Of course, and I'm surprised many people don't. Chrome handles bookmarks well, automatically syncing them between different machines you are signed in on. I used to have them nicely organized into different folders but now it's a bit of a mess... It's especially useful to deal with tab explosion. Control+D and you can just save all your tabs in a single folder (and never look at them again.)
The biggest problem is linkrot. As a rough estimate 13% of links die every year, and it's quite possibly much higher than that. (https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs) Without the glorious web archive, bookmarks would be unusuable. And I wonder how many people know about web archive.. Youtube-dl may also be useful if you want to preserve music or videos (despite the name, it works on almost every site I've tried it on including audio sites.) Someday I intend to script something up to automatically scrape all my bookmarks and make a local copy, but it seems complex.
Youtube-dl is the best. I use a bash script I wrote to pipe the output into ffmpeg which saves a high quality version of the source and a web optimized webm version.
I am not using such service, but isn't there a way (i.e. addon) to generate a copy of the page you bookmarked in order to remedy to that kind of issue ?
I use bookmarks a lot and I also like Chrome's handy way of managing bookmarks into folders. I just wish there were better keyboard shortcuts for creating bookmarks and automatically sending them to specific folders (e.g: Cmd + D + T will send it to 'Tech' folder).
Regarding linkrot, I think Pocket or Instapaper will solve that for your because they copy the underlying content from the page.
I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.
For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years. Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I'm searching that brings back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)
My collection is at least 9 years old now. I've been maintaining the same Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to version. Now it's seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases when I prefer to use Chrome.
> From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.
In case people are not aware of this, prepending a * to your query will make Firefox search _only_ in your bookmarks:
I used to meticulously organize my Firefox bookmarks into different folders and subfolders. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine showed me the Tab groups features (since then deprecated, but lives on as an extension), and I don't think I have bookmarked a site since then. I disable loading until click, and the browser shows me the entire set of groups if I close it and reopen it.
For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears.
Same here. Sometimes you find something really useful but you forget to bookmark (or in my case: add to pinboard). Then a few days later I realize and after a couple of minutes googling to no effect I start typing the parts I remember and FF narrows down until I find it. It also let me search for stuff that google at least until recently would ignore.
Firefox's bookmarks are _mostly_ great. I keep running into an issue when re/naming folders, though. I'll type a few letters and the dialog will close. So, if I was intending to type "a very interesting topic", I'll wind up with something like "a very int". This has been happening for years and I should really submit a bug report...
I've been running Fx sync ver 1.1 (EoL fall 2015) @home for almost 5 years now on a tiny vm but have not taken the time to move over to 1.5. This requires (since Fx version 32-ish maybe) to keep old installers (ver 28 is the furthest back I go) around for any platform if I re-image or add a machine I want to carry my bookmarks to and then upgrade to latest once sync is complete. iOS _used_ to work but that was the first platform to completely bail on the older sync
This is probably the absolute worst way to handle bookmarking but as long as sync ver 1.1 is still functional I will probably keep doing it, sadly. I've at least given up sorting with folders and labels and just rely on the search in Fx.
Safari does this really good, as well (your point about checking bookmarks against what you type in the address bar). It also pulls history, and it's very fast (no doubt due to Spotlight).
Try Bubblehunt (https://bubblehunt.com) - search platform where you can create own search system for your bookmarks, interesting resources and get results from other people.
With a paid feature called an archival account, Pinboard stores an actual copy of each bookmarked article, kind of like your own private Wayback Machine. It provides full text search over these articles.
I frequently save articles that I read so that I can refer to them later. It doesn't happen often, but once in a while I will desire to access an article that I read a few months or years later, and I find Pinboard well worth the value for making it possible for me to actually identify the article and retrieve its content regardless of whether the original link is still around.
I find this especially useful because it is my habit to collect citations for various facts. When I find myself making a claim in conversation, I really want to be able to access the original source where I learned about the fact, and provide the evidence to back it up. Or to review the source to confirm that my memory of it is accurate. Or sometimes I want to share a useful article explaining some topic with a colleague or friend.
I do occasionally use the browser bookmarks a sort of clipboard or working set, for 5-10 links at a time. I use Google Chrome and it syncs bookmarks between my devices.
