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Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

243 points by spindritf 14y ago

webwanderings 14y ago
Does Mozilla know that their blog's comment section is probably broken? I cannot submit my comment where it matters.
stuaxo 14y ago
Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.
- shardling 14y ago
  WFM. (In all browsers I can test on OSX.) Hopefully you're not experiencing a MitM attack! :)
- spindritf 14y ago
  They present a valid certificate for blog.mozilla.org from GeoTrust to me.
- keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  What kind of error specifically? Also, is the SHA1 fingerprint of the certificate you do receive the same as this: B0:02:9E:58:32:7B:72:16:58:C6:E4:DA:20:9F:20:CC:C5:7D:3F:5F?
- retube 14y ago
  yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.
- retube 14y ago
  yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.
sabret00the 14y ago
I have three uses of saved pages. - The open tab: return to it later - Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar - Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news sites Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or for very specific functions. The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.
olalonde 14y ago
No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)
- evoxed 14y ago
  Honestly, this is the main reason I always have a tab open to HN. There are so many items on here that I know I don't have the time to look into immediately but will return to, and having them saved just by upvoting feels really good. I very close attention to what I vote for, and when I go hunting for a link I know there's a good chance it'll be saved along with comments for context.
jedahan 14y ago
Mozilla's UX posts continue to impress by being thorough and open-minded.
- AndreasFrom 14y ago
  Firefox is improving at an amazing pace for both users and developers. It seems like the rapid release schedule has sparked a flame.
DanBC 14y ago
I'm glad they're working on something, because my bookmarks are a good example of horribly broken. (Ideally I'd have something that looked like the grid-home layout that most browsers have now, but for all my bookmarks. Then it'd have the ability to create / destroy folders, and drag and drop functionality to move bookmarks around.)
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.
code_duck 14y ago
Safari's Reading List comes to mind.
- keeperofdakeys 14y ago
  For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using this feature?
  - mh- 14y ago
    better description here than I could muster: http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too. http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_hero2_2x.jpg http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...
- malvim 14y ago
  Came to my mind as well, both on iOS and OSX. The article does mention it, though, in the "Various applications and services offer save for later functionality" part, along with other software and services.
derleth 14y ago
My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two bookmark files with tags attached. Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks. I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. The tags from both original files must be preserved. If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original files, it must be tagged the same way in the new file. Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option. I like my privacy. It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.
- damncabbage 14y ago
  It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me. I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. (I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)
  - derleth 14y ago
    > I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the relevant data.
    - kbrosnan 14y ago
      If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do this. If you want simple and dirty. 1. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine 2. Pick your favorite scripting language 3. merge the two json backup files using your script Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.
      - derleth 14y ago
        > Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags. A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.
srean 14y ago
I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently. The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link. So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it. It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway. And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised. @hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use. Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory) @lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.
- 14y ago
kule 14y ago
Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later date. What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can still read what was on the page.
- skymt 14y ago
  Have you seen Historious? http://historio.us/ http://historio.us/
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the recommendation (what's your username)?
    - corin_ 14y ago
      I'm a paying user of yours so I don't have any specific problem with you or historious, but I don't like that you're offering a free month here. I'm sure it won't really have any impact, but in theory by rewarding people who say "have you tried <product>" in a HN comment you're incentivising people to make those comments, essentially offering people the chance to use a referrals scheme without it going through referral links.
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        That's true generally, although it doesn't really apply in this case. I don't usually give free months to people who mention historious, I was just happy to see a mention and gave a freebie. Arguably, the free bookmarks you get through referrals are more useful, since they don't expire...
- sparkie 14y ago
  http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/ can do this. It can make a snapshot of the page, and also a copy of all attachments on it (especially useful for pdfs, images etc.)
davecap1 14y ago
I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of improving one that is not well known?
HyprMusic 14y ago
I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks. Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visited them once. All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.
- mitjak 14y ago
  I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of: * Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack. I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.
- coffeeaddicted 14y ago
  I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast. One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh
tarr11 14y ago
I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on what computer I am on. If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose Chrome.
h2s 14y ago
Reasons why I bookmark pages: 1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly 2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly 3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me. I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of bookmarking too many things. Next I start fretting over whether they're organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion. It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is still king in my book!
- Karunamon 14y ago
  >no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me. Ever tried Xmarks?
- RobAley 14y ago
  I likewise use different browsers often during development, mainly for testing and exploring browser specific options, but use Firefox for my main browser and bookmarking etc. When I want to access a bookmark in, say, Chrome, if the page is open in firefox I simply drag globe icon next to the URL from Firefox and drop it onto chrome. If it isn't already open, I show all bookmarks and drag and drop the bookmark from there.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Instead of having to make sure we have them organized, browsers should just index their content and provide good search. Indexing engines are more than fast enough nowadays.
ollysb 14y ago
My ideal solution would be to search my pinboard bookmarks from the address bar in chrome. As it is I get fairly close using alfred and a custom search for pinboard.
reinhardt 14y ago
I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume. All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling of being "left behind" more and more. I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later" tool or process. If I can't read it right now, chances are I won't do it at all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.
GBKS 14y ago
Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat, the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based version would be much more usable. I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.
lurrch 14y ago
Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things that suck when (trying) to use one. My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface THINKS I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results. Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse. Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own these status symbols du jour. That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen complex. Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox, and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS program to consume and digest RSS feeds. RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it "fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.
latif 14y ago
My add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/ combines bookmarks and tab-management. It lets the user group bookmarks into sets that a user can open all at once or singly. This approach almost completely eliminates the need for an address bar. Another interesting feature of the add-on is that it unifies bookmarks and web-search. The two seem totally disparate but they can be integrated seamlessly in a very cool way. Check http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html for an overview of the approach.
kijin 14y ago
Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks. But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they plan to address these issues: 1. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political science course. 2. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too. But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many. 3. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for toggling between icon and list view.) 4. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks? All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not only help you save pages for later, but also help you manage the pages that you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds, 5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".
zemanel 14y ago
Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization. By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents would be indexed (taking into account the security implications) I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks. As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of bookmarks a user already has.
- Lagged2Death 14y ago
  By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself... Opera, circa 2008: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in-opera-with-ope/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in...
  - zemanel 14y ago
    Exactly. Thanks! Had no idea that feature existed, going to try it out. Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes (on OSX) and, i admit, mainstreams, make ne not using it much although i do cross html browser tests there
    - Lagged2Death 14y ago
      Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes... I completely understand. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Opera myself. The features and UI are miles ahead, IMHO, but other characteristics are so frustrating. The Windows version doesn't crash often, but there are plenty of web sites that don't get along with it.
tribe 14y ago
This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be in another. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Lagged2Death 14y ago
I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so many eyeballs, either.
CT100 14y ago
I wish browsers had 3 suggestions for which folder to put the bookmark into - that would save me time scrolling through my bookmarks.
grayc 14y ago
For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are: 1. I want to go back to a website for new content; or 2. I want to store content to read/view later; or 3. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me. So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for 3. I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely visit. A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is impossible as I have it set up. Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search; folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.
webwanderings 14y ago
The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the History feature, is beyond me. In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).
- vdm 14y ago
  Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from the page.
andrew_wc_brown 14y ago
I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites. 1. Tab - One time read 2. History - I might need to return a few times in a week, month 3. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it, it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu. The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.
andrew_wc_brown 14y ago
I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites. 1. Tab - One time read 2. History - I might need to return a few times in a week, month 3. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it, it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu. The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.
yason 14y ago
I hit Ctrl-D and later search for something of resemblance by typing into the url bar and letting results flow in from bookmarks. I'd much rather just minimize tabs into a staging area than bookmark. And then type things into the url bar and finding pages. Or browsing the staging area visually, much like an eternally long strip of tabs. And tabs preserve context unlike bookmarks. THe only thing that prevents me from saving too many tabs is that browsers get crashy/laggy when I do that and I have no way to stash the saved tabs to some place where they don't clutter my desktop visually.
amitamb 14y ago
I worked on a app to let you keep your bookmarks searchable from any browser and share them with others at same time. http://www.microki.com/ http://www.microki.com/
bazzargh 14y ago
There's only two things I use the browser's bookmarks for now - firstly to prime the pump for FF's awesomebar. I rely on that when I delete my history (which I do irregularly during development). The second thing is bookmarklets, which are also a subversion of the mechanism, but let me customize /across browsers/ which most extension mechanisms don't do. Glad to see Mozilla tackling the fragmented collection of bookmarks I've ended up with as 'favourites' in Google Reader, Hacker News, twitter, youtube, vimeo....
blahedo 14y ago
Aside from the content, this is a fantastic exposition of the techniques of UX design, and since I teach a unit on that I wanted to make sure I'd be able to give the link to my students. But I'm on my home computer right now, and I manage that from my office computer, so I... ...emailed the link to myself. :P Which is actually an interesting confirmation of several points the article made. Most of my save-for-later is "I want to consume this, but don't have time" and "I want to come back to this momentarily", for which I use the leave-tabs-open strategy rather than bookmarking or emailing. I knew this article would be great almost from the time I saw the title....
wooptoo 14y ago
A mind map browser history/bookmark system would be the most intuitive. With timestamps and relations between items. Most of the time when searching through my browsing history I remember a small bit from the page that I want (like a phrase), but not the whole address or title. So searching for something like "find that page about a Python module, which I opened two days ago" would be truly helpful. Hell, even searching by a page's dominant color would be helpful sometimes, since I have a good visual memory.
theootz 14y ago
Related to bookmarks... I no longer use Firefox and have long since switched to Chrome, but in doing so my bookmarks have become effectively useless. What I mean by this is, in Firefox, one of the greatest (and probably underused) features was the ability to tag individual bookmarks instead of simply pushing them into a single folder. This meant that, when I wanted to revisit a bookmark later on, I simply had to start typing in the tags (which I always made broad and diverse). By typing in more and more tags that I thought would likely relate to the article I wanted to reach, it would narrow it down. I never had to remember what the article was called, or where it was, or anything like that. Now if this automatically happened while bookmarking? Some intelligent manner in which the page could be skimmed for keywords or something. Bookmarking and retrieval becomes much simpler... Just wanted to throw that out as something to consider :) (Now, one Chrome, I usually just leave tabs open or try to organize into folders and fail miserably :/ )
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Welcome to the club. Many of us have realized by now that none of the browsers are following any standards when it comes to bookmarks. The tagging is the exclusive Firefox feature and we were simply hijacked by it over the years. You moved to Chrome after using Firefox for many yeas (so did I) and you realize that your Firefox tags are not welcome at Chrome.
- hesselink 14y ago
  I use the Firefox address bar as a lightweight version of this. Since it searches URLs as well as titles of sites in your history, you can just type (parts of) words separated by spaces to find old content.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  Tagging is indeed the best way to organize bookmarks and it's what we use to organize bookmarks in noteplz.com . Another useful thing i've found useful is keeping the page referer along with the bookmark (one of the few good things i can think of about referers) .

