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.
I do something similar. My bookmark bar looks like this:
GSuite, Hackernews, The Morning Paper, Google Docs, Customer Folders (wiki, ticketing systems, relevant documentation or whatever), Personal Folder (NAS, etc), My Company Folder (internal Things), Things to Read (stuff I bookmarked but haven't actually read yet)
I use separate Chrome profiles for personal/work, so things like bookmarks, history, etc. don't get mixed together. And if for whatever reason I need to quickly remove just my personal stuff from the machine (or work stuff), I just have to wipe out that one profile. I'm surprised more browsers haven't adopted profiles yet.
Very nice. I love the idea of integrating tab saving with bookmarks. OneTab is great, but it's easy to rack up a stupendous number of saved links, with really important ones lost in the accumulated junk.
I've bounced back and forth through a couple different approaches and tools. I have a ton of browser bookmarks in Chrome, many of which are old even after I did some cleanup work a while ago. Plus Instapaper. And, of course, a ton of saved tabs in OneTab. I've toyed with a couple of open-source tools like unmark and bookmarks.public (git-based, which sounds fun but is really just a couple extra steps removed from your browser), but never really found something that satisfied all of my needs.
Crestify has a tool to import bookmarks from Chrome. Happy to hear you found the tab saving useful :). Let me know what could make Crestify the ultimate bookmarking tool for you, always open to feature requests on GitHub too!
Chrome has the option to export all bookmarks to an html file, which I think can be given as an input to wget.
Now if I understand that correctly, won't it recursively download every web page and all it's links 5 levels deep? Because that could be quite enormous if there are just a few web pages with lots of links...
It won't traverse across domains without an explicit argument, so it won't go too crazy. It also won't backtrack, so you won't end up with a complete copy of a blog if you've only bookmarked a single article. You can, of course, reduce the maxdepth to 1 pretty safely, if you don't think you'll need more than the specific bookmarked page.
I use that for programming language documentation - for example I'll hit the root page of Python's standard library documentation, and get everything I need locally.
Instapaper offers a somewhat reduced pocket/pinboard premium experience for free since last November. Importing from pocket is very easy, I don't know about pinboard.
To avoid confusion: the premium level is the default level now...
I've read through the webstore link and the github page, and I'm clearly missing something. I don't see an option to save to folder via fuzzy search. In fact, I don't see options at all. I see a list of my bookmark folders with a search at the top. If I actually click on any of my bookmark folders then it just closes the menu.
It doesn't let me navigate through my folders, and it never opens anything.
Hello, Better Bookmark author here. This extension is not meant to open anything - it's only purpose is simplifying the process of adding new bookmarks. It basically displays a list of your bookmark folders (flattened), and lets you select which folder the bookmark should go to. If you click on a folder (or navigate using arrows and confirm with enter), it should close the menu, but the page should be bookmarked into this folder. If it doesn't do it, it's a bug :)
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.
What a treat. Too bad the longer one where you explain it got taken down. Anyway, although highly skeptical about the product, I'll at least give you props for turning down the final offer on grounds of who offered it. Most wouldn't. I'd never do a deal with him if it was about public benefit. Plus, seeing all of them loose their shit (esp Cuban's faces) was hilarious. Thanks for the entertainment. :)
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 ?
You can just save the pages in MHTML format (so each page is a single file) and keep them in "read later" folders. Or you can use one of the services that saves pages online....
Holy smokes thank you for this link! I have been looking for a page archiver that would actually pull down ALL the files needed for a page and fix the relative links. All the others I have found simply ignore css includes like fonts or css images.
Another option is the Firefox "Print Edit" Addon. It allows you to remove any unwanted stuiff from the webpage and then save it as a single file (or print it). This will include all the CSS, Javascript and raster-images as base64 encoded data-urls. What you gain, in the end, is a single HTML (not MHT) page, that contains all the requisites and has crap removed (by you).
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.
You should really take the time to set up 1.5, or just use Mozilla's hosted sync service. You're probably burning more time schlepping installers around and doing upgrades… not to mention the Sync 1.1 server code is ancient, so the infra you're running it on is probably riddled with vulnerabilities.
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.
It also does fulltext indices of PDF files, which is pretty awesome if you read a lot of CS papers. It's become my cryptography research search engine for that reason.
That's really nifty, but also seems something that can be hacked in a day. Create a script to fetch the articles contents, and reformat it into a index that can be searched.
I like the idea of pinboard. I want to copy it. But, I also want to be lazy.
The other part of the equation for me is that $1 / month seems like the correct price for a useful service. I think Pinboard has something like 20,000 users. If they are all paying $1 / month (I have no idea if they are), then it feels like a sustainable business.
Other than the archival for $25, I don't see what I'd pay for that my own bookmarks don't already get me.
And the archival itself is likely only useful for stuff other people have already archived anyways; in the rare instances I find something I definitely want to ensure I have a copy of, I can usually find a way to get a copy onto my local machine and NAS.
Is there any browser add-on that will display the public Pinboard tags for HN stories? I guess a pointer to how to get this via whatever API would be helpful too.
The tag cloud is generated automatically but when bookmarking a site you have to add them. Pinboard does suggest tags that you can quickly select though.
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 do the same. Tangentially, I find Firefox's address bar autocomplete to be far superior to Chrome's (better partial/fuzzy matching and combination matches across URL and page titles). A bit ironic given one is the product of a search company.
That's a very interesting use case! Have you tried using keyword bookmarks? If you find yourself visiting a URL often, you could make it a keyword bookmark with an optional %s search parameter, accessible from the address bar. Useful for websites with generated urls, like reddit or 4chan.
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.
I was considering piecemealing it out as Saas. The CMS component is heavily dependent on Alfresco, which is a bit of a nightmare to work with, to the extent I code around it instead of directly integrating the components. If I find funding, I wouldn't mind splitting this off as its own project (apart from our more wet-lab oriented work which has nothing to do with software). I'd need to payroll a Java developer.
I work in molecular genetics research, and I've noticed how disconnected subfields within the life sciences can be. For example, a classical geneticist working with yeast can spend their entire career oblivous to the fact that the problem they've been working on has been indirectly solved by a biochemical engineer working in the same building. This happens for a number of reasons, they publish in different journals, use different terminology, the relationship may not be obvious, etc. Originally, I only had metadata extractors and various NLP parsers specific to the bio/life sciences, but I felt that was too limiting and began to expand it. The backend which ties all the services is almost entirely written in Lua/Torch, and Redis. And everything is built around the Alfresco CMS which comes with Solr, and Mattermost as a locally hosted slack alternative. Mattermost bots report on new content (http://imgur.com/a/P3YK1, http://imgur.com/a/GTVEX) wherever it comes from.
