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Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in e

Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember. Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken. If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bodge5000 5y ago
The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed. I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  >pre kerfuffle version What does that mean? I am using Total Suspender
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.
detaro 5y ago
Yes, a good bookmarking/archiving/... solution would likely solve this for many people.
- midnightcity 5y ago
  You could try TinyGem
l33tman 5y ago
Interesting, been annoyed about this for years. I'm bookmarking things both in Chrome and on the Samsung internet mobile browser and neither prioritizes my bookmarks when I start typing something in the search bar. It actually seems completely random, sometimes a bookmark shows up, sometimes it shows 5 rows down, often not at all. Weird, bookmarking a site should count as a pretty strong a signal that I might want to see that page again...
dredmorbius 5y ago
Very much this. I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall, Pocket remains a roach motel: articles check in but they never check out. What I really want is a persistant, local, tagged, searchable, entirely-offline-usable archive of content. There seems to be little interest (or supreme obstacles) in providing this. (I've looked at Zotero, Calibre, and Mendalay, none really suit my workflow.) I've utterly given up any hope of browser vendors delivering this.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  Why would they? It's local, thus, not saleable information.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment. It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed. The remaining possibility would be a generalised HTTP/HTML (and if possible other document markup) programming libraries.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users. Does anyone know how to build a modular plugin sub-system?
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
eivarv 5y ago
I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave. https://cleave.app https://cleave.app Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level. I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources. I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked... In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.
- justinc8687 5y ago
  How does this compare to virtual desktops? Isn't this their main use?
  - eivarv 5y ago
    Compared to virtual desktops, this allows you to close down apps (consume less resources) as well as maintain multiple working context-specific application states.
lewisjoe 5y ago
You hit the nail. Yes bookmarking is broke. Most bookmarking services act as dumb buckets of information. Like an endless abyss of links that I'll never return to. That's why I made https://closetab.email https://closetab.email - This one delivers a digest of links from my bookmarks straight to my inbox, every monday. This way I end up consuming them eventually and also close tabs a bit more confidently, knowing I'll come back to it later.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Too bad email is broken as well...
_Microft 5y ago
Firefox allows to search your bookmarks by prepending * (an asterisk) to the input of the adress bar. They have also added a button for that a while ago. It's next to the search engine buttons at the bottom of the results panel. These buttons also show the shortcut symbols in their hover-text.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  The search functionality is still very limited, though. I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines, I remember mentions of the thing the article is telling about. Local bookmarks need an offline cache that at least contains the text content and headings of the URL. Otherwise, the search will stay useless because nobody can organize them manually without making (human) mistakes after a while. Ironically, Chromium's omnibar search worked by searching through headlines for a while; but meanwhile it's broken again, and it never worked for bookmarks and only for history entries.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    I agree that the feature is limited and could be greatly improved. Tab titles and tags are usually good enough though to find what I am looking for.
  - ttctciyf 5y ago
    > I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines When I open a new window[1] in Firefox and start typing in the address bar, I get matches based on the page title not just on the url. For example, I open a new window and type "brow" and the matches I get include "I closed a lot of browser tabs | Hacker News" (see image[2].) So I rarely if ever use bookmarks, I can almost always find what I'm looking for by typing in the url bar, or if that fails by searching in history. 1: Are you seated? Good. I don't use tabs, I just open new windows with ctrl-n and use alt-tab & ctrl-w to navigate. I have middle-click set to open in a new window. I use customise to put the "open new window" icon onto my buttons, next to the address bar. I would happily use a version of firefox with no tabs, they add nothing to my life. 2: https://i.imgur.com/loFZ0Mm.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/loFZ0Mm.jpeg
