My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links).
I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content.
It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.
My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze.
Just a shout out to https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery. My favorite productivity extension. I'm a tab hoarder, this makes my life manageable and gives my Firefox all the screen real estate by using keyboard shortcuts to open/close the tabs easily.
I also use the Firefox css to hide the top sidebar, so I get maximum screen usage.
Weird note: you can't Airdrop .webloc URLs to your iPhone/iPad, ditto .textClipping, etc. macOS's edges have become more pronounced over time. Don't get me started on how many of Apple's apps don't have spring-loaded folders...
I appreciate how universal and decoupled this approach is, but it doesn’t fix my main problem with browser bookmarks which is that management overhead gets to be problematic and makes me want to not bookmark things unless there’s adequate “justification” for doing so.
This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.
I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.
For me, it totally fixed the problem you mentioned: each time I find something really interesting, I drag and drop the bookmark to either a folder "MISC" (unsorted) or to a dedicated folder if it's specific to a project I'm working on.
Since the shortcut's file name contains the Page title, I can later search with my OS's search tool "curve fitting .url" => it finds the right bookmark.
If I use it in a particular project, I can copy/paste this .url file into the project folder, etc.
Having thousands of bookmarks creates no real problem: you end up with thousands of 1KB file in various folders, there is no mental burden in that: it doesn't add "weight" to the UX of a particular browser extension, since they are only files.
Drag-drop only takes 1 sec, there is no friction, no prompt.
For some time now I had a similar tab hoarding problem. My stop-gap solution is crammming a locally hosted markdown text editor in a new tab page. This way my bookmarks live as a Markdown file on my computer and I can easily add or remove links with as much additional comments as I like.
What I would like to add to it besides tons of polish is for it to be an extension that would also expose those bookmarks back to browser in form of bookmark folder syncing with the underlying markdown.
Give BrainTool a look. Its designed to address tab hoarding by making it easy to file and close out tabs and tab groups and then re-find them with search and hierarchy and notes. Associated keyboard commands make it easy to open/close and navigate tabs as a group (eg open a tabgroup with all tabs for a given topic). Everything can be synced to a plan text file. (Disclaimer, I'm the developer, but also a user!)
For me Arc was exactly the wrong approach. I thought about asking for bookmarks, but switched back to Safari instead. A menu is just a better tool for keeping track of more than a few dozen things than Arc's sidebar is. If I had thought of OP's idea of files, I might have gone for that. I still might, although I think I'll look at some combination of AppleScript/KeyboardMaestro to get the job done.
I've kinda given up on my project, at least for now, but you can check out the design of it for reference. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions
I would definitely agree, now that I have started to save my bookmarks into a dedicated section on [my personal site][1]. I want my blog to become my central place for all my knowledge dump, that is indexed the way I want, and can be explored through simple Linux tools (grep, find, etc.). I might also try linking it to a local LLM to query more naturally.
Also, I personally miss good old [del.icio.us][2]. It was way ahead of time.
It's an interesting idea but missing vital features for me. For example, the star in Chrome tells me that I have bookmarked this page in the past so I avoid having duplicate bookmarks even after editing the name. The standard synchronization also makes it easy to bookmark a link on my phone and then deal with it once I'm back at my computer. Now I would have to figure out a way to somehow download the URL as a file on my phone so it syncs to my computer. The favicon is another neat thing to have on bookmarks.
Somewhere along the way it just feels like a backup makes more sense.
My own solution is along these lines. I have a static html page on my personal server; that's the home for all my browsers. (It's under git, of course.) Just flip to my ongoing mosh session to my server, and a trip into vim can add/move/delete anything desired. It's currently an HTML table, which tells you how long this technique has been serving me well.
The approach that makes my life much simpler is to list all the bookmarks on one page. Seeing everything in front of my eyes just takes the mental load off my mind. I experimented with the idea and built a browser extension with it. It has become my daily driver for web navigation.
- I cannot self-host it, hence you have to sync things between devices, which is stupid
- Can it automatically do import / export?
- Can it support multiple users?
I am using my own bookmarking system, which solves these issues for me, but again, it is not a jack of all trades. I do not see your aunt running it in portainer. I am still developing it, so it is not super stable. Even with these shortcomings this is how I consume internet now.