243 points by spindritf 14y ago

webwanderings 14y ago

Does Mozilla know that their blog's comment section is probably broken? I cannot submit my comment where it matters.

stuaxo 14y ago

Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.

shardling 14y ago
WFM. (In all browsers I can test on OSX.) Hopefully you're not experiencing a MitM attack! :)
spindritf 14y ago
They present a valid certificate for blog.mozilla.org from GeoTrust to me.
keeperofdakeys 14y ago
What kind of error specifically? Also, is the SHA1 fingerprint of the certificate you do receive the same as this: B0:02:9E:58:32:7B:72:16:58:C6:E4:DA:20:9F:20:CC:C5:7D:3F:5F?
retube 14y ago
yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.
retube 14y ago
yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.

sabret00the 14y ago

I have three uses of saved pages. - The open tab: return to it later - Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar - Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news sites Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or for very specific functions. The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.

olalonde 14y ago

No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)

evoxed 14y ago
Honestly, this is the main reason I always have a tab open to HN. There are so many items on here that I know I don't have the time to look into immediately but will return to, and having them saved just by upvoting feels really good. I very close attention to what I vote for, and when I go hunting for a link I know there's a good chance it'll be saved along with comments for context.

jedahan 14y ago

Mozilla's UX posts continue to impress by being thorough and open-minded.

AndreasFrom 14y ago
Firefox is improving at an amazing pace for both users and developers. It seems like the rapid release schedule has sparked a flame.

DanBC 14y ago

I'm glad they're working on something, because my bookmarks are a good example of horribly broken. (Ideally I'd have something that looked like the grid-home layout that most browsers have now, but for all my bookmarks. Then it'd have the ability to create / destroy folders, and drag and drop functionality to move bookmarks around.)

drivebyacct2 14y ago
I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.

code_duck 14y ago

Safari's Reading List comes to mind.

keeperofdakeys 14y ago
For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using this feature?
- mh- 14y ago
  better description here than I could muster: http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too. http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_hero2_2x.jpg http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...
malvim 14y ago
Came to my mind as well, both on iOS and OSX. The article does mention it, though, in the "Various applications and services offer save for later functionality" part, along with other software and services.

derleth 14y ago

My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two bookmark files with tags attached. Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks. I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. The tags from both original files must be preserved. If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original files, it must be tagged the same way in the new file. Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option. I like my privacy. It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.

damncabbage 14y ago
It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me. I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. (I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)
- derleth 14y ago
  > I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the relevant data.
  - kbrosnan 14y ago
    If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do this. If you want simple and dirty. 1. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine 2. Pick your favorite scripting language 3. merge the two json backup files using your script Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.
    - derleth 14y ago
      > Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags. A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.

srean 14y ago

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently. The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link. So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it. It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway. And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised. @hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use. Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory) @lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.