pjmlp 5y ago
No, I see it as refusal to learn how to use bookmarks. I fail to see how what is so hard regarding organizing information in folders per subject, when in doubt choose the more generic one. Firefox also allows me to easily search for bookmarks, and has a quite nice bookmark manager. Using bookmarks since 1995 across different kinds of browsers, always migrating them along.
- frou_dh 5y ago
  Agreed. Reminds me of how people complain that RSS is somehow too hard to use, and being on Twitter is now the only way to stay informed.
- Macha 5y ago
  1. Bookmarks fail for medium term usage. There's some research material for a doc or PR I'm actively working on - Why bookmark, catalogue and eventually prune if I'm not going to need it past tomorrow? 2. Bookmarks don't keep page state. As more apps go the PWA route, not all of them have URIs that lead to your preferred state. Even just stuff like expanding/hide comment threads is a start, not to mention things like NPR which redirect me to the homepage if it's been too long since I last did the CMP dance.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    1. Ongoing activities folder 2. Neither do tabs across process restarts or devices.
    - lmohseni 5y ago
      Regarding your second point, Firefox does both of these.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        It also does the same for bookmarks. However it doesn't help when it isn't the same browser across both devices.
    - 5y ago
shakow 5y ago
> Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? In some ways, I agree. My own solution was to develop reading lists storage (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/ https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/), i.e. an intermediate storage space between “saved for the years to come” of the bookmarks and the “in my face” pinned tabs. They are then displayed on my new tab page, so I can remember to read them whenever I open a new page.
globular-toast 5y ago
Maybe. For some reason many people just don't use bookmarks at all. The question is why don't they use them. Have they tried but found it broken? Or have they never tried?
- Vinnl 5y ago
  I don't use them because I have to know which pages are important enough to bookmark when I come across them first, rather than when I need them later. Usually I rely on finding something in my history. If I need to get around to it at some point, I'll keep the tab open and I'll get around to it when (if ever) I'm closing a bunch of tabs in a row, which takes relatively little effort. If I bookmark it, it'll just sit there and I'll never think of it again.
- jraph 5y ago
  I don't use bookmarks. I rely on history. If I want to find something, I'll type relevant keywords and the page shows up. It works without using bookmarks. I usually memorize parts of urls or title without effort, if I didn't have that I guess I would need bookmarks. I think bookmarks would be good for building lists. Like recipes. But I'm not organized well enough to do this.
  - account42 5y ago
    Careful, Browsers don't keep infinite history.
Maxburn 5y ago
YES!! I was a long time user of Xmarks for online bookmark syncing (cross platform and browser). I was sorely hurt when it was discontinued. I moved over to EverHelper. These days I don't try to sync bookmarks to browsers, they inevitably get corrupted or lost somewhere shomehow. I just use the EverHelper website as my bookmark manager. I'd love to find a open source thing I can host myself to fully own my bookmarks too so if anyone knows of that let me know.
- platz 5y ago
  I made a self-hosted pinboard clone that stores your bookmarks in sqlite w/ import from FF https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
  - Maxburn 5y ago
    Very nice, will look closer to this. Unfortunately for me I've grown so used to the folder/tree style adapting to tags would be pretty difficult. Thanks for mentioning it.
miguelrochefort 5y ago
The solution is trivial: Show related bookmarks at the top of Google Search results. It blows my mind that neither Google nor Pocket implemented this feature (natively and/or as a browser extension).
- freediver 5y ago
  How would Google know your bookmarks?
  - miguelrochefort 5y ago
    Chrome?
  - marpstar 5y ago
    I presume they'd be injected by the browser, but it also seems trivial for Google to display your bookmarks in search results if you sync them with your Google account.
    - freediver 5y ago
      I would still expect my bookmarks to be encrypted on Google servers so they would not be able to plainly "read" them?
- jkmcf 5y ago
  IIRC Readability used to do this. It was my favorite feature, and I've pinged Pocket and others about this.
handrous 5y ago
IMO one of the main problems is that opening a new tab is much faster than finding an existing one.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  One of the best extensions is the tree-style-tabs extensions. It puts your tabs on the left/right of your window organised in a tree, makes finding tabs much faster than having tabs at the top (and with modern wide-screen monitors also optimises screen real-estate)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Firefox Desktop at least lets you know if you've aready got a given URL open. Chrome does not. (My "Close tabs" post-it on my desk lamp is dated April 15. 2017.)