There is too much information to stay on the bleeding-edge of things without serious commitment of resources, which start-ups don't have. My intention was to track the content a group of people go through in a day and visualize connections in the data that may not have been obvious before.
Essentially, it's meant for harvesting IP in biotech field.
Originally no, it was supposed to be a tool to help us generate IP and analyze patents. I'm considering peddling it to other biotechs on a word-of-mouth basis and see where that goes. To make this into a production ready service would require more effort than just me alone, so I'm still exploring options.
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 use bookmark folders in the toolbar sort of like taskbar menus in windows.. the entries get their favicos displayed next to them: http://i.imgur.com/DRcs7I1.gifv
..in Firefox rss bookmarks become submenus with the rss entries as the items. It's great for web comics
I've mostly switched to Safari for personal stuff, and there's a New Tab screen with all your favorites on it... works similarly, but not as pretty. Still gotta stick with Chrome for work.
I use the "open all bookmarks in this folder" as well. I have a folder which contains the top sites I visit everyday and I start my morning routine by opening them into the tab tree.
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.
> Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away.
I can't google NDAed documentation or forum threads. I can't google stuff that's useful to a topic, but that I've forgotten about. Webcomics often have terrible search indexes - and even navigation - so I'll bookmark my place when archive binging exactly as I'd use a physical bookmark. I bookmark-bar things I open so frequently (JIRA views, trello boards, etc.) that I don't even want the overhead of googling / typing in the url. I bookmark difficult to google topics - e.g. I still can't re-locate the win8 user you need to grant read permissions to, to allow Win8 AppX/WinRT programs to bypass the sandbox to read files (so you don't have to pack game assets into each .appx build).
But I don't bookmark things I merely access quite frequently, like HN ;)
> 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.
I'd say XKCD is a special case. Considering the "There is always a relevant XKCD" meme, I think google has a pretty decent grasp of what terms relate to what XKCD comic. Not to mention the transcripts and explanations of explainxkcd.com.
Another possible explanation is that Google's search engine is exhibiting, due to the lack of a better term, a form of "transference" [0].
Google engineers are huge fans of XKCD as is evident from Randall Monroe's well attended talk at Google some time back. In my mind, his talk was easily one of the most attended talks, second only to Linus Torvalds talk on Git.
[0] I'm sure there is a standard term for software exhibiting biases held by its authors when making decisions on behalf of users.
All the local archiving in the world won't help me download new SDKs, find updated documentation, new changelogs, see active replies to ongoing queries, maintain our own NDAed documentation, ...
I think this quote of yours summarizes why I still use bookmarks extensively:
"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."
I have tons and tons of things that I probably could google/ddg search for, but were really difficult for me to find initially and that I know I would never find again. Some things, sure, no problem, and I search; other things no, I want to bookmark them because I'm not sure I'd find them again. Search engines are really not as perfect as I'd like them to be.
The other reason I have bookmarks is to kind of remind myself "hey remember this thing--you should look into it in more detail later. Like soon."
So I kind of have two sets of bookmarks. One are kind of like "recent things that I need to remember," sort of like a todo list, but or sites or reading, and then will delete quickly, and the others are references that were hard to find initially.
I could email myself things, but to me that's not easier, and it wouldn't help with reminders, because I'd have to go looking for them (if I have to search for it, it's out of sight, out of mind). I don't see the point of something like Pocket, because my browser already syncs across all my devices everywhere. I suppose I could save it to a text file that is synced across devices, or something on a note system, but it doesn't seem better than bookmarks. There was something else I tried that I don't even remember anymore, that in theory would be perfect, but it wouldn't let me organize them in a way that made sense (it insisted that things be sorted alphabetically or something like that).
I do think there could be something better, something that is kind of like synced bookmarks, something like a notes program, something like an RSS reader, but I haven't seen it yet. Ideally what I'd want is something that syncs across devices, allows me to bookmark things for reference or later reading, reminds me of "urgent links," basically acts as a news aggregator/rss feed reader, and gives me useful suggestions for new feeds, and is open source or at least has some sort of open API.
I've noticed recently--as in the last year--I've started using Google Keep kind of like how I use bookmarks, but that often is cumbersome in its own way.
For "todo list", marking something as Read Later works perfectly. Lots of bookmarks app do this and it's most convenient to view them by creation date.
For reminders, Mochimarks lets you set explicit reminders on every bookmark or note. The notifications can be viewed in the app, show up through the extension, and are emailed to you. You can snooze the alerts too.
I have a concept to add a feature to track if something has changed on the site since the last time you visited, but it's not implemented.
Mochimarks has a rest api. It has lots of sorting options too (creation, last visited, total visits, interest, and reminders.) It's made bookmarks a lot more useful for me.
usaa.com is the best case example, it's just 8 characters and very fast to type but news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 is 37, i'd much rather just type new and get the autocompletion of the rest. Also i don't want to remember if it was over?points=100 or points?over=100.
You also get the benefit of not misspelling things, and your bookmark goes straight to the https-site reducing the risk of MITM.
> If I come across a deep link ... I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
> I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders
How on earth do you make this work? I find it hard enough to search successfully for an email that I know exists, let alone something I may have bookmarked years ago with who-knows-what text alongside it. I assumed you at least stored them in a folder to ease the search, but without doing that, I don't know how you ever find what you're looking for. What mail client do you use?
The email thing made me cringe. At very least you should separate mailing lists vs your name appearing in to: or cc:. I never(rarely) manually move emails. But a few rules here and there can make thinngs significantly more manageable.
> 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.
This. I am not sure if my brain is wired differently or my use case for emails is somehow different to other people, but given all the search capabilities of the email clients (gmail & outlook) I have used during the last few years, I find it difficult to find less productive ways to use my work time than managing emails (either thinking whether an email should be deleted or moved to some folder).
Some big corps automatically prune root inboxes of all items over a legally-determined age ( 90 or 180 days seem common ), in which case folder management is essential for retaining anything of value.
