(no title)
sfRattan | 1 month ago
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
cosmic_cheese|1 month ago