  - redfern314 5y ago
    Chrome actually does have that feature, but maybe it differs a bit from how Firefox implements it. It gives you a "switch to this tab" option in the omnibox if your input matches the title or URL of an open tab.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      It certainly doesn't do that on Mobile. I abandoned Chrome/desktop years ago.
1MachineElf 5y ago
I believe it is in Google's and Microsoft's interest to keep bookmarks crippled. Every time you forgo using your bookmarks to lookup something, you instead use their search services, which indirectly translates to money in their pocket.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Bingo
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla, telling them "if you ever make a bookmark system better than ours, we'll pull all our Google funding"? I'm going to stick with Hanlon's razor and assume making a better bookmark system is non-trivial.
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    >So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla Ok. Curious to know your theory on why Mozilla let go of the Servo team the same month Google agreed to give them hundreds of millions of dollars.
    - PoignardAzur 5y ago
      Budget cuts. The project had reportedly already integrated the major improvements from Servo into the main engine. It's not outlandish to assume that the marginal benefit of working on Servo was lower, compared to working on features on the main browser. If you really want to go that route, you could make an argument that maybe Mozilla is handicapping Firefox's bookmark feature to get people to subscribe to Pocket... but people in this thread who are using Pocket also complain it doesn't solve their problems. What's the angle there? Pocket doesn't want paying customers?
- freediver 5y ago
  Interesting theory. However Apple has no such agenda and yet Safari has probably the worst bookmark/history management of them all. So it seems to be a question of product management priorities really.
bane 5y ago
The problem is that browsers have a broken model of memory: 1 - Tabs are current attention. 2 - Bookmarks are long-term memory, but don't store content, only meta-data. What browsers need is 1 - Current attention 2 - Working memory, where old tabs automatically capture content and slide off into some kind of easy to recall state, but are no longer tabs 3 - Bookmarks, but with content storage, better organization, indexing, and retrieval. Evolution spent billions of years to arrive at this kind of scheme, we should mimic it.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  This literally was the primary reason to build my peer to peer browser that has a persistent cache which can be shared with other (local) peers. I think the cache needs to be persistent and offline ready, ignoring ETags and other stupid headers. Otherwise it's a useless cache that is not controlled by the user.
BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
Bookmarks are downplayed because search is browsers' main source of revenues. I'd personally accept a bit of ads in the bookmark manager (maybe in a section for suggestions based on bookmarks) in exchange for bookmarks to be better integrated and supported.
mrfusion 5y ago
I wish every search I did would search my existing bookmarks first and prioritize those. Also maybe my Home Screen could alternate to opening random bookmarks in my “read later” folder.
danShumway 5y ago
100% agree. Bookmarks are cumbersome to make, hard to search, and just generally kind of annoying to work with. They kind of integrate into searching on the URL bar, but not very well. Many of them have tagging support, but the system feels like an afterthought. And I'll add onto that, the way browser history works is also kind of annoying. I don't really trust that I'll be able to re-find a page I visited at a particular point in time. Visiting the same page twice doesn't create multiple history entries, it's hard to search by date. It feels really unreliable to use as a log. There's a lot of room for innovation here, we're only just now starting to see browsers merge in tab grouping and containers, which I could have sworn Opera already supported ~10-15 years ago. I don't feel like we've spent enough time actually thinking about what different types of workflows people have for browsing the web and about how bookmarks/history/tabs could be adjusted to make those workflows easier. It would take too long to list out all of the experiments that would be worth running (bookmarking screenshots or assets on a page, having bookmark "containers" for search, automatically categorizing bookmarks based on the domain or keywords inside the page, offline bookmarks that store the current state/DOM of the page, not just the URL, etc, etc). I think Edge was playing around with marking up pages using a stylus, but I don't know if that's still a thing now that they're based off of Chrome. And web annotations have been standardized for ages now. Still not integrated into any browser UIs that I'm aware of. In my opinion bookmarks are one of the most underdeveloped parts of the modern browser, closely followed by history, and then by tabs themselves.
- platz 5y ago