It is "bookmarking system" x "rss reader" x "simple search engine"
I have bookmarked and highlighted nearly everything I've read, by topic for the past 10 years.
I agree bookmarking could be files, but the reason for keeping the bookmarks is important to consider and important not to lose.
The piece that makes bookmarks hyper valuable, is remembering why or what was important about them. Annotation-centric bookmarking for me is really valuable. That usually means highlighting.
There's some nice options listed in the comments, I use diigo.com for a while as a paying customer and it's quite capable. Every so often I want to see what's out there, appreciate the links
In my mind I don't bookmark a page, as much as a sentence on it.
First step is am I just keeping it, or reading it. If I read it, I don't want to lose that time to have to spend it again in the future. If I read, I always highlight as I go anything. It kind of makes a journal, and also helps you reinforce if what you're reading is applicable to something you're currently needing to do.
The unfair advantage? When I come back to look for a link, I'm often actually looking for a sentence, phrase, or something I highlighted. I might occasionally put notes on the highlights. You can end up with dozens or hundreds of snippets explaining in and around a concept.
Annotating web pages, creates a feed of those by tag, which can then be fed to other things like sharing topics with people easily. There are other tools too like Readwise that help a lot to extract the insights.
I'm working on a personal-use bookmark manager project, after a realization: tabs, bookmarks, and history, are all just various points on a spectrum of URL frecency. I think the UI for managing and browsing these objects should reflect that.
With multiple synced devices, I should be able to see all synced tabs, and all bookmarks, and manage and search them, all from one unified interface. The Firefox local cache makes this possible.
I think I need a browser extension with a button you can click that says "bookmarked!". And it doesn't have to do any thing or store anything. Because I have 1000s of bookmarks and I never go back and use them :)
A person's bookmarks accumulated over many years can amount to privacy sensitive information. I was recently surprised to learn that Firefox's URL bar not only autosuggests stored bookmarked URLs as you type but also speculatively pre-connects them [1]. Can be disabled in `about:config` at `browser.urlbar.speculativeConnect.enabled`, at least in Firefox for Windows. If you save many bookmarks for a long time you may not want nor expect your browser to years later pre-connect to whatever URL or bookmark name happens to match some characters you type! I disabled it. Privacy benefit at a small speed cost.
My own approach is tending more toward a locally-hosted homepage.
- Can be accessed from any local browser.[1]
- Can be edited with any local text editor.
- Can be liberally annotated.
- Can be readily searched (Ctrl-F, grep, etc.).
- Can be version controlled.
- Can be rsynced to other systems, or served over a local LAN, or privately-managed VPN, should that be necessary.
Within the homepage I can set up various categories, projects, date-oriented classifications (which can be annotations themselves), and of course a healthy and growing "misc" category.
________________________________
Notes:
1. This is occasionally not the case, as file:/// URIs are deprecated. In which case one can serve the file locally e.g., with Python (python3 -m http.server), netcat, etc.
In Firefox, it's an SQLite database in the profile folder, readily accessible by normal SQLite tools. The profile folder is accessible through the Help menu, if you don't like to dig for it in a file manager.
If the built-in bookmark systems in browsers could support tags, then I would say yes. However, it currently only supports a basic tree concept, with "folders" for links.
This is very one dimensional. I read loads of articles that talks about multiple topics. Especially Hacker News type articles :). An article can talk about, say geo-politics. As an example, perhaps an article on the recent pagers that exploded in Lebenon. This article may also be discussing some cybersecurity topics too. In this case I may want to tag it with 1->n tags.
I currently use Raindrop.io. It kinda works, but it doesn't really have what I have in mind. It also has more features than I think I need from a bookmarking app.
I kinda feel that Digg (wayback, it was one of the first 'Web 2.0' sites had a model that could work.
If I had enough motivation, I think I could probably produce a simple app that does tagging, and only tagging, with bookmarks.
But this file-based bookmarking system totally support tags :)
Example:
- Let's say you bookmark my article https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark
- drag and drop => it creates a file "The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in.url"
- you rename this file into "The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in #tag1 #tag2 #productivity.url" in 2 seconds
- later when searching, you search with query="bookmarking #productivity", bam, you find it with tag "productivity" :)
You can put all .url files in a single folder with "#tags" in the filename. It works exactly like a tagging system, no more, no less.