You don't even use bookmarks for short-term shortcuts to to highly-accessed, complex, URLs? For instance, someone in your team shares a google doc with you that has the specification for a feature you're building. It takes weeks to build this feature, and you've got a browser window sitting on that spec doc half the time. You won't bookmark that? You'll load it up from an email search every time?
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 don't think this is a bad idea. Let other's aggregate what's important and filters up to the top. I'm the same way. I used to subscribe to a lot of blogs and stuff, now I just visit Hacker News and my custom Reddit front page, and read a couple articles that are popular, and then get on with my day.
If you find yourself staring at the URL bar with nothing to do because you already visited your curated aggregation site, maybe you don't need to be randomly surfing the Internet, and instead can accomplish some important work. (This is a good place to be in as opposed to someone hot-tabbing to 10 different websites.)
I used to feel this way but there is intellectual concentration risk. Reading the same stuff as everyone else has created an echo chamber for me, and I intend to seek diverse sources again like I did before the link aggregator era.
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!
Yea, I mostly use bookmarks for weird work URLs that are hard to search (ie. local Jenkins instance) or hard to remember (ie. ADP timesheet). Most everything else I just search for or look at my browser history.
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'm the same way. I use bookmarks constantly and have all of the tools I use for work displayed with no text so they are all just favicons. I also have folders which contain infrequently used links (pretty much never).
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.
Do you think that Pale Moon will live? I'm not really happy with firefox nowadays (not that I'm too much tied to it, a switch-away is as hard as exporting my bookmarks), it's getting slower and slower, sometimes uses all the ram and cpu on my Xubuntu laptop for no apparent reason, and I hate this recent WebExtensions thing. I want to switch, but I don't want to use sth. that's destined to die soon.
Why can't we have a Linux of a browser, that's built with large collaboration, is highly customisable, and completely focused on being merely a browser in itself. Kind-a webkit, but with minimal chrome... All that said, Xombrero my ex that I'll always miss.
It's a small project - I have no guarantee that it will. I shall do my little bit to keep it afloat, though, as it is by far the most promising FF alternative or fork that I have found. But then, I rely heavily on certain add-ons which will soon go extinct in mainline FF, but may have a future in PM. Your mileage may indeed vary.
I can't help noticing: Pale Moon is slightly faster in most regards, and it gobbles slightly more than half of what recent Firefox does. This is Arch Linux, I have no idea how the world looks outside that small bubble.
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.
Do you have any opinions on what an open bookmark format should cover? I'd like to hear those. Could be a good and relatively simple project I could mentor on.
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 do the same and share the same pain about the bookmarks manager.
One thing that irks me is that Firefox saves my bookmarks in "bookmarks menu" when I use ctrl-d. Then I get a monstrous "Bookmarks" menu and I have to move manually all these bookmarks with the Bookmarks manager from "bookmarks menu" to "unsorted bookmarks". Which is easy enough, but why the hell does Firefox save bookmarks in different folders when I use ctrl-d or the star icon?
What would you like to seem improved in the bookmark manager?
I'm currently working on the ability to rename the bookmarks inline in the tree instead of the input boxes on bottom in the Bookmark Manager (the one you get from Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+Shift+O).
Searching tags, bookmarks, and bookmark comments by regular expressions would be awesome.
It would be nice if I could, say, rename a tag. So, for example, if I had a tag named "map", I'd like to be able to rename it to "maps" and have all bookmarks with that tag updated. Same with deleting a tag from all the bookmarks that have it.
I'd like to be able to:
- see a list of all my tags, in various sort orders, and be able to navigate through them like folders (expanding and collapsing their contents).
- perform operations on the bookmarks with a certain tag. For instance, to be able to take a certain subset of them and move them to another tag, again much like what was possible with folders.
- make comments on tags that include a full markup language (org-mode markup ideally, but some regular markup would be better than just vanilla ascii).
That's just off the top of my head. There have been other features which I've wished for over the years that Firefox's bookmark manager didn't have but I knew I could easily get with org-mode in emacs.
FWIW you can rename tags in Firefox: from Show all bookmarks, unroll the Tags menu in the left pane, click the bookmark you want to rename, fix the name in the right lower pane. It can take some time to update.
Many things can be done from the "Show all bookmarks" window. But they can be very misleading.
(The following may not be very relevant nor clearly stated. Sorry if I can't convey my point.)
For instance, when you want to delete all bookmarks associated to one tag, it's not just going into the Tags menu and deleting the corresponding tag: this would only remove the given tag from the bookmarks but leave the bookmarks bookmarked (which is the right thing to do when I think of it). Instead, the only way I found is to search from "Search Bookmarks" for the bookmark name and delete from the resulting list (making sure I don't delete a bookmark that just happens to share the tag name in other fields. Sorting by tags may help a bit.)
For complex things, I once had to open bookmarks with sqlite and edit them by hand. Scary experience even though I made backups. (How would it deal with Weave, at the time, was my main concern.)
I would very much like to know the folder chain holding the bookmark. I can search for it, but I still can't find it. At least give me the parent folder.
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.
Additionally to what everyone said already, I have two other uses:
1) I have a set of bookmarks specialized for search. Chrome can do this without bookmarks, but Firefox needs them. I'm talking about bookmarks like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbm=isch
Note the %s in the middle, that's where queries go.
When you save this as a bookmark and add a keyword to it ("gg" in my case), you can then search images on Google like this:
- Alt-d (jump to url bar)
- gg fluffy kittens
I have a few dozen of these: Google, G images, G translate, G maps, local maps, Wikipedia English, Wikipedia Czech, various dictionaries, whois, wolfram alpha, grammar check, YouTube, Maven search... You get the idea.
2) A huge curated collection of bookmarks to Java libraries. Something similar to all those awesome-java collections that are lately popping up, but more complete, in my browser, indexed for search and neatly grouped into like a hundred folders.
Bookmarks are where links go to die. So yes I do "use" bookmarks, but never revisit them. What I instead do often is either keep the tabs open or, save them as notes in a note taking app. I feel that the note taking app makes it easier to organize stuff into "projects" as that how I usually work.
Definitely! I still keep the bookmarks bar visible on Chrome and Firefox to have quick access to my favorite and most visited pages. All of the links have abbreviated names to fit more on the bar. #1 is Hacker News, of course.