  i gave up with bookmarks in browsers and just built a selfhosted pinboard clone instead. add a bookmarklet, problem solved.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Random aside: I want to be able to put the same bookmark in multiple folders!
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  also; From any bookmarked page, I want to be able to delete the bookmark, without having to go into bookmark manager, figure out which folder it's in and delete it. When I've read the page, I don't need the bookmark anymore. This is the #1 reason why I have > 60,000 bookmarks. I'd bet that 99% of them are obsolete, or I eventually read them. But it's kind of a monumental task to actually curate them.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    I try to only bookmark things that are likely to remain relevant to me long term to some degree, and/or would be a pity to lose a path to for some reason. But this is very hard to judge accurately
conceptualspace 5y ago
that's the inspiration for my browser extension, Yet Another Speed Dial. it works as the new tab page but basically i use it as a visual bookmark manager. i find it way easier to scan my bookmarks as thumbnails to find what i want. it's open source and supports all the major browsers, check it out! https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
Scarbutt 5y ago
Don't bookmark tags solve this problem for you? firefox only though.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Is that an extension? It doesn't seem to be built in to FF. It would be great if there was tab grouping by tags and tags showing up on tab hover over!
  - Scarbutt 5y ago
    It's built-in, you can add tags when you create a bookmark in firefox and yep, that tab grouping feature would be nice, Chrome has tab groups and you can name so it gets close.
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      It appears that you can't tag an existing bookmark, but only when you create it. Seems like a hobbled feature...
dhms 5y ago
As others have mentioned, it might be in the interest of browser vendors to get you to perform more web searches. I don't know what browser you use, but personally I feel Firefox at least does a slightly better job than the competition at highlighting your bookmarks when you start typing in the search bar. Not sure if that is objectively true of course.
depingus 5y ago
xBrowserSync has completely replaced all bookmark managers for me. No more hunting through extensive folder trees (what a mess that was!). When adding bookmarks, I just manually add a couple tags and be done with it. With xBS, bookmarks are accessed mainly through a simple tag/keyword search. Bonus: I'm no longer tethered to any particular browser's sync ecosystem. BitWarden has my passwords and xBrowserSync has my bookmarks. I can browser hop on all my devices! Double bonus: Open source and you can self-host.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
I use a graph database for URLs. Either Semantic Synchrony or org-roam. That lets me keep any URL in as many categories as I'd like, and neat them however I want, or even create cycles if need be.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
My too many tabs problem is more than a bookmarking issue. - It’s partly ADHD: I lose track of tabs I no longer care about - It’s partly about state: I have actively performed some unsaved work that wouldn’t be preserved by a bookmark - It’s partly because I use the same computer for work and personal use: this amplifies both of the other problems, and I haven’t found a good profile management solution to mitigate them I mean by all means an improved bookmark solution could help, and could potentially help to improve these other issues. But my current solution is to just treat all tabs as ephemeral, and just close them all periodically. I very seldom bookmark anything, I generally use browsing history for that use case instead
Aerroon 5y ago
1. Bookmarks don't save state. 2. Bookmarks aren't a constant reminder in my field of vision that they exist. 3. It turns the "too many tabs problem" into "too many bookmarks". Once in a while I "unload" my tabs by bookmarking them into a separate folder. I close the tabs and because there's no visual reminder anymore I forget they exist. Eventually I build to to another few hundred tabs and do it again. Now I'm dealing with a couple of thousand bookmarks. I once deleted my old bookmarks. A couple of years later I went looking for a specific one. I knew exactly where the bookmark should've been, but I had deleted it. Edit: all of this is to say that I'm not sure whether this has a technological problem. Maybe if the UX of bookmarks was really good.
Haga 5y ago
Tabs should be auto grouped in a interest e. g. "cangoroo obsession". Within these threads, the repeated common elements (authors, producers, stars, most recent visit, Nr of visits) should allow to sort it hierarchical. Now bookmarks are a echo chamber of obsessions and we are to blame. Tabs get sorted by the obsessions they are part of, creating meta tabs. Society collapses on its own weight.
Tagbert 5y ago
I just open the bookmark sidebar cmd-B Then I use the search box at the top. The bookmark appears. Close the sidebar cmd-B (Why does the HN text editor ignore single new lines?)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bodge5000 5y ago