I probably have 500 bookmarks. I never click on them though.
Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm.
e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it autocomplete from the address bar next time you start to type the URL.
I used to, I now use zotero to save whole pages onto webdav, from there bunch of scripts peel the ads off, scrape the text, convert to PDF, store in cms and index for full text search on solr. Also hooked up Dropbox to do the same for one click archiving from mobile. Since Dropbox and the webdav are shared between my partners and I, it's a convenient way to build knowledge base. Experimenting hooking up Telegram and slack as well to integrate everything for no hassle user-end. The real pain in the ass is passing the URL itself, consistently, without insisting users use another third party app.
*Forgot to mention the best part: Backend pools these full-text documents, cleans and parses for NLP, then generates meaningful tags, and organizes documents in an auto generated folder hierarchy which is based on word2vec/doc2vec and content clusters. Whole thing runs on a dedicated server with two 1070 GTX video cards for the NLP work which is training and re-evaluating constantly as new content pours in.
At some point, it occurred to me that almost all of the bookmarks in my ever-expanding collection really represented "to do items" more than "reference items".
As others have said, most things can easily be searched as needed. But I was using bookmarks as placeholders, saying "I wanted to read x later", in most cases... sometimes other things.
So I started treating bookmarks as various categories of todos. I do have a reference folder, but it has less than a hundred items. I often use those only passively -- i.e. when typing into the address bar, the starred link will come up first.
All the other links are sorted into categories such as "files to download", "new articles", "new buyables" and so forth.
Now that I think of Bookmarks as deferred work, it has changed a lot of habits. My total number of bookmarks has slowly dropped, and I tend to handle more stuff as it comes, or not at all -- or at least to be more conscious of bookmarks as a cost.
An unexpected benefit has been a feeling of mental satisfaction, after closing a lot of semi-forgotten, open loops. I now think a big unorganized pile of bookmarks can represent a real liability, whereas if you actually go through all those links and delete the weaker ones you get a concentrated pile of goodness. You hit a point where you'd rather read your remaining bookmarks than most news feeds.
I have tons of bookmarks. Pro-tip: make a bookmark, edit the bookmark, set the title to "" <empty string>. Then you have it's favicon as your site launcher.
sometimes I make use of the features "open all bookmarks in this folder".
other times I use the bookmark to (as somebody else mentioned already) weight consideration of sites I'm interested in getting results from.
aside: at hackreactor, I worked with some folks on the beginnings of a chrome extension to grab your bookmarks, analyze the content of each site, and suggest new bookmarks when you open a new tab. the suggestions part was working already by the time I came around. then I got a job and that pretty much fell out of priority... heh.
I'm a little surprised that the majority of the answers here are Yes!
I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical people. I guess I was wrong!
Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
My lack of bookmarks fits with the rest of my "online personality". I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage email folders or browsing bookmarks.
Also, the fact that I browse in a "clean" browser instance in SELinux that saves no history from instance to instance probably contributes to my lack of bookmark use.
No and it worries me. I have a great memory normally, I speak several languages and computer languages. I was raised in the era before search engines when bookmarks were important.
But these days it worries me to say that I just visit the same three websites over and over. Aggregation websites with links and content.
Sometimes I find myself staring at the url bar not being able to think of anything to do because I've visited my three websites already.
Of course besides those three aggregators there are sites like google and stackexchange that I visit indirectly. And any blogs, forum and such that I might find through google.
I do, but I've also come to rely on a plug-in called 'scrapbook'. It allows you to cut a snippet from a webpage and save it along with the url of the original.
Very handy, and it also protects somewhat against linkrot.
I've tied it to a hotkey to copy any bit that is highlighted to the currently open scrapbook. (shift-ctrl-b) without further notifications or interaction other than the keystroke. Super quick and it doesn't get in the way of continued reading.
Firefox is looking to integrate an auto-redirect to the Wayback Machine in case of link-rot. There's a Test Pilot experiement going on and it may be extended to allow for auto-saving of bookmarks on the Wayback Machine when bookmarked.
My bank url is hard to remember, and search it on google is risky to be a victim of fake sites. So anything fake-able is on my bookmark.