Every once in a while I go down this bookmark rabbit hole. Tags is the correct solution (for all the reasons your mentioned). I hate the standard folder / tree based bookmark system that browsers and most 3rd party bookmark managers use. Firefox supports tags, but Firefox Mobile doesn't. Raindrop is clunky as hell. And...for along time, that was it.
Luckily, a few years ago I discovered xBrowserSync, which turned out to be exactly what I'd been looking for. It's a stupidly simple tag only based system that syncs across devices. The browser extension makes bookmarking easy. Your data is locally encrypted then synced. It has a phone app. It's open source. And I can self host a server if I want to. There is no "organizing" or sorting of anything. Bookmarks live almost ethereally in the plugin (tho they actually live in your browser's built-in bookmark manager too...but we never need to visit that place).
My only concern is that it hasn't been updated in forever (not that it's ever been broken for me). But I fear the day it does break and wonder if anyone will be around to fix it.
Someone in the comments below mentioned Linkding, which looks like it could work (if the browser extension or bookmarklet turn out to be mobile friendly). I'm definitely going to give that a run and see how it fits. Anyways, enough shilling for xBS (I swear I'm not affiliated with them). Good luck in your search.
On paper, tagging is objectively better for the reasons you describe. But in my experience, the human brain has an intuition for location and object-permanence which is confused by having the same thing in multiple places.
Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.
There used to be an excellent service that allowed you to save downloaded versions of entire pages to your account, it was called furl.net IIRC. The service was well ahead of its time as it included search capability within the content of the saved documents. It was extremely handy for building supporting documentation for all kinds of research. From time to time I entertain the idea of recreating furl and testing if it would catch on this time around.
>Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.
I've noticed this. The worst part is if you are looking for some specific piece of information similar to other links that are still valid it's hard to tell if you have the correct information at hand or not.
Chrome can take a full page snapshot of a webpage but the image is not high res.
Efficiency/performance questions would be important if we would process thousands of such files per second, but this is not the case, or is it? We read/write these .url files at a pace of maybe 1 file per second maximum, if we are browsing fast, and want to save many bookmarks in a short time.
IMHO filesystem efficiency questions never arise for bookmarks of a user of a computer. If one day you want to do some data mining on your 10k bookmarks, it will probably take < 1 second, even if done with Python.
Do you see a real-life situation for which reading a .url in 1 µs instead of 100 µs would make any difference?
(If you're speaking about search/querying, then the OS search feature does it for us)
What I want from bookmarks it's not manage them as files, since those files are just links, I'd like to have eventually collected snapshots (like Zotero does), eventually DIFFING through them (because often articles get modified, without changing title/URL etc), instead of a full snapshot maybe just the "Firefox Reader" version saved so I can avoid wasting space in useless bits, check their on-line status slowly and regularly so when a bookmark is broken I got a small alert and I see it "greyed out" and appear in a dedicated "broken bookmarks" page I can try to update (often the same bookmarked page exist but under a different URL and thanks to the cached copy I can look for the new version or a mirror with a search engine).
Files for UIs was an ancient concept trying mimicking paper files, it's about time to use textual pages and search&narrow UIs more than files for many, many things.
[+] [-] bsnnkv|1 year ago|reply
I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content.
It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.
My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze.
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...
[2]: https://notado.app
[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/
[+] [-] alunchbox|1 year ago|reply
I also use the Firefox css to hide the top sidebar, so I get maximum screen usage.
Their bookmark feature is pretty awesome too.
[+] [-] nextcaller|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aquariusDue|1 year ago|reply
link: https://github.com/l10nelw/winger
[+] [-] dhoelzgen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lelandfe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] divbzero|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jwells89|1 year ago|reply
This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.
I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.
[+] [-] josephernest|1 year ago|reply
Since the shortcut's file name contains the Page title, I can later search with my OS's search tool "curve fitting .url" => it finds the right bookmark.
If I use it in a particular project, I can copy/paste this .url file into the project folder, etc.