The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed. I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind

wintermutestwin 5y ago
>pre kerfuffle version What does that mean? I am using Total Suspender
- bodge5000 5y ago
  The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.

detaro 5y ago

Yes, a good bookmarking/archiving/... solution would likely solve this for many people.

midnightcity 5y ago
You could try TinyGem

l33tman 5y ago

Interesting, been annoyed about this for years. I'm bookmarking things both in Chrome and on the Samsung internet mobile browser and neither prioritizes my bookmarks when I start typing something in the search bar. It actually seems completely random, sometimes a bookmark shows up, sometimes it shows 5 rows down, often not at all. Weird, bookmarking a site should count as a pretty strong a signal that I might want to see that page again...

dredmorbius 5y ago

Very much this. I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall, Pocket remains a roach motel: articles check in but they never check out. What I really want is a persistant, local, tagged, searchable, entirely-offline-usable archive of content. There seems to be little interest (or supreme obstacles) in providing this. (I've looked at Zotero, Calibre, and Mendalay, none really suit my workflow.) I've utterly given up any hope of browser vendors delivering this.

bbarnett 5y ago
Why would they? It's local, thus, not saleable information.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment. It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed. The remaining possibility would be a generalised HTTP/HTML (and if possible other document markup) programming libraries.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users. Does anyone know how to build a modular plugin sub-system?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago

eivarv 5y ago

I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave. https://cleave.app https://cleave.app Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level. I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources. I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked... In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.

justinc8687 5y ago
How does this compare to virtual desktops? Isn't this their main use?
- eivarv 5y ago
  Compared to virtual desktops, this allows you to close down apps (consume less resources) as well as maintain multiple working context-specific application states.

lewisjoe 5y ago

You hit the nail. Yes bookmarking is broke. Most bookmarking services act as dumb buckets of information. Like an endless abyss of links that I'll never return to. That's why I made https://closetab.email https://closetab.email - This one delivers a digest of links from my bookmarks straight to my inbox, every monday. This way I end up consuming them eventually and also close tabs a bit more confidently, knowing I'll come back to it later.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
Too bad email is broken as well...

_Microft 5y ago

Firefox allows to search your bookmarks by prepending * (an asterisk) to the input of the adress bar. They have also added a button for that a while ago. It's next to the search engine buttons at the bottom of the results panel. These buttons also show the shortcut symbols in their hover-text.

cookiengineer 5y ago
The search functionality is still very limited, though. I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines, I remember mentions of the thing the article is telling about. Local bookmarks need an offline cache that at least contains the text content and headings of the URL. Otherwise, the search will stay useless because nobody can organize them manually without making (human) mistakes after a while. Ironically, Chromium's omnibar search worked by searching through headlines for a while; but meanwhile it's broken again, and it never worked for bookmarks and only for history entries.
- _Microft 5y ago
  I agree that the feature is limited and could be greatly improved. Tab titles and tags are usually good enough though to find what I am looking for.
- ttctciyf 5y ago
  > I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines When I open a new window[1] in Firefox and start typing in the address bar, I get matches based on the page title not just on the url. For example, I open a new window and type "brow" and the matches I get include "I closed a lot of browser tabs | Hacker News" (see image[2].) So I rarely if ever use bookmarks, I can almost always find what I'm looking for by typing in the url bar, or if that fails by searching in history. 1: Are you seated? Good. I don't use tabs, I just open new windows with ctrl-n and use alt-tab & ctrl-w to navigate. I have middle-click set to open in a new window. I use customise to put the "open new window" icon onto my buttons, next to the address bar. I would happily use a version of firefox with no tabs, they add nothing to my life. 2: https://i.imgur.com/loFZ0Mm.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/loFZ0Mm.jpeg

pjmlp 5y ago

No, I see it as refusal to learn how to use bookmarks. I fail to see how what is so hard regarding organizing information in folders per subject, when in doubt choose the more generic one. Firefox also allows me to easily search for bookmarks, and has a quite nice bookmark manager. Using bookmarks since 1995 across different kinds of browsers, always migrating them along.