I also still 'star' interesting links and categorize them into folders. Very handy to have Chrome sync the bookmarks across all of my machines.
I completely agree it's easy to memorize without text. I even lump them into logical groups using the vertical separator favicon from this site:
http://separator.mayastudios.com
For work, absolutely.
I have a couple of top level directories on my bookmark bar:
KeyLinks
InterestingTech
PrevWork
CurrWork-<2-3 words describing topic of work>-<Date started>
Under KeyLinks I keep well...key links, like the links to the wiki entry on how to setup dev environments, link to the Holiday calendar, link to the Jira dashboard showing my team's sprints, link to the company roadmap, etc. Pretty much just links that I'll have to refer to periodically.
Under InterestingTech are articles or things of interest I stumble upon on my day to day, but that I don't have time right now to look into.... This one is honestly a bit of a bottomless pit at this point...
Under CurrWork-* I keep all the links related to the work I'm doing right now. That means wiki entries related to it, StackOverflow links I had to use to fix something, Jira tickets, Jenkin jobs, internal web-app links, code review link, etc. You name it. If it's in any way related to my current work, and it's a site, it's there.
And when I'm done with the current 'CurrWork-*', I remove the leading 'CurrWork-' and move it to the bottom of PrevWork.
I have an awful memory, but this in combination with an emacs org-mode file for each 'CurrWork' iteration I have, I manage to be able to refer to things I've worked on in the past when people ask. After they give me a minute or two to get my bearings of course.
I do occasionally, though usually Firefox' "awesomebar" will get me there anyway so there is not often a need.
My girlfriend does make extensive use of it for all sorts of things.
I think my mom uses it as well. My brother and dad I'm not sure about. Not sure what that says for a confidence interval, but many people still do. Then again, I'm sure there must be clusters of people (when clustering by who knows who) that never learned it's there, or who choose not to use it.
All of my bookmarks are resources, something for me to read or use at a later time. Some are for things I want to learn, some are for things I knew but have lost to time, and others are just.. out there. Like this: https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm I have no idea why I bookmarked that (or when).
Another example: This week I decided to learn Rust. I was listening to a podcast and the host mentioned rustbyexample.com and I visited the site and realized previous me had bookmarked it thinking I would decided to learn Rust at some point and it would be a nice resource.
Maybe something that would look at my recent history and say Hey X has been in your bookmarks for months and it's related to all the Y pages you've been visiting.
None of them are organized, I'd pay for something to automatically organize them.
My chrome bookmarks are one of the 3 pillars of my cloud identity, along with my gmail and my dropbox. You could just say my google account and my dropbox.
I have hundreds of bookmarks, covering dozens of categories of research and reading. One of the largest subcategories includes hundreds of references that I may or may not need for future projects including software (stackoverflow questions, tutorials, bug solutions, framework and API references, optimization articles, in-depth guide articles, and so on), woodworking, economic/governmental/civic/legal research, fitness, electrical engineering and general circuity/wiring, real estate, recipes, piano repair, audio production, and so on. These are all intended to be kept until needed, most likely indefinitely.
Then there's a category for more temporary things that I need in the moment and am unlikely to need again, including news/blog articles I haven't gotten around to reading yet, solutions for bugs that I need to fix, torrents I haven't gotten around to downloading, and collections of references for small, specific projects that I won't need again afterwards.
So basically I use Chrome bookmarks as my personal address book for "things on the vast internet which I wish to return to eventually."
For major things I use daily, like youtube or gmail or facebook, I don't bother bookmarking them-- for those I just use the address bar's semi-intelligent autosuggest....Ctrl+L to go to address bar, then I just type g and hit enter, or y and hit enter, or f, etc. The only website I need to type out beyond 2 letters is twitter/twitch.
I guess this may sound odd, but Chrome has begun to feel like a natural part of my mind. The bookmarks and my gmail are an extension of my memory. My interactions with the net are an extension of my thought processes. I have seen other people make similar remarks about their phones.
Oh yes! I use them in FF and have organized them in folders with tags for hassle-free retrieval across devices.
I find them extremely useful for tutorials/learning new stuff which I know I need/want to learn but just don't have the time at the moment. Whether or not I end up coming back to them is a discussion for another day ;)
I use Emacs / Org Mode for bookmarks. I use a few different browser profiles, and usually always want to open a bookmark in a specific profile. Having all bookmarks in one place is much easier than figuring out which browser I need and then finding the bookmark in it. Plus this way I can use other Org Mode features with them too (adding any arbitrary notes/tasks to them, todo keywords for a reading list, refiling/archiving, etc.)
Basically I just add the properties URL and BROWSER to any entry I want to be a bookmark. I have the numpad key 4 bound to a command that opens the url (works either in the org file buffer itself, or from an agenda view). I also have the numpad key 1 bound to an agenda search for the tag :bm: (searching for a property is too slow), so I can easily get a list of all bookmarks, which can then be filtered by tags, category, top-level headline and regexes.
I use diigo. The free version lets you cache the page, annotate the page with highlights, and tag your bookmarks. The extension for Chrome works very well. They also launched some PDF annotation features, but I haven't tried that.
I use browser bookmarks frequently, but have few of them. I tend to use them primarily for utilities and other sites that I visit somewhat regularly. Basically the two main cases are 1) sites I visit so often that it's handy to get there with a single click as opposed to a couple of characters in the address bar, and 2) sites with strange urls and/or ones that I access repeatedly but infrequently, so might not remember where to find.
For anything I want to remember for later, or keep for reference material, I clip it to Evernote instead. Find that much more useful, as normally when you're looking for a piece of reference material it's going to be able to remember some keywords from it than the title or where you filed the bookmark. Also means you can easily reference it even if the page is missing or changed in the future.
I'm a big fan of bookmarking but I found the browser features didn't fit my needs all that well. So I built my own browser extension which I really like. Hasn't taken off at all and development has kind of stopped for the time being (other work has put it on the back burner) so it's still just available on Chrome.
Using it I hit Ctrl+M (the shortcut to open it) and then I have my top 20 sites key bound. So HN is Ctrl+M -> h. All my other bookmarks can be accessed via a search feature which you can tab or "/" to get to on opening the extension. I hate lists/folders so my bookmarks are all hidden away behind the search function. The extension is built for either the mouse or keyboard so I have a lot of flexibility in how I interact with it.