Well I've marked a ton of urls and rarely revisit :(
It's like having a camera, take photos and forget them forever. It's a tool to help you forget things, not to remember, sadly!
I use them in three ways: My most used bookmarks live on my bookmarks bar in Firefox with the text removed, so they are just icons of the favicon.gif from the server, screenshot example here[1]. The lesser used ones live in the "Folders" folder under a tree style arrangement. The third method is via the "ReadLater" folder which contains links I didn't have time to fully read right away, and acts as a sort of manual version of Pocket or similar apps.
I have a home.html file that is my browser default page. It has all the links I use regularly, organized in a few columns that I think make sense, but more honestly I use it mainly by muscle memory. It also has input fields for a couple of different search engines.
It's very simple, no javascript and just a tiny bit of CSS.
Any time I want to update it, add a link, etc. I just use a text editor.
Of course I do. Some of them neatly stacked in labeled folders, some of them just higgledypiggledy in the great unsorted. I have my bookmark history on hand to way back before the turn of the century. A lot of those links have died, obviously, but it's a neat historical record of my foci, foibles and obsessions over the years.
My data belong either offline or on serverspace I control myself. There's nothing especially secret about it, but like my email (going back more than twenty years), I wouldn't dream of storing data like that online outside my own control.
The bookmarking, by the way, used to take place in Firefox. The ongoing self-immolation of that once mighty browser has recently sent me to the Pale Moon camp. And it's like coming home. I couldn't be happier, running on various Linux'es on the household machinery. The Chrome/Chromium world hegemony is one of those sad, scary things I shall never understand.
I use the bookmark toolbar in Firefox, but I delete the text and leave the favicons so that I can fit ~50 bookmarks in one row. I also have folders containing bookmarks for particular categories, like "Work", "Stuff to watch", etc.
I just posted about doing this before I read your comment. I wondered if anyone else did the same as me. It started out as a way to fit more than a few bookmarks on the bar, then I realized that I recognized the icon faster than I could read the text, and squeezed all my most used bookmarks on there.
As far as native bookmarks, I don't like that browsers have kind of black boxed their bookmarks and require individual proprietary cloud sync for these things (I realize Firefox has a self hosted option, but it's kind of outdated and last I checked the documentation was spotty. Even then it's only FF).
I know there's also the Netscape Bookmark Format which is kind of sketch, but at least it's something. I tried writing something that exported on close, I'd sync them myself, then imported on open, but it was pretty hacky (edit: also browsers exports are often very different so there was some normalization there that was fragile). There should be a way to setup an endpoint to natively sync this stuff with an open protocol and then all your bookmarks on all clients look the same. If you don't like that service, export someplace else and change your endpoint. Browsers should just be boxes for structured content.
To take things a step further, I'm not entirely sure how I'd function without them.
(I'm sure I'd find a way, but it would be an adjustment and a loss)
Firefox's fuzzy searching in the URL bar makes bookmarks awesome. My "workflow":
1. Bookmark anything I might need later by clicking the bookmark button. It presents a little tooltip-like popup that lets me edit the title and tags if I want to.
2. Sometimes I edit the title/tags and sometimes I don't. I make this call based on a quick judgement call on whether the default will allow me to find the article later. Suppose the article title is "MySQL Adds Froitz-Based Blammo Filtering." Well, that should suffice. But if the title is merely "10 Awesome New MySQL Features" then I might want to edit the title/tags to mention something about "Froitz-Based Blammo Filtering" if that's what I'm interested in. [1]
3. Then I usually never use the bookmark ever again.
4. BUT, sometimes I do. And Firefox's fuzzy match implementation lets me type "mysql froitz" and get a match on this bookmark 100% of the time. Chrome's matching is stupider & I'm not sure about Safari. Safari makes adding bookmarks less convenient than FF or Chrome so I assume finding them is harder. (Maybe it's not, I don't know)
I don't know about Firefox's bookmarking performance characteristics. But, I know that I've been adding lots of bookmarks forever and it "just works" and it feels instance. The fact that I've never had to think about it beyond that point is a compliment of the highest order. That's one of the many reasons why I remain a dedicated Firefox supporter.