Having thousands of bookmarks creates no real problem: you end up with thousands of 1KB file in various folders, there is no mental burden in that: it doesn't add "weight" to the UX of a particular browser extension, since they are only files.
Drag-drop only takes 1 sec, there is no friction, no prompt.
[+] [-] hawski|1 year ago|reply
What I would like to add to it besides tons of polish is for it to be an extension that would also expose those bookmarks back to browser in form of bookmark folder syncing with the underlying markdown.
[+] [-] tconfrey|1 year ago|reply
[0] https://braintool.org
[+] [-] gcanyon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asjir|1 year ago|reply
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITR1xloUslE
[+] [-] jimmaswell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thelostdragon|1 year ago|reply
Also, I personally miss good old [del.icio.us][2]. It was way ahead of time.
[+] [-] suddenclarity|1 year ago|reply
Somewhere along the way it just feels like a backup makes more sense.
[+] [-] josephernest|1 year ago|reply
Having duplicates with different names is even better, and helps to find it more easily in the future: let's say I have bookmarked 2 times this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19165259/python-numpy-sc...:
1. "python numpy/scipy curve fitting"
2. "scipy.optimize.curve_fit question"
Later I can find it with query="curve fitting", or I can also find it with query="optimize". So it increases the chance of me finding it again :)
[+] [-] vandyswa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|1 year ago|reply
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-page-favorites/...
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/one-page-f...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/one-page-favo...
[+] [-] renegat0x0|1 year ago|reply
- Can I write comments about some bookmarks?
- Can I tag bookmarks?
- I cannot self-host it, hence you have to sync things between devices, which is stupid
- Can it automatically do import / export?
- Can it support multiple users?
I am using my own bookmarking system, which solves these issues for me, but again, it is not a jack of all trades. I do not see your aunt running it in portainer. I am still developing it, so it is not super stable. Even with these shortcomings this is how I consume internet now.
It is "bookmarking system" x "rss reader" x "simple search engine"
Link:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
[+] [-] yoavm|1 year ago|reply
- Comments? Put them in the filename
- Tags? Put them in the filename
- Sync? Many of us already sync our devices in some way (dropbox/gdrive/syncthing/...). I see it as a plus - it puts me in control, not "the cloud"
- Import / Export? `mv` & `cp`. You can take your export on a USB stick, send it over email, you name it.
- Users? /home/bob/bookmarks, /home/alice/bookmarks
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
I agree bookmarking could be files, but the reason for keeping the bookmarks is important to consider and important not to lose.
The piece that makes bookmarks hyper valuable, is remembering why or what was important about them. Annotation-centric bookmarking for me is really valuable. That usually means highlighting.
There's some nice options listed in the comments, I use diigo.com for a while as a paying customer and it's quite capable. Every so often I want to see what's out there, appreciate the links
In my mind I don't bookmark a page, as much as a sentence on it.
First step is am I just keeping it, or reading it. If I read it, I don't want to lose that time to have to spend it again in the future. If I read, I always highlight as I go anything. It kind of makes a journal, and also helps you reinforce if what you're reading is applicable to something you're currently needing to do.
The unfair advantage? When I come back to look for a link, I'm often actually looking for a sentence, phrase, or something I highlighted. I might occasionally put notes on the highlights. You can end up with dozens or hundreds of snippets explaining in and around a concept.
Annotating web pages, creates a feed of those by tag, which can then be fed to other things like sharing topics with people easily. There are other tools too like Readwise that help a lot to extract the insights.
[+] [-] alanbernstein|1 year ago|reply
With multiple synced devices, I should be able to see all synced tabs, and all bookmarks, and manage and search them, all from one unified interface. The Firefox local cache makes this possible.
[+] [-] ulrischa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ks2048|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwiiU|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1eqjl70/major_issu...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|1 year ago|reply
- Can be accessed from any local browser.[1]
- Can be edited with any local text editor.
- Can be liberally annotated.
- Can be readily searched (Ctrl-F, grep, etc.).
- Can be version controlled.
- Can be rsynced to other systems, or served over a local LAN, or privately-managed VPN, should that be necessary.
Within the homepage I can set up various categories, projects, date-oriented classifications (which can be annotations themselves), and of course a healthy and growing "misc" category.