First of all, I use reading list. It's kind of bookmark in Safari. If there's interesting webpage, but I don't have time or mood to read it, click and close. If I answered and want to check it later, click and close. Once a week I breeze through them and delete, so it won't stockpile like a mountain.
Second is Favourites (like bookmark bar), I can access it from blank page. I'm saving webpages, that I visit often, news, important forums, etc. Also webpages, that I'm using currently in work (e.g. Postgres documentation, if I'm working with it right now.
Rest is just organized by topic list of webpages that I could use later. I'm not using it that often, but sometimes it might be handy.
Personally, I've stopped bookmarking everything I find somewhat interesting. Now if I do find something and it will be used in the next week/month, it's often part of an existing project or idea, and so it gets thrown in a text file that's versioned.
I started doing this after accumulating a huge index of bookmarks spread across saved.io, Evernote, Google Bookmarks, iCloud, Firefox, Opera, txt files, Google Spaces and the other dozen or so bookmarking/collaborative knowledge sharing platforms showcased on Product Hunt.
I'm surprised there's no digital equivalent to the Hoarders TV show. I suppose thousands of bookmarks are less impressive than a garage full of old newspapers and rats.
Yes, I quite realise that with my bookmarks its the equivalent of on-line hoarding. I keep all of mine in pinboard though so it's fairly well organised hoarding.
I was using delicious up from 2004 - 2014. I just realised I never actually closed my account there. Think I'd better close it to keep the hoarding to a minumum.
I treat URLs like any other document: I click+drag the favicon off the address bar and drop it in the target folder in explorer (file browser in Windows), which creates a dot-url shortcut.
Why keep resources in a unique silo? You wouldn't keep all your PDFs/Word/rtf/&c in a "<ext> manager app", so why do URLs have to be kept in one?
Also, this way they all get backed up since I keep all work docs on my network drive.
I'm surprised no one else follows this pattern, but I've never seen anyone else use it, nor have I won over any converts via its sheer awesome factor <shrug>.
FYI, works in FF and Chrome, but not Opera. (Bummer, because I like Opera generally, and it's my default Android browser.)
Firefox and Chrome both will display a local directory. In fact I exploit that for my no-software written personal wiki, github.com/a3n/miki. I bookmark the directory of the top of my wiki, and drill down into directories to get at my pages, except the pages I've bookmarked.
I see no reason why a browser couldn't do that with URLs in local directories.
EDIT: Unfortunately I don't think the first part, drag/drop from browser tab to file manager folder, works in Linux. Tried it with nemo, dolphin and nautilus. But viewing and clicking on directories and contents from the browser works fine.
EDIT EDIT: Dragging a tab didn't work for me. But dragging the icon from the address bar worked fine. Except in Dolphin, which gave me something weird. nemo and nautilus were good. And the "files" clicked in the file manager opened in the browser. And of course, opening them from the browser directly also works.
That's a pretty neat use-case, thanks for sharing. I could see it being useful for my own personal knowledge database as well. Unfortunately it doesn't help with my regular browsing workflow, which revolves around a bookmark bar filled with textless favicons arranged by color.
Hmm, I'm not sure what the anti-pattern you see is.
I just go to the folder that represents the topic (typically /Vendors/Mgfr/Product/) and there along with spec sheets, user guides, etc., are the URLs I've saved.
Then I {wait for it} open a blank tab (ctrl+t) and drag the URL 'file' back and drop it on the blank tab -- Presto, there's the page.
Considering I probably find four or five worthwhile web pages for every hardware purchase, every semi-tricky JIRA problem, every new tech to master ... that'd just be unwieldy in a bookmarks app. And this way it's detached from any given browser.
It's not super portable but I suppose I could start saving stuff in OneDrive (forBiz) or the like and they'd be more accessible from various networks (home/work/travel/what-have-you), but so far it's done the job for me.
That is quite a few more steps than just clicking a drop down folder on my bookmarks bar or using the omnibar/awesome bar to quickly access previously visited pages. Prohibitively more steps for casual internet users and needlessly more steps for a power user like me who can just further optimize the steps I find myself repeating often.
It's not that maintaining a database of useful links in a filesystem structure is an antipattern, I just find it too limited and hierarchical for most purposes. Knowledge databases like Zotero[0], or mindmapping software like Freemind[1] are good for when I need to build link databases for specific topics and projects, and a combination of web scraping and offline data consolidation and organization provided by such software has so far been the best approach for me.
If I find myself visiting a static page more than 2 or 3 times, it really makes no sense for me not to just archive the page on my hard drive in case it later becomes inaccessible and then tag it for easy searching.
I still do, but I find Google Chrome bookmarking system to be a bit too simplistic.
I mean, Google is usually strong on that from with labels in Gmail, Keep but for some reason they never implemented that in their bookmarks. It would makes more sense than using folders IMO.
I use the bookmarks bar to neatly organize my frequent links. And I kind of have an OCD when a link is misplaced in the wrong folder.
Of course, then, some folders, I never visit again but some, very very frequently.
Also for the habit of reading/skimming articles and often hopping from one URL to another, I use One Tab. Super efficient to collect links in one page:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...
On the negative side, my work PC has over 800 URLs and home PC about 1500+
Absolutely. I trust Firefox Sync more than third-party services. I have a fairly comprehensive hierarchical structure. I only bookmark things I really care about, but even still have hundreds of bookmarks in tens of folders. It's useful because it makes these sites show up immediately in the address bar as I start typing. API done for example. I just start typing the library/API name and the address bar autocompletes the part to the doc index b/c that's what I've bookmarked. One step shorter than bouncing through Google.
I also bookmark articles that I think I'll reference in the future, that supports or contradicts something I believe strongly.
All the time in Chrome. I have a fairly rigid structure in my Bookmarks folders, where I categorise all my hobby and professional interests. I like that it is synchronised across all my devices too.
I used to use Pocket a lot to do similar things, but categorising, and browsing the saved links was a little too cumbersome.
Plus I like that I can search just within my plethora of bookmarks if I want to reference something I know I saved a year ago. [0]
I recommend checking out https://vimium.github.io/, provides a lot of shortcuts (You don't even need to know vim despite the name). "b" brings up a box like this:
Yes, I use them a lot, but find the organizing tools pretty lacking. E.g. I program in Python and keep a bookmark for many Python modules in alphabetic subfolders so that I can quickly jump to the docs. It's rather boring to maintain this setup. I also dance tango and I'd love to bookmark many Youtube videos but here the tools are really primitive: there's lots of ways to organize this (by type of video, dance style, by principal figures, by dancers -- sometimes more than one couple -- by music maybe) and no easy way to do anything other than a silo of "all things tango".
