It sure would've been ideal to encourage those open standards, but one thing I've learned is that people bookmark for different reasons. Some just want to use

It sure would've been ideal to encourage those open standards, but one thing I've learned is that people bookmark for different reasons. Some just want to use it as short-term memory, while others use it more as a research index/tool. If you're more in the latter camp, the browser isn't necessarily the best designed tool to maintain your 80,000 bookmarks accrued over 10 years, even if they did have more open standards. So, sometimes you just want a system that more targeted to your use case and that "does one thing well". The nice thing about links is that there isn't any inherent reason why they need to be stored in the browser anyway. But i take your point that it would've been nice to have your basic profile information be more easily shared/synced across applications; that would've been pretty cool.