__________
[1] This is just a theoretical example, of course. MySQL does not actually receive new features, awesome or otherwise.
I have thousands of bookmarks. One thing I've wanted Google to do for the longest time since I started using their browser was to let me limit searches to my own bookmarks.
I've got a fair degree of organization with folders and sub-folders but still spend way too much time trying to locate a specific bookmark. I've learned to edit the subject line because often you're bookmarking something called 'home' or a cryptic Github path.
I have thousands of bookmarks, and gave up putting them in to folders years ago. Now I just tag them with every relevant keyword that I can think of when I make the bookmark, and search them that way.
Firefox's bookmark manager is very primitive, though, and I've long been meaning to migrate my bookmarks over to org-mode in emacs, where I have much more powerful searching, metadata, editing, linking, commenting, restructuring, and navigating options.
I configured my webrowser such that it clears my browsing history whenever I'm closing my browser and mainly use bookmarks for fast auto-completion when typing in the address bar. With respect to organisation, I generally don't. I just use the "star" button to mark websites as favourites. I synchronise bookmarks across devices using Firefox Sync.
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
The biggest problem is linkrot. As a rough estimate 13% of links die every year, and it's quite possibly much higher than that. (https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs) Without the glorious web archive, bookmarks would be unusuable. And I wonder how many people know about web archive.. Youtube-dl may also be useful if you want to preserve music or videos (despite the name, it works on almost every site I've tried it on including audio sites.) Someday I intend to script something up to automatically scrape all my bookmarks and make a local copy, but it seems complex.
[+] [-] 13of40|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asaddhamani|9 years ago|reply
This is a problem that I was tired of dealing with, and hence I made https://github.com/crestify/crestify
It archives all bookmarks to archive.org and archive.today.
[+] [-] falcolas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnegoshi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|9 years ago|reply
Funnily although I pay for the service I am yet to actually use the archive!
Some anecdata on linkrot:
I started paying for the archive about 3 years after starting on pinboard.
This was about 10 years after starting my bookmarks on Delicious later imported to pinboard
13166 of your bookmarks have been archived, representing 64% of your collection.
This consumes 11.82 G of disk space.
7491 bookmarks have not been stored due to errors:
not found 964
bad request 4
unauthorized 5
forbidden 113
gone 17
rate limited 3
server error 6251
bad gateway 14
unavailable 78
[+] [-] scriptkiddy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] copperx|9 years ago|reply
I recursively download sites using curl/wget on websites I want to preserve for a long time. Is web archive something different?
[+] [-] ekianjo|9 years ago|reply
I am not using such service, but isn't there a way (i.e. addon) to generate a copy of the page you bookmarked in order to remedy to that kind of issue ?
[+] [-] ollieco|9 years ago|reply
Regarding linkrot, I think Pocket or Instapaper will solve that for your because they copy the underlying content from the page.
[+] [-] tmaly|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollieco|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Cyph0n|9 years ago|reply
For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years. Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I'm searching that brings back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)
My collection is at least 9 years old now. I've been maintaining the same Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to version. Now it's seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases when I prefer to use Chrome.
[+] [-] aplaice|9 years ago|reply
In case people are not aware of this, prepending a * to your query will make Firefox search _only_ in your bookmarks:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.match.url
https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Basic-Browsing/Awesome-Bar-Se...
[+] [-] govg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitanqild|9 years ago|reply
Same here. Sometimes you find something really useful but you forget to bookmark (or in my case: add to pinboard). Then a few days later I realize and after a couple of minutes googling to no effect I start typing the parts I remember and FF narrows down until I find it. It also let me search for stuff that google at least until recently would ignore.
[+] [-] stonelazy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethagnawl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unexistance|9 years ago|reply
Recently used the bookmark-keyword thingy, pretty good BUT I'm still used to remembering URLs :p
Heck, one of the reason I'm not migrating to Chrome is... Bookmark shortcut key [alt]+[b] combined with js bookmarklet
e.g: remove floating div, press [alt]+[b] -> [3] done
[+] [-] philamonster|9 years ago|reply
This is probably the absolute worst way to handle bookmarking but as long as sync ver 1.1 is still functional I will probably keep doing it, sadly. I've at least given up sorting with folders and labels and just rely on the search in Fx.