Yes. Anything essential goes in the bookmark toolbar (mostly thinking about internal sites at work). I save a number of keyword searches (like "yt" for youtube, "wp" for Wikipedia).
For personal machines, I've got about 5 machine+OS combinations, with 2-3 browsers on each that I use for various things. I chose not to set up sync accounts in any of the browsers (I've already got too many damn accounts to manage, thank you!). So I sometimes save a bookmark if I'm in the middle of a long series of pages about something, as a sometimes-completely-literal "bookmark".
I am currently developing PageDash, a personal web archive web-based app. The key difference is that I want to preserve the page exactly just as I saw it, with the help of a browser extension.
Reason for this is that I love saving pages that I encounter. I use Evernote Web Clipper a lot, but it frequently fails to keep the styling perfect. Secondly, a lot of archivers can't save pages behind an authentication layer.
In my Bookmarks bar I have 'General', which breaks down into about fifteen categories. Each of those is broken down into several folders --- its very organized. I go through it once a year or so to clear out links I'm certain I won't need in the future (usually project ideas).
I use Bookmark Box to sync with other browsers by way of Dropbox. Its not perfect, but it works.
For the rest of the Bookmarks bar I have my most common links -- a few spreadsheets (in Drive), some web apps, and a folder for forums I frequent. I also have a bookmarket for Pepperplate, which I use on a regular basis.
No, but I use pocket. I put links to technical stuff in there that I intend to read, but I rarely look at it. Maybe I'll start remembering to after this thread. I noticed a while back that pocket allows you to dump them in a text format; I was intending to do that and store in a git repo or my gdrive, so that I would be more confident I'd have them for the rest of my life. I sort of don't really know where chrome's bookmarks are kept, which makes me less inclined to use them, but that's almost certainly lazy/ignorant of me.
I have hundreds of them in Chrome, ported over from all kinds of browsers and services over the year. I never use them. They just sit in the bookmarks toolbar and annoy me.
Organized in ~150 folders all with subfolders.
Ditched the bookmark services when Chrome started syncing data across devices. There are three features I would love:
1. The search box in the manager does a full text search of the content on the bookmarked page instead of just the title (at the time it was marked, not updated).
2. The ability to search by URL with regex.
3. Show the date I bookmarked the page.
You can Access, Search, Import, and Export bookmarks from:
"chrome://bookmarks/" URL and Pressing "CTRL+D" give you option to save to folder instantly.
Sometimes when I don't remember the bookmark folder location for example(https://news.ycombinator.com), I simply type something like 'news' or 'ycom' and chrome will show me some predictions which will be combination of Bookmark, Google search, and History with different icons or text.
Yes, I do. As a university student, it's really useful to be able to view different course webpages, schedules, important dates, etc - all links that I would access frequently (almost every day)
Apart from that, I also use browser bookmarks for links I want to (or have to) view in the near future. It acts as a constant reminder since it's always visually present.
I use Pocket for articles/links I can afford to view during my free time.
I use wiki's, because "links" only make sense in a given context, so at work I add the noteworthy links in the local wiki, and for my personal use I keep a series of text files of notes on particular subjects, where I add links.
I do however use bookmarks on my laptop to point to locally installed document such as the full python library doc, in order to be able to access those when offline (eg: in a train).
I do especially because Chrome syncs them everywhere including my mobile phones, laptop and desktop.
It's also useful to bookmark in browser because the address bar gives priority to your bookmarks over auto-complete and history.. So it's much easier to access those sites too.
P.S. I organize them by folder, so it's most likely design -> landing pages -> dark -> bookmark or personal -> finance -> bookmark, etc.
My bookmarks bar has my top-30 list (mail, feedly, HN, ...) I tried a folder system but found the amount of overhead to be WAY too cumbersome.
I capture stuff to read in Pocket. If I eventually find the link to be valuable (news: almost never; how-tos: much more often), I move it into a Google Keep "PostIt".
The value-add is that I can add pics, notes, links to Dropbox docs, etc in the same PostIt, and organize them as I see fit.
Macintosh-only stand-alone local database for URLs; Costs $25; url-manager.com.
I've been using it for years...have 10s of thousands of bookmarks...it's where I keep all my research...has saved me many times. All data in one local file (or Dropbox)...easily portable; no annual fee.
Click on the icon in the menu bar to save the current web page Title and URL; optional field for Notes permits you to add keywords or large excerpts from the site or article.
Organize the database/outline by making folders/sub-folders. Fast db search;
Mac OS X app : Customizable toolbar, standard Window Menu and Fonts Panel, Font Smoothing, Sheets and Drawer Windows, Cocoa Status Item and support for Dropbox. Includes Yosemite Share extension and Spotlight importer.
Import and Export : URL Manager Pro can import from and export to Safari, Firefox, Chrome, OmniWeb, Camino, iCab, Mozilla and Netscape. It lets you 'harvest' bookmarks by importing XML (XBEL), HTML and text files for bookmarks and URLs. Export entire db or any one folder to HTML or text format.
Installing the Quick Tabs [1] Google Chrome plugin has completely changed my use of browser-based Bookmarks: with cmd-e an intelligent search box pops up giving me instant access to my history or bookmarks folder.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the chrome feature that's mostly replaced bookmarks for me.
Just like aliasing commands in the terminal, you can alias web pages in Chrome's address bar. So, when I type "je" in my omnibar it has an autocomplete option "Jenkins", and pressing enter will take me to the URL I set for the Jenkins home page.
This feature is poorly named "search engines", and yes, it is extensible to putting extra strings at the end of that URL (which could be registered as a search term within that site), but I've been using it for years, and 99% of my use is simply mapping arbitrary strings to arbitrary URLs. It works amazingly for that. No mouse movement digging into bookmark folders required.
- tabs I haven't read yet, but I need to restart my browser for some reason, and I want to be sure the tabs won't be lost ; in this case, those bookmarks are disposed of as soon as the browser restarted
- content I'm pretty sure I'll want to read back in a few time
I only use the bookmark bar, so I have to limit what I save. When it gets too big, I clean it up.