14y ago

kule 14y ago

Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later date. What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can still read what was on the page.

skymt 14y ago
Have you seen Historious? http://historio.us/ http://historio.us/
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the recommendation (what's your username)?
  - corin_ 14y ago
    I'm a paying user of yours so I don't have any specific problem with you or historious, but I don't like that you're offering a free month here. I'm sure it won't really have any impact, but in theory by rewarding people who say "have you tried <product>" in a HN comment you're incentivising people to make those comments, essentially offering people the chance to use a referrals scheme without it going through referral links.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      That's true generally, although it doesn't really apply in this case. I don't usually give free months to people who mention historious, I was just happy to see a mention and gave a freebie. Arguably, the free bookmarks you get through referrals are more useful, since they don't expire...
sparkie 14y ago
http://www.zotero.org/ http://www.zotero.org/ can do this. It can make a snapshot of the page, and also a copy of all attachments on it (especially useful for pdfs, images etc.)

davecap1 14y ago

I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of improving one that is not well known?

HyprMusic 14y ago

I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks. Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visited them once. All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.

mitjak 14y ago
I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of: * Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack. I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.
coffeeaddicted 14y ago
I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast. One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh

tarr11 14y ago

I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on what computer I am on. If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose Chrome.

h2s 14y ago

Reasons why I bookmark pages: 1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly 2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly 3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me. I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of bookmarking too many things. Next I start fretting over whether they're organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion. It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is still king in my book!

Karunamon 14y ago
>no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me. Ever tried Xmarks?
RobAley 14y ago
I likewise use different browsers often during development, mainly for testing and exploring browser specific options, but use Firefox for my main browser and bookmarking etc. When I want to access a bookmark in, say, Chrome, if the page is open in firefox I simply drag globe icon next to the URL from Firefox and drop it onto chrome. If it isn't already open, I show all bookmarks and drag and drop the bookmark from there.
icebraining 14y ago
Instead of having to make sure we have them organized, browsers should just index their content and provide good search. Indexing engines are more than fast enough nowadays.

ollysb 14y ago

My ideal solution would be to search my pinboard bookmarks from the address bar in chrome. As it is I get fairly close using alfred and a custom search for pinboard.

reinhardt 14y ago

I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume. All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling of being "left behind" more and more. I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later" tool or process. If I can't read it right now, chances are I won't do it at all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.

GBKS 14y ago

Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat, the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based version would be much more usable. I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.

lurrch 14y ago

Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things that suck when (trying) to use one. My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface THINKS I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results. Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse. Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own these status symbols du jour. That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen complex. Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox, and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS program to consume and digest RSS feeds. RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.

unimpressive 14y ago
I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it "fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.

latif 14y ago

My add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/ combines bookmarks and tab-management. It lets the user group bookmarks into sets that a user can open all at once or singly. This approach almost completely eliminates the need for an address bar. Another interesting feature of the add-on is that it unifies bookmarks and web-search. The two seem totally disparate but they can be integrated seamlessly in a very cool way. Check http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html for an overview of the approach.

kijin 14y ago

Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks. But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they plan to address these issues: 1. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political science course. 2. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too. But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many. 3. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for toggling between icon and list view.) 4. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks? All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not only help you save pages for later, but also help you manage the pages that you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds, 5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".

zemanel 14y ago

Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization. By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents would be indexed (taking into account the security implications) I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks. As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of bookmarks a user already has.

Lagged2Death 14y ago
By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself... Opera, circa 2008: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in-opera-with-ope/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in...
- zemanel 14y ago
  Exactly. Thanks! Had no idea that feature existed, going to try it out. Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes (on OSX) and, i admit, mainstreams, make ne not using it much although i do cross html browser tests there
  - Lagged2Death 14y ago
    Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes... I completely understand. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Opera myself. The features and UI are miles ahead, IMHO, but other characteristics are so frustrating. The Windows version doesn't crash often, but there are plenty of web sites that don't get along with it.

tribe 14y ago

This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be in another. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Lagged2Death 14y ago

I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so many eyeballs, either.