[+] [-] archvile|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohthehugemanate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|9 years ago|reply
I have no idea what happened, it just forgot all my history. Everything else was still there, just the history.
[+] [-] vkorsunov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcrites|9 years ago|reply
With a paid feature called an archival account, Pinboard stores an actual copy of each bookmarked article, kind of like your own private Wayback Machine. It provides full text search over these articles.
I frequently save articles that I read so that I can refer to them later. It doesn't happen often, but once in a while I will desire to access an article that I read a few months or years later, and I find Pinboard well worth the value for making it possible for me to actually identify the article and retrieve its content regardless of whether the original link is still around.
I find this especially useful because it is my habit to collect citations for various facts. When I find myself making a claim in conversation, I really want to be able to access the original source where I learned about the fact, and provide the evidence to back it up. Or to review the source to confirm that my memory of it is accurate. Or sometimes I want to share a useful article explaining some topic with a colleague or friend.
I do occasionally use the browser bookmarks a sort of clipboard or working set, for 5-10 links at a time. I use Google Chrome and it syncs bookmarks between my devices.
[+] [-] ikawe|9 years ago|reply
Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm.
e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it autocomplete from the address bar next time you start to type the URL.
[+] [-] kusmi|9 years ago|reply
*Forgot to mention the best part: Backend pools these full-text documents, cleans and parses for NLP, then generates meaningful tags, and organizes documents in an auto generated folder hierarchy which is based on word2vec/doc2vec and content clusters. Whole thing runs on a dedicated server with two 1070 GTX video cards for the NLP work which is training and re-evaluating constantly as new content pours in.
Altogether it was 2-3 years of work.
[+] [-] threepipeproblm|9 years ago|reply
As others have said, most things can easily be searched as needed. But I was using bookmarks as placeholders, saying "I wanted to read x later", in most cases... sometimes other things.
So I started treating bookmarks as various categories of todos. I do have a reference folder, but it has less than a hundred items. I often use those only passively -- i.e. when typing into the address bar, the starred link will come up first.
All the other links are sorted into categories such as "files to download", "new articles", "new buyables" and so forth.
Now that I think of Bookmarks as deferred work, it has changed a lot of habits. My total number of bookmarks has slowly dropped, and I tend to handle more stuff as it comes, or not at all -- or at least to be more conscious of bookmarks as a cost.
An unexpected benefit has been a feeling of mental satisfaction, after closing a lot of semi-forgotten, open loops. I now think a big unorganized pile of bookmarks can represent a real liability, whereas if you actually go through all those links and delete the weaker ones you get a concentrated pile of goodness. You hit a point where you'd rather read your remaining bookmarks than most news feeds.
[+] [-] mr_spothawk|9 years ago|reply
http://imgur.com/a/mVFYh
sometimes I make use of the features "open all bookmarks in this folder".
other times I use the bookmark to (as somebody else mentioned already) weight consideration of sites I'm interested in getting results from.
aside: at hackreactor, I worked with some folks on the beginnings of a chrome extension to grab your bookmarks, analyze the content of each site, and suggest new bookmarks when you open a new tab. the suggestions part was working already by the time I came around. then I got a job and that pretty much fell out of priority... heh.
[+] [-] bm98|9 years ago|reply
I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical people. I guess I was wrong!
Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
My lack of bookmarks fits with the rest of my "online personality". I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage email folders or browsing bookmarks.
Also, the fact that I browse in a "clean" browser instance in SELinux that saves no history from instance to instance probably contributes to my lack of bookmark use.
[+] [-] INTPenis|9 years ago|reply
But these days it worries me to say that I just visit the same three websites over and over. Aggregation websites with links and content.
Sometimes I find myself staring at the url bar not being able to think of anything to do because I've visited my three websites already.
Of course besides those three aggregators there are sites like google and stackexchange that I visit indirectly. And any blogs, forum and such that I might find through google.
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
Very handy, and it also protects somewhat against linkrot.
I've tied it to a hotkey to copy any bit that is highlighted to the currently open scrapbook. (shift-ctrl-b) without further notifications or interaction other than the keystroke. Super quick and it doesn't get in the way of continued reading.