frou_dh 5y ago
Agreed. Reminds me of how people complain that RSS is somehow too hard to use, and being on Twitter is now the only way to stay informed.
Macha 5y ago
1. Bookmarks fail for medium term usage. There's some research material for a doc or PR I'm actively working on - Why bookmark, catalogue and eventually prune if I'm not going to need it past tomorrow? 2. Bookmarks don't keep page state. As more apps go the PWA route, not all of them have URIs that lead to your preferred state. Even just stuff like expanding/hide comment threads is a start, not to mention things like NPR which redirect me to the homepage if it's been too long since I last did the CMP dance.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  1. Ongoing activities folder 2. Neither do tabs across process restarts or devices.
  - lmohseni 5y ago
    Regarding your second point, Firefox does both of these.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It also does the same for bookmarks. However it doesn't help when it isn't the same browser across both devices.
  - 5y ago

shakow 5y ago

> Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? In some ways, I agree. My own solution was to develop reading lists storage (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/ https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/), i.e. an intermediate storage space between “saved for the years to come” of the bookmarks and the “in my face” pinned tabs. They are then displayed on my new tab page, so I can remember to read them whenever I open a new page.

globular-toast 5y ago

Maybe. For some reason many people just don't use bookmarks at all. The question is why don't they use them. Have they tried but found it broken? Or have they never tried?

Vinnl 5y ago
I don't use them because I have to know which pages are important enough to bookmark when I come across them first, rather than when I need them later. Usually I rely on finding something in my history. If I need to get around to it at some point, I'll keep the tab open and I'll get around to it when (if ever) I'm closing a bunch of tabs in a row, which takes relatively little effort. If I bookmark it, it'll just sit there and I'll never think of it again.
jraph 5y ago
I don't use bookmarks. I rely on history. If I want to find something, I'll type relevant keywords and the page shows up. It works without using bookmarks. I usually memorize parts of urls or title without effort, if I didn't have that I guess I would need bookmarks. I think bookmarks would be good for building lists. Like recipes. But I'm not organized well enough to do this.
- account42 5y ago
  Careful, Browsers don't keep infinite history.

Maxburn 5y ago

YES!! I was a long time user of Xmarks for online bookmark syncing (cross platform and browser). I was sorely hurt when it was discontinued. I moved over to EverHelper. These days I don't try to sync bookmarks to browsers, they inevitably get corrupted or lost somewhere shomehow. I just use the EverHelper website as my bookmark manager. I'd love to find a open source thing I can host myself to fully own my bookmarks too so if anyone knows of that let me know.

platz 5y ago
I made a self-hosted pinboard clone that stores your bookmarks in sqlite w/ import from FF https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
- Maxburn 5y ago
  Very nice, will look closer to this. Unfortunately for me I've grown so used to the folder/tree style adapting to tags would be pretty difficult. Thanks for mentioning it.

miguelrochefort 5y ago

The solution is trivial: Show related bookmarks at the top of Google Search results. It blows my mind that neither Google nor Pocket implemented this feature (natively and/or as a browser extension).

freediver 5y ago
How would Google know your bookmarks?
- miguelrochefort 5y ago
  Chrome?
- marpstar 5y ago
  I presume they'd be injected by the browser, but it also seems trivial for Google to display your bookmarks in search results if you sync them with your Google account.
  - freediver 5y ago
    I would still expect my bookmarks to be encrypted on Google servers so they would not be able to plainly "read" them?
jkmcf 5y ago
IIRC Readability used to do this. It was my favorite feature, and I've pinged Pocket and others about this.

handrous 5y ago

IMO one of the main problems is that opening a new tab is much faster than finding an existing one.

cycomanic 5y ago
One of the best extensions is the tree-style-tabs extensions. It puts your tabs on the left/right of your window organised in a tree, makes finding tabs much faster than having tabs at the top (and with modern wide-screen monitors also optimises screen real-estate)
dredmorbius 5y ago
Firefox Desktop at least lets you know if you've aready got a given URL open. Chrome does not. (My "Close tabs" post-it on my desk lamp is dated April 15. 2017.)
- redfern314 5y ago
  Chrome actually does have that feature, but maybe it differs a bit from how Firefox implements it. It gives you a "switch to this tab" option in the omnibox if your input matches the title or URL of an open tab.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    It certainly doesn't do that on Mobile. I abandoned Chrome/desktop years ago.

