3 ms·

I find bookmarks literally useless nowadays. For example, currently I'm researching bicycles for my mother. I'm on an online shop, and I just open potential ca

I find bookmarks literally useless nowadays. For example, currently I'm researching bicycles for my mother. I'm on an online shop, and I just open potential candidates on new tabs, which means they start loading in the background while I keep browsing. And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. When I switch to another task, I can just collapse this tree, and when I get back, the listing will be exactly where I left it, which is particularly useful if the site uses JS search without updating the URL. Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Bookmarks could be useful for a long-term reference storage (months/years instead of days/weeks), but then chances are a bunch of those links will have rotted, so I need to use something that mirrors the content instead (I used Pinboard previously, now I just use the SingleFile addon to store it as a file).

fouric 6y ago
> And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. Bookmarks can be categorized with folders and tags - which, together, are much more flexible than tab groups. A tab can only exist in one group/tree at a time, but a bookmark can have infinitely many tags and exist in a tree-like structure (which is what you described) using bookmarks and be relabeled so it's easier for you to find using full-text search. > Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Yes, because bookmarks are meant to be long-term storage, tabs are meant to be working memory, and transient web page state like whether a radio button is checked or not is not intended to be long-term. Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. > if the site uses JS search without updating the URL Then you can just keep that search tab open if you absolutely have to interrupt yourself and go to another task. Bookmarks will do just fine for all the stuff you found. It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them.
- icebraining 6y ago
  To be clear, I'm not arguing for just tabs; I agree that tab trees are limited for the long-term storage needs. I just think bookmarks are too crippled to serve as the solution for those needs. > Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. Supposed doesn't matter to me, frankly. A solution for me must work for most sites, regardless of whether the web developers of those sites do the "supposed" or not. But even if they did, those cookies and local storage aren't tied to the bookmarks, so I can't rely on them. Chances are they'll expire much sooner, plus they generally only work on the same machine where they were created, which in the long-term may not be the same I'll be using later. And the ultimate state loser still applies: URLs rot, and bookmarks rot with them. For long-term storage, they're absolutely not enough. Hence my use of page archiving as files, instead. > It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them. Maybe, but I don't care to waste time finding out which pages do or do not have their state in the URL or local storage if I need it. Tabs simply work.

fouric 6y ago

> And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. Bookmarks can be categorized with folders and tags - which, together, are much more flexible than tab groups. A tab can only exist in one group/tree at a time, but a bookmark can have infinitely many tags and exist in a tree-like structure (which is what you described) using bookmarks and be relabeled so it's easier for you to find using full-text search. > Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Yes, because bookmarks are meant to be long-term storage, tabs are meant to be working memory, and transient web page state like whether a radio button is checked or not is not intended to be long-term. Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. > if the site uses JS search without updating the URL Then you can just keep that search tab open if you absolutely have to interrupt yourself and go to another task. Bookmarks will do just fine for all the stuff you found. It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them.

icebraining 6y ago
To be clear, I'm not arguing for just tabs; I agree that tab trees are limited for the long-term storage needs. I just think bookmarks are too crippled to serve as the solution for those needs. > Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. Supposed doesn't matter to me, frankly. A solution for me must work for most sites, regardless of whether the web developers of those sites do the "supposed" or not. But even if they did, those cookies and local storage aren't tied to the bookmarks, so I can't rely on them. Chances are they'll expire much sooner, plus they generally only work on the same machine where they were created, which in the long-term may not be the same I'll be using later. And the ultimate state loser still applies: URLs rot, and bookmarks rot with them. For long-term storage, they're absolutely not enough. Hence my use of page archiving as files, instead. > It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them. Maybe, but I don't care to waste time finding out which pages do or do not have their state in the URL or local storage if I need it. Tabs simply work.