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Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

by vapemaster on 8/18/22, 4:32 AM with 263 comments

• by mg on 8/18/22, 6:58 AM

  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.

• by adaml_623 on 8/18/22, 6:32 AM

  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).

• by buro9 on 8/18/22, 8:28 AM

  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.

• by mrb on 8/18/22, 5:52 AM

  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).

• by m0guz on 8/18/22, 7:58 AM

  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.

• by nextaccountic on 8/18/22, 5:52 AM

  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)

• by teleforce on 8/18/22, 5:44 AM

  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/

• by zorrolovsky on 8/18/22, 7:17 AM

  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.

• by pier25 on 8/18/22, 1:51 PM

  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...

• by Quai on 8/18/22, 7:07 AM

  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.

• by thaumasiotes on 8/18/22, 6:11 AM

  > 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?

• by mamoriamohit on 8/18/22, 8:01 AM

  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?

• by plaguepilled on 8/18/22, 7:07 AM

  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.

• by abetusk on 8/18/22, 12:01 PM

  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.

• by Curzel on 8/18/22, 7:41 AM

  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?

• by n8cpdx on 8/18/22, 6:54 AM

  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.

• by jbverschoor on 8/18/22, 7:13 AM

  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..

• by cupachabra on 8/18/22, 5:04 AM

  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

• by black_knight on 8/18/22, 7:03 AM

  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.

• by onion2k on 8/18/22, 7:29 AM

  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...

• by t-3 on 8/18/22, 6:07 AM

  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.

• by causi on 8/18/22, 12:02 PM

  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.

• by narag on 8/18/22, 7:10 AM

  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.

• by sedawk on 8/18/22, 7:09 PM

  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 :-|

• by rvba on 8/18/22, 12:36 PM

  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.

• by dmje on 8/18/22, 9:21 AM

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

• by bayindirh on 8/18/22, 11:29 AM

  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.

• by ksaj on 8/18/22, 9:52 PM

  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.

• by binarynate on 8/18/22, 6:22 AM

  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.

• by jhoelzel on 8/18/22, 7:55 AM

  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.

• by mejutoco on 8/18/22, 7:06 AM

  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.

• by Jaruzel on 8/18/22, 9:47 AM

  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.

• by msravi on 8/18/22, 8:44 AM

  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

• by matt332 on 8/18/22, 7:20 AM

  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.

• by mackrevinack on 8/18/22, 8:26 AM

  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

• by rasz on 8/18/22, 6:49 AM

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

• by tmcdos on 8/26/22, 1:26 PM

  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.

• by neilv on 8/18/22, 7:41 AM

  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/ )

• by pmontra on 8/18/22, 6:48 AM

  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.

• by eternityforest on 8/18/22, 9:41 AM

  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.

• by klqpas on 8/18/22, 9:19 AM

  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.

• by hiidrew on 8/18/22, 1:35 PM

  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/

• by wvh on 8/18/22, 1:37 PM

  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.

• by alkonaut on 8/18/22, 2:51 PM

  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.

• by memcg on 8/18/22, 2:55 PM

  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.

• by jpozo on 8/21/22, 2:59 PM

  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

• by dustractor on 8/18/22, 7:51 AM

  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.

• by a9h74j on 8/18/22, 7:39 AM

  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.)

• by richardw on 8/18/22, 10:44 AM

  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.

• by norman784 on 8/18/22, 10:07 AM

  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).

• by wollsmoth on 8/18/22, 2:03 PM

  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.

• by 2143 on 8/18/22, 6:16 AM

  > 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.

• by avipars on 8/18/22, 8:10 AM

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

• by caviv on 8/31/22, 6:47 PM

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

• by z9znz on 8/18/22, 11:41 AM

  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.

• by teetertater on 8/18/22, 3:02 PM

  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

• by CSDude on 8/18/22, 9:23 AM

  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.

• by alexashka on 8/18/22, 9:39 AM

  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 :)

• by lazyweb on 8/18/22, 2:01 PM

  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.

• by readonthegoapp on 8/18/22, 6:14 AM

  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?

• by isodev on 8/18/22, 10:53 AM

  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).

• by ymolodtsov on 8/19/22, 6:29 AM

  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.

• by kkfx on 8/18/22, 7:48 AM

  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

• by JohnFen on 8/18/22, 3:10 PM

  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.

• by whoibrar on 8/18/22, 5:46 AM

  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.

• by etchasketch on 8/18/22, 4:44 PM

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

• by verytrivial on 8/18/22, 10:08 AM

  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.

• by _trampeltier on 8/18/22, 7:51 AM

  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.

• by type0 on 8/18/22, 10:28 AM

  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.

• by heavyset_go on 8/18/22, 7:42 AM

  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.

• by jmercouris on 8/18/22, 7:30 AM

  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.

• by oxff on 8/18/22, 6:28 AM

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

• by apricot13 on 8/18/22, 10:18 AM

  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!

• by grsmvg on 8/18/22, 7:37 AM

  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.

• by webjac on 8/18/22, 8:35 AM

  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

• by wisdomseeker_ on 8/18/22, 9:19 AM

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

• by francisfeng on 8/18/22, 9:49 AM

  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

• by KuiN on 8/18/22, 10:51 AM

  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.

• by littlecranky67 on 8/18/22, 7:54 AM

  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"

• by pixelfog on 8/18/22, 4:43 AM

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

• by jrm4 on 8/18/22, 1:37 PM

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

• by peter_retief on 8/18/22, 7:05 AM

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

• by jazzlw on 8/18/22, 12:43 PM

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

• by robga on 8/18/22, 7:32 AM

  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?

• by nathias on 8/18/22, 8:56 AM

  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 ....

• by jasonlotito on 8/18/22, 1:58 PM

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

• by realitysballs on 8/18/22, 6:09 AM

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

• by sigmonsays on 8/18/22, 2:05 PM

  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

• by grigaraviciusv on 8/18/22, 7:48 AM

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

• by HellDunkel on 8/18/22, 7:34 AM

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

• by zcw100 on 8/18/22, 10:55 AM

  Because it's the junk drawer of the internet.

• by grigaraviciusv on 8/18/22, 7:48 AM

  Just get a SessionBuddy or similar extension.

• by ShowalkKama on 8/18/22, 7:58 AM

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

• by permo-w on 8/18/22, 1:26 PM

  meta:

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

• by natannikolic on 8/26/22, 6:50 PM

  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/

• by mud_dauber on 8/18/22, 2:30 PM

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

• by roschdal on 8/18/22, 6:51 AM

  Google.

• by neoe on 8/18/22, 8:47 AM

  see RSS

• by TedShiller on 8/18/22, 7:37 AM

  google

• by suction on 8/18/22, 6:21 AM

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

• by wawjgreen on 8/18/22, 7:44 AM

  bring back del.icio.us!!!