I use bookmarks to keep track of the hundreds of client-specific subdomains on a site I manage for work. I start typing the name of the client in Chrome's search bar and I've got instant access to the URL. I can't think of a better way to handle that (though I'm open to suggestions if you're using something better).
Yes, lots, in Chrome. I have folders directly in the shortcuts bar, with e.g. "Money", "News", "Proj" and current projects usually have their own folders. One I use a lot is "Topics", which has many subfolders for e.g. "Analytics". I use the Other Bookmarks list for things I use regularly but not often (e.g. once a month).
I definitely would like some improvements. My "Topics" folder is huge and I don't really need it loaded each time the browser loads. Just save it in the topic and let me find it later. Also, if Chrome has my shortcuts, why doesn't Google highlight those in search results? And maybe auto-link the saved shortcuts to the terms I used when finding them in the first place. There's a lot of meta data in that action - search-search-search, save. Google knows quite a bit of my thought process (via keywords and sequence), so use that.
I do for sure. I do this thing where I save a bookmark without its title, so it just has a little favicon icon on my bookmark bar, and it is very nice and clean.
I also have folders for Work, Blogs and one for improving myself as a developer. I love browser bookmarks, but am not exactly a poweruser, but I would miss them very much if they were taken away.
Google Keep supports tagging and search, so I can usually find things. For things I want to read later, I either put it in Pocket or use Google Keeps' reminder functionality.
Chrome integration looks decent (save web pages as an image), but Firefox integration is lacking.
Just google everything when I need to find something. In the past I was using bookmarks to track blogs I follow but these days there is too much content. I just google/HN search stuff when I need to find something. I tried going back to bookmarking stuff/save for later but I just never got time to go back to the them.
Currently I use a variety of techniques for managing content I would like to revisit on the web. I do use bookmarks mostly for often visited websites and I always using syncing if possible with Chrome and other browsers that support it (Brave does now!). I've also discovered some browser plugins that really help with this. OneTab is absolutely indispensable and will store all of your currently open tabs so that you don't have to keep them open. That's great when I've got several tabs open on a single subject that I want to come back to later. I've also started to use Pocket for most blog posts and random things that I want to read some time in the future but can't right now. The nice thing is that it is accessible from all my devices so I can put links into Pocket from my phone and then go to them from my desktop computer.
I use firefox. It's easy to bookmark things by clicking the star. I almost never pick them from menus, but you can limit awesomebar searches to bookmarks by typing "[asterisk]", so I can find, say, all of the interesting github projects I've ever bookmarked by typing "github [asterisk]"
I've got to say the Awesome Bar should have a first run demo of some kind. Once I got familiar with it I can't go back to anything else. Firefox has too many features for it's own good and it's sad so few people know about them.
I use them quite a bit. They are the only completion source I allow for firefox, so when I type something other than a URL on the URL/search bar, I either hit the down arrow and select a matching bookmark, or hit enter and run a search.
Structurally my bookmarks are an ever growing list, they all go into the bookmarks menu in firefox. I occasionally tag them too. Most bookmarks are part of my "online library", I keep them so that if I ever want to send a link to sth. I liked to someone, use them in an article, or maybe read again. I have a separate read-it-later list in an Org-mode file.
Some of the bookmarks are shortcuts, mostly to different dictionaries in WordReference, to Collins english dictionary, and various websites I browse often, like Reddit, HN, my school's, and my own website that I check every-so-often when I upload sth. new.
I use the bookmark ribbon in Chrome as a "to visit soon, or return to" list. Stuff I would normally look through the history for.
My most desired feature in Chrome is being able to right-click a link and add it to my bookmarks. Presently, I have to open the link in a new tab/window (using right-click, then T or W) then go to the tab/window, click on the bookmark star, then close the page (i.e. before it finishes loading). If I want to avoid loading a page I don't want to look at right now, I'll right-click on the link, then E to copy the link to the clipboard, then go to a new tab, bookmark it, right-click on the new blank bookmark link, then E to open the editor dialog, type in some suitable title, tab to the address text box, paste in the URL, then click Close. Either way, it just isn't simple.
Years (and years) ago, there was PowerMarks by Kaylon. It was great. Cross-browser, pretty good automated, over-rideable indexing -- space-separated words/symbols, very quick to maintain, with fuzzy matching. Rapid, "instantaneous", incremental search against thousands of bookmarks.
It's gone, now, and I've never seen its equivalent.
These days, I use an extension that saves a local copy of the page. As others have mentioned: Linkrot.
But it's not nearly as quick or convenient to return to a page as it was in PowerMarks. Although, the extension I use does have search -- manually triggered, and thereupon taking some time to initially build the index.
But I end up saving more "read later" stuff in it, as opposed to just reference links. So it ends up being a bit noisier, and size means I end up with multiple stores having multiple indexes.
I save my bookmarks in a text file, commit it and push it to a remote Git repo. I have this Git repo cloned on every system I use. Since the Vim editor is part of my daily workflow, visiting one of the URLs in the text file is a simple matter of pressing `gx` while the cursor is on a URL.
This is useful to me because I have this repo cloned on every system I use for various reasons, e.g. it contains my daily notes, productivity scripts, etc. So it makes sense to keep all my bookmarks also in this repo. Also having the bookmarks in a text file provides me the flexibility to add arbitrary notes/comments for each URL I save. The fact that I don't have to use the mouse and I can use Vim search or motion commands to find a bookmark is a bonus.
All my bookmarks collection inside browsers always end up turning to a horrible stack of junk: I don't know how to get rid of the old stuff, you know something that interested you at some point won't be interesting later but you never know...
With the intelligent address bars of the browsers, you can search and find for most of the recent stuff that you used, and even sometimes very old stuff.
I don't use bookmarks anymore, and I feel like the bookmark bar is most of the time a useless distraction.
If there is things I really want to keep, I post it in a public Shaarli[1] instance where I force myself to use tags, description and informative title.
I use bookmarks a lot and using Chrome I sync them on multiple machines. Yet, I find that bookmarks management is a neglected feature in Chrome. I have hierarchies of bookmarks, and while creating a new bookmark it's very hard to find the appropriate folder, especially when I remember the name of the folder vaguely.