[+] [-] hashhar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
It's handy to have access to the actual webpages complete with formatting and links, but the store could get quite large if you save a lot of pages
[+] [-] j_s|9 years ago|reply
Couldn't find anything intentionally similar with good reviews for Chrome.
[+] [-] Existenceblinks|9 years ago|reply
Well I've marked a ton of urls and rarely revisit :( It's like having a camera, take photos and forget them forever. It's a tool to help you forget things, not to remember, sadly!
[+] [-] morganvachon|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0408/h_1491614673_38...
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
It's very simple, no javascript and just a tiny bit of CSS.
Any time I want to update it, add a link, etc. I just use a text editor.
[+] [-] interfixus|9 years ago|reply
My data belong either offline or on serverspace I control myself. There's nothing especially secret about it, but like my email (going back more than twenty years), I wouldn't dream of storing data like that online outside my own control.
The bookmarking, by the way, used to take place in Firefox. The ongoing self-immolation of that once mighty browser has recently sent me to the Pale Moon camp. And it's like coming home. I couldn't be happier, running on various Linux'es on the household machinery. The Chrome/Chromium world hegemony is one of those sad, scary things I shall never understand.
[+] [-] sleavey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morganvachon|9 years ago|reply
Great minds do think alike! :-)
[+] [-] andrewguenther|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awl130|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hueller|9 years ago|reply
As far as native bookmarks, I don't like that browsers have kind of black boxed their bookmarks and require individual proprietary cloud sync for these things (I realize Firefox has a self hosted option, but it's kind of outdated and last I checked the documentation was spotty. Even then it's only FF).
I know there's also the Netscape Bookmark Format which is kind of sketch, but at least it's something. I tried writing something that exported on close, I'd sync them myself, then imported on open, but it was pretty hacky (edit: also browsers exports are often very different so there was some normalization there that was fragile). There should be a way to setup an endpoint to natively sync this stuff with an open protocol and then all your bookmarks on all clients look the same. If you don't like that service, export someplace else and change your endpoint. Browsers should just be boxes for structured content.
[+] [-] JohnBooty|9 years ago|reply
To take things a step further, I'm not entirely sure how I'd function without them.
(I'm sure I'd find a way, but it would be an adjustment and a loss)
Firefox's fuzzy searching in the URL bar makes bookmarks awesome. My "workflow":
1. Bookmark anything I might need later by clicking the bookmark button. It presents a little tooltip-like popup that lets me edit the title and tags if I want to.
2. Sometimes I edit the title/tags and sometimes I don't. I make this call based on a quick judgement call on whether the default will allow me to find the article later. Suppose the article title is "MySQL Adds Froitz-Based Blammo Filtering." Well, that should suffice. But if the title is merely "10 Awesome New MySQL Features" then I might want to edit the title/tags to mention something about "Froitz-Based Blammo Filtering" if that's what I'm interested in. [1]
3. Then I usually never use the bookmark ever again.
4. BUT, sometimes I do. And Firefox's fuzzy match implementation lets me type "mysql froitz" and get a match on this bookmark 100% of the time. Chrome's matching is stupider & I'm not sure about Safari. Safari makes adding bookmarks less convenient than FF or Chrome so I assume finding them is harder. (Maybe it's not, I don't know)
I don't know about Firefox's bookmarking performance characteristics. But, I know that I've been adding lots of bookmarks forever and it "just works" and it feels instance. The fact that I've never had to think about it beyond that point is a compliment of the highest order. That's one of the many reasons why I remain a dedicated Firefox supporter.
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[1] This is just a theoretical example, of course. MySQL does not actually receive new features, awesome or otherwise.
[+] [-] rmason|9 years ago|reply
I've got a fair degree of organization with folders and sub-folders but still spend way too much time trying to locate a specific bookmark. I've learned to edit the subject line because often you're bookmarking something called 'home' or a cryptic Github path.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|9 years ago|reply
Firefox's bookmark manager is very primitive, though, and I've long been meaning to migrate my bookmarks over to org-mode in emacs, where I have much more powerful searching, metadata, editing, linking, commenting, restructuring, and navigating options.
[+] [-] aurelian15|9 years ago|reply