________________________________
Notes:
1. This is occasionally not the case, as file:/// URIs are deprecated. In which case one can serve the file locally e.g., with Python (python3 -m http.server), netcat, etc.
[+] [-] shepherdjerred|1 year ago|reply
https://github.com/shepherdjerred/sjer.red/blob/main/src/lin...
https://sjer.red/links/
[+] [-] gwbas1c|1 year ago|reply
I wish I could find this folder on my work computer: I only have one work computer, so I don't sync work bookmarks with other devices.
[+] [-] Kneecaps07|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|1 year ago|reply
(I've not used it since then.)
[+] [-] nine_k|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] two_handfuls|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rantingdemon|1 year ago|reply
If the built-in bookmark systems in browsers could support tags, then I would say yes. However, it currently only supports a basic tree concept, with "folders" for links.
This is very one dimensional. I read loads of articles that talks about multiple topics. Especially Hacker News type articles :). An article can talk about, say geo-politics. As an example, perhaps an article on the recent pagers that exploded in Lebenon. This article may also be discussing some cybersecurity topics too. In this case I may want to tag it with 1->n tags.
I currently use Raindrop.io. It kinda works, but it doesn't really have what I have in mind. It also has more features than I think I need from a bookmarking app.
I kinda feel that Digg (wayback, it was one of the first 'Web 2.0' sites had a model that could work.
If I had enough motivation, I think I could probably produce a simple app that does tagging, and only tagging, with bookmarks.
[+] [-] Liquid_Fire|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] budafish|1 year ago|reply
https://linkding.link/
[+] [-] josephernest|1 year ago|reply
Example:
You can put all .url files in a single folder with "#tags" in the filename. It works exactly like a tagging system, no more, no less.[+] [-] discardedrefuse|1 year ago|reply
Luckily, a few years ago I discovered xBrowserSync, which turned out to be exactly what I'd been looking for. It's a stupidly simple tag only based system that syncs across devices. The browser extension makes bookmarking easy. Your data is locally encrypted then synced. It has a phone app. It's open source. And I can self host a server if I want to. There is no "organizing" or sorting of anything. Bookmarks live almost ethereally in the plugin (tho they actually live in your browser's built-in bookmark manager too...but we never need to visit that place).
My only concern is that it hasn't been updated in forever (not that it's ever been broken for me). But I fear the day it does break and wonder if anyone will be around to fix it.
Someone in the comments below mentioned Linkding, which looks like it could work (if the browser extension or bookmarklet turn out to be mobile friendly). I'm definitely going to give that a run and see how it fits. Anyways, enough shilling for xBS (I swear I'm not affiliated with them). Good luck in your search.
[+] [-] MatthiasPortzel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] abraxas|1 year ago|reply
There used to be an excellent service that allowed you to save downloaded versions of entire pages to your account, it was called furl.net IIRC. The service was well ahead of its time as it included search capability within the content of the saved documents. It was extremely handy for building supporting documentation for all kinds of research. From time to time I entertain the idea of recreating furl and testing if it would catch on this time around.
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|1 year ago|reply
I've noticed this. The worst part is if you are looking for some specific piece of information similar to other links that are still valid it's hard to tell if you have the correct information at hand or not.
Chrome can take a full page snapshot of a webpage but the image is not high res.
[+] [-] mjevans|1 year ago|reply
If they could handle compressed archives transparently then an array of files, maybe extended from the old windows URL= style files, might work.
An SQLite file also sounds like a great way of handling URLs, which Firefox does:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/464516/firefox-bookmarks...
[+] [-] josephernest|1 year ago|reply
IMHO filesystem efficiency questions never arise for bookmarks of a user of a computer. If one day you want to do some data mining on your 10k bookmarks, it will probably take < 1 second, even if done with Python.
Do you see a real-life situation for which reading a .url in 1 µs instead of 100 µs would make any difference?
(If you're speaking about search/querying, then the OS search feature does it for us)
[+] [-] kkfx|1 year ago|reply
Files for UIs was an ancient concept trying mimicking paper files, it's about time to use textual pages and search&narrow UIs more than files for many, many things.
[+] [-] cxr|1 year ago|reply
See also: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Permafrost>