1MachineElf 5y ago

I believe it is in Google's and Microsoft's interest to keep bookmarks crippled. Every time you forgo using your bookmarks to lookup something, you instead use their search services, which indirectly translates to money in their pocket.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
Bingo
PoignardAzur 5y ago
So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla, telling them "if you ever make a bookmark system better than ours, we'll pull all our Google funding"? I'm going to stick with Hanlon's razor and assume making a better bookmark system is non-trivial.
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  >So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla Ok. Curious to know your theory on why Mozilla let go of the Servo team the same month Google agreed to give them hundreds of millions of dollars.
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    Budget cuts. The project had reportedly already integrated the major improvements from Servo into the main engine. It's not outlandish to assume that the marginal benefit of working on Servo was lower, compared to working on features on the main browser. If you really want to go that route, you could make an argument that maybe Mozilla is handicapping Firefox's bookmark feature to get people to subscribe to Pocket... but people in this thread who are using Pocket also complain it doesn't solve their problems. What's the angle there? Pocket doesn't want paying customers?
freediver 5y ago
Interesting theory. However Apple has no such agenda and yet Safari has probably the worst bookmark/history management of them all. So it seems to be a question of product management priorities really.

bane 5y ago

The problem is that browsers have a broken model of memory: 1 - Tabs are current attention. 2 - Bookmarks are long-term memory, but don't store content, only meta-data. What browsers need is 1 - Current attention 2 - Working memory, where old tabs automatically capture content and slide off into some kind of easy to recall state, but are no longer tabs 3 - Bookmarks, but with content storage, better organization, indexing, and retrieval. Evolution spent billions of years to arrive at this kind of scheme, we should mimic it.

cookiengineer 5y ago
This literally was the primary reason to build my peer to peer browser that has a persistent cache which can be shared with other (local) peers. I think the cache needs to be persistent and offline ready, ignoring ETags and other stupid headers. Otherwise it's a useless cache that is not controlled by the user.

BenoitEssiambre 5y ago

Bookmarks are downplayed because search is browsers' main source of revenues. I'd personally accept a bit of ads in the bookmark manager (maybe in a section for suggestions based on bookmarks) in exchange for bookmarks to be better integrated and supported.

mrfusion 5y ago

I wish every search I did would search my existing bookmarks first and prioritize those. Also maybe my Home Screen could alternate to opening random bookmarks in my “read later” folder.

danShumway 5y ago

100% agree. Bookmarks are cumbersome to make, hard to search, and just generally kind of annoying to work with. They kind of integrate into searching on the URL bar, but not very well. Many of them have tagging support, but the system feels like an afterthought. And I'll add onto that, the way browser history works is also kind of annoying. I don't really trust that I'll be able to re-find a page I visited at a particular point in time. Visiting the same page twice doesn't create multiple history entries, it's hard to search by date. It feels really unreliable to use as a log. There's a lot of room for innovation here, we're only just now starting to see browsers merge in tab grouping and containers, which I could have sworn Opera already supported ~10-15 years ago. I don't feel like we've spent enough time actually thinking about what different types of workflows people have for browsing the web and about how bookmarks/history/tabs could be adjusted to make those workflows easier. It would take too long to list out all of the experiments that would be worth running (bookmarking screenshots or assets on a page, having bookmark "containers" for search, automatically categorizing bookmarks based on the domain or keywords inside the page, offline bookmarks that store the current state/DOM of the page, not just the URL, etc, etc). I think Edge was playing around with marking up pages using a stylus, but I don't know if that's still a thing now that they're based off of Chrome. And web annotations have been standardized for ages now. Still not integrated into any browser UIs that I'm aware of. In my opinion bookmarks are one of the most underdeveloped parts of the modern browser, closely followed by history, and then by tabs themselves.

platz 5y ago
i gave up with bookmarks in browsers and just built a selfhosted pinboard clone instead. add a bookmarklet, problem solved.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Random aside: I want to be able to put the same bookmark in multiple folders!

