of reference 5. Even if the person is willing to put in the effort to deal with #3 and #4, once saved links tend to become forgotten about because #1 and #2 and the vicious cycle of deprecation is complete

That’s why most people use the bookmarks bar as a quick launcher pad for frequently used bookmarks.

The Read Later services and native features are great for articles but not for general bookmarks that are not long-form reading. Equally, full-text carbon copy clippers such as Notion, Raindrops, Evernote, etc. are not ideal for bookmarks for the same reason. Not to mention such solutions can only save pages one-by-one (instead of in batch), and can’t open multiple links at the same time — both needed to easily and quickly switch between different tasks/contexts.

Without being able to easily save and organise large quantities of (useful) links, people resort to leaving them open until they are able to process them, contributing to a pervasive issue of tab-hoarding.

Without being able to (auto)save sessions/tabs, people end up losing a lot of valuable references. The browser is the only (major) app in a modern stack that doesn’t save work and doesn’t enable you to reopen previous work.

You can only undo recently closed tabs and recover the last state of the browser if it crashes. But you can’t save and close an online shopping session in the middle, only to reopen and pick up where you left off several days later. Why not?

Shameless plug… this is precisely why we’ve developed Tablerone: https://tabler.one/


That’s my use case for Feedly -> Pocket.


Google.


see RSS


google


This question makes me wonder...what are some examples of "first class citizens in browsers" to you?


bring back del.icio.us!!!


pinboard.in is a good alternative


or websktop.com




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