CT100 14y ago

I wish browsers had 3 suggestions for which folder to put the bookmark into - that would save me time scrolling through my bookmarks.

grayc 14y ago

For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are: 1. I want to go back to a website for new content; or 2. I want to store content to read/view later; or 3. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me. So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for 3. I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely visit. A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is impossible as I have it set up. Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search; folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.

webwanderings 14y ago

The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the History feature, is beyond me. In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).

vdm 14y ago
Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from the page.

andrew_wc_brown 14y ago

I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites. 1. Tab - One time read 2. History - I might need to return a few times in a week, month 3. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it, it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu. The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.

andrew_wc_brown 14y ago

yason 14y ago

I hit Ctrl-D and later search for something of resemblance by typing into the url bar and letting results flow in from bookmarks. I'd much rather just minimize tabs into a staging area than bookmark. And then type things into the url bar and finding pages. Or browsing the staging area visually, much like an eternally long strip of tabs. And tabs preserve context unlike bookmarks. THe only thing that prevents me from saving too many tabs is that browsers get crashy/laggy when I do that and I have no way to stash the saved tabs to some place where they don't clutter my desktop visually.

amitamb 14y ago

I worked on a app to let you keep your bookmarks searchable from any browser and share them with others at same time. http://www.microki.com/ http://www.microki.com/

bazzargh 14y ago

There's only two things I use the browser's bookmarks for now - firstly to prime the pump for FF's awesomebar. I rely on that when I delete my history (which I do irregularly during development). The second thing is bookmarklets, which are also a subversion of the mechanism, but let me customize /across browsers/ which most extension mechanisms don't do. Glad to see Mozilla tackling the fragmented collection of bookmarks I've ended up with as 'favourites' in Google Reader, Hacker News, twitter, youtube, vimeo....

blahedo 14y ago

Aside from the content, this is a fantastic exposition of the techniques of UX design, and since I teach a unit on that I wanted to make sure I'd be able to give the link to my students. But I'm on my home computer right now, and I manage that from my office computer, so I... ...emailed the link to myself. :P Which is actually an interesting confirmation of several points the article made. Most of my save-for-later is "I want to consume this, but don't have time" and "I want to come back to this momentarily", for which I use the leave-tabs-open strategy rather than bookmarking or emailing. I knew this article would be great almost from the time I saw the title....

wooptoo 14y ago

A mind map browser history/bookmark system would be the most intuitive. With timestamps and relations between items. Most of the time when searching through my browsing history I remember a small bit from the page that I want (like a phrase), but not the whole address or title. So searching for something like "find that page about a Python module, which I opened two days ago" would be truly helpful. Hell, even searching by a page's dominant color would be helpful sometimes, since I have a good visual memory.

theootz 14y ago

Related to bookmarks... I no longer use Firefox and have long since switched to Chrome, but in doing so my bookmarks have become effectively useless. What I mean by this is, in Firefox, one of the greatest (and probably underused) features was the ability to tag individual bookmarks instead of simply pushing them into a single folder. This meant that, when I wanted to revisit a bookmark later on, I simply had to start typing in the tags (which I always made broad and diverse). By typing in more and more tags that I thought would likely relate to the article I wanted to reach, it would narrow it down. I never had to remember what the article was called, or where it was, or anything like that. Now if this automatically happened while bookmarking? Some intelligent manner in which the page could be skimmed for keywords or something. Bookmarking and retrieval becomes much simpler... Just wanted to throw that out as something to consider :) (Now, one Chrome, I usually just leave tabs open or try to organize into folders and fail miserably :/ )

webwanderings 14y ago
Welcome to the club. Many of us have realized by now that none of the browsers are following any standards when it comes to bookmarks. The tagging is the exclusive Firefox feature and we were simply hijacked by it over the years. You moved to Chrome after using Firefox for many yeas (so did I) and you realize that your Firefox tags are not welcome at Chrome.
hesselink 14y ago
I use the Firefox address bar as a lightweight version of this. Since it searches URLs as well as titles of sites in your history, you can just type (parts of) words separated by spaces to find old content.
zerostar07 14y ago
Tagging is indeed the best way to organize bookmarks and it's what we use to organize bookmarks in noteplz.com . Another useful thing i've found useful is keeping the page referer along with the bookmark (one of the few good things i can think of about referers) .