Pokepokalypse 5y ago
also; From any bookmarked page, I want to be able to delete the bookmark, without having to go into bookmark manager, figure out which folder it's in and delete it. When I've read the page, I don't need the bookmark anymore. This is the #1 reason why I have > 60,000 bookmarks. I'd bet that 99% of them are obsolete, or I eventually read them. But it's kind of a monumental task to actually curate them.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  I try to only bookmark things that are likely to remain relevant to me long term to some degree, and/or would be a pity to lose a path to for some reason. But this is very hard to judge accurately

conceptualspace 5y ago

that's the inspiration for my browser extension, Yet Another Speed Dial. it works as the new tab page but basically i use it as a visual bookmark manager. i find it way easier to scan my bookmarks as thumbnails to find what i want. it's open source and supports all the major browsers, check it out! https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

Scarbutt 5y ago

Don't bookmark tags solve this problem for you? firefox only though.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
Is that an extension? It doesn't seem to be built in to FF. It would be great if there was tab grouping by tags and tags showing up on tab hover over!
- Scarbutt 5y ago
  It's built-in, you can add tags when you create a bookmark in firefox and yep, that tab grouping feature would be nice, Chrome has tab groups and you can name so it gets close.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    It appears that you can't tag an existing bookmark, but only when you create it. Seems like a hobbled feature...

dhms 5y ago

As others have mentioned, it might be in the interest of browser vendors to get you to perform more web searches. I don't know what browser you use, but personally I feel Firefox at least does a slightly better job than the competition at highlighting your bookmarks when you start typing in the search bar. Not sure if that is objectively true of course.

depingus 5y ago

xBrowserSync has completely replaced all bookmark managers for me. No more hunting through extensive folder trees (what a mess that was!). When adding bookmarks, I just manually add a couple tags and be done with it. With xBS, bookmarks are accessed mainly through a simple tag/keyword search. Bonus: I'm no longer tethered to any particular browser's sync ecosystem. BitWarden has my passwords and xBrowserSync has my bookmarks. I can browser hop on all my devices! Double bonus: Open source and you can self-host.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

I use a graph database for URLs. Either Semantic Synchrony or org-roam. That lets me keep any URL in as many categories as I'd like, and neat them however I want, or even create cycles if need be.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

My too many tabs problem is more than a bookmarking issue. - It’s partly ADHD: I lose track of tabs I no longer care about - It’s partly about state: I have actively performed some unsaved work that wouldn’t be preserved by a bookmark - It’s partly because I use the same computer for work and personal use: this amplifies both of the other problems, and I haven’t found a good profile management solution to mitigate them I mean by all means an improved bookmark solution could help, and could potentially help to improve these other issues. But my current solution is to just treat all tabs as ephemeral, and just close them all periodically. I very seldom bookmark anything, I generally use browsing history for that use case instead

Aerroon 5y ago

1. Bookmarks don't save state. 2. Bookmarks aren't a constant reminder in my field of vision that they exist. 3. It turns the "too many tabs problem" into "too many bookmarks". Once in a while I "unload" my tabs by bookmarking them into a separate folder. I close the tabs and because there's no visual reminder anymore I forget they exist. Eventually I build to to another few hundred tabs and do it again. Now I'm dealing with a couple of thousand bookmarks. I once deleted my old bookmarks. A couple of years later I went looking for a specific one. I knew exactly where the bookmark should've been, but I had deleted it. Edit: all of this is to say that I'm not sure whether this has a technological problem. Maybe if the UX of bookmarks was really good.

Haga 5y ago

Tabs should be auto grouped in a interest e. g. "cangoroo obsession". Within these threads, the repeated common elements (authors, producers, stars, most recent visit, Nr of visits) should allow to sort it hierarchical. Now bookmarks are a echo chamber of obsessions and we are to blame. Tabs get sorted by the obsessions they are part of, creating meta tabs. Society collapses on its own weight.

Tagbert 5y ago

I just open the bookmark sidebar cmd-B Then I use the search box at the top. The bookmark appears. Close the sidebar cmd-B (Why does the HN text editor ignore single new lines?)