If any Chrome Developer is listening:
It will be amazing if there is some form of autocomplete to specify the folder for the bookmark. Right now on Mac, finding the folder in the drop-down is very hard. To find a folder, typing needs be fast. I almost never find the right folder, if the folder name contains a space. As after the space it starts to match from the first letter in the folder names if you take a brief pause to start typing the next letter.
I use bookmarks in two basic ways. One is that I have Firefox customized to have two rows of header and on the right half of the top row (which has tabs on the left) I have favicon only bookmarks of sites I look at frequently (like hckrnews.com) so I can open them with one click. I have eighteen such bookmarks plus a link to browser preferences. I have seven folders of bookmarks, either just with the folder icon, one or two characters of text, or a single emojii character for identification. Three of these contain links to my favorite articles (Firefox is bad at scrolling in bookmark folders :( ). One has links I occasionally want to use but not often and one is supposed to have things I want to go back and look at somewhat quickly but not quickly enough to be worth a top level link (I need to clean it out, though, I've collected too much that I am not going to go back to). I'll sometimes create temporary folders about a particular topic.
I bookmark most pages I view as unsorted bookmarks (especially helpful for news sites that have essentially no way to ever find old articles) and then ones I am more interested in I add to another folder that I occasionally divide into smaller folders (to avoid needing to scroll) and put all of these smaller folders ordered chronologically in a folder to the right of the tabs. I usually search the bookmarks first when looking for something, but I don't tag and too often neither the title nor url contain the right keywords for me to find it.
I would really love a more unified bookmark/history system along the lines of Vivaldi's calendar history, but being able to create icons that will flag the current page (to be able to look through just the more interesting history) and other icons that would cause the current page to be saved to a particular folder as a bookmark. Then at most one click would reproduce my current system other than occasional reorganization. Since I can't predict in advance most of what I want to refer to again, I want it to take as little time as possible to bookmark things. I liked the star in Firefox better when it didn't pop up the folder selection unless you clicked it twice.
I stopped using bookmarks after I realized I wasn't using them, thanks to a combination of:
1. Autocompletion: for any website I use regularly I just write a substring of the url or Title (Firefox does this especially well). This covers probably 70% of my browsing.
2. Google. This might take slightly longer in case I want to find a specific article I had read some time ago, but it still seems less effort that having to bother with bookmarks, in my experience: either you have a very long list of unsorted bookmarks, in witch it's hard to search, or you have to spend time sorting them into sub-folders.
Now that I think of it, the following would be a very useful Google feature: +1 an url so that it becomes much more likely to bubble to the top in future searches.
I do, for frequent access stuff. Work-related things, personal apps that run in various places, frequently visited sites. The trick is to keep the number low, otherwise I'll never use them because they're impossible to navigate.
For reference material, I built something sort of vaguely like pinboard.in into a home-brew app that I run for myself. It handles search, a modified form of tagging, and a timeline-like view, and I get to it with a JS bookmark (tada) that lives in-browser and sends selected text as a search.
(The app itself is a ridiculous mess, having grown as a sort of cancer in a different app I wrote for myself that now does several unrelated things. Maybe someday I'll pick that crap back apart into something releasable.)
The only part I use is the bookmark toolbar, which I use HEAVILY. Just counted, I have 30 in my toolbar. I never use any other bookmarks now though. I still have all my old bookmarks in backups going back to the late 90s though. Fun to look at every once in a while.
Smart bookmarks! Bookmarklets! RSS bookmarks! Awesomebar fuzzy matching! Along with bookmark keywords and bookmark syncing! Firefox's implementation of bookmarks is right next to Wikipedia and ad blockers among the crowning inventions of the World Wide Web.
I use bookmarks, but rarely for clicking from the bar. Chrome and Edge promote bookmarked sites in the nav bar suggestions when I'm typing. I usually use descriptive names of the content so I can find stuff I liked or go to often by typing a couple letters.
I stopped using Chrome bookmarks b/c they got too messy but now I use Bookmark OS which I really like. It kinda like Mac OSX but for bookmarks in the browser https://bookmarkos.com
I have something very simple, A folder called FFR = For Future Reference, where I'll keep the most interesting stuff. Trusting Trust (and Overcoming Trusting Trust), Windows' NSA_KEY, and the like. Most are in the folder with no further hierarchy, but some are categorized into Security, DIY, UI/UX, Gift Ideas, etc.
I also have bookmarks at the root level for things that I will Definitely See Tomorrow™, which I never erase, because hey, They could be important.
Absolutely yes. It serves two primary purposes for me:
1. Archival. If I like something and will need to refer to it/revisit it later (more than a month, say) I will bookmark it.
2. Frequently used pages sit neatly on my bookmarks bar so that I can get to the websites I want quickly just by glancing at their favicons.
Organisation:
I primarily organize in 3 levels.
Top level: This is where frequently used stuff goes. I have configured FF to only show favicons for these so they take little space. eg. HN, GitHub, Outlook, Reddit and Bugzilla.
Second level: This is where things go for archival. I have bookmark folders at the top level that represent a category. eg. Books, Movies, Tech, Coding. Each of those can be further categorised. An example is my Tech folder is broken up into Articles, Blogs, Podcasts, Material (projects, GH repos etc.).
The void: This is the final level or organisation and is just a catch-all folder called Sort-These-Out where all stuff I'm too lazy to organise (or which isn't well defined right now, or things I'll get back on another machine maybe (Linux vs Windows)) goes. It currently has 13 bookmarks. Not bad.
PS: Did you know you can send tabs across Firefox instances on different machines by right clicking and hitting "Send Tab to Device"? The best thing ever.
EDIT: Forgot these two features.
1. Keyword search. Kind of like the bang query syntax from DuckDuckGo you can set up a keyword to search a single website by creating a bookmark. So I can go 'gh mycoolrepo' for searching on GitHub.
2. Tags. Firefox allows you to tag bookmarks. It helps me a lot when, for example, I want to find all bookmarks related to vim (but don't necessarily have vim in the page title). I'm working on an autotagger that integrates into Firefox to save me from having to tag them myself.
Yes I do, I use bookmarks to save time. I have them organized in different folders, with a few for "temporary" bookmarks that I clear out regularly. I try to limit my bookmarks to landing pages, online tools and references - stuff I know I'll revisit, while I send article/news bookmarks to Pocket or Feedly (RSS).
A problem comes up when searching for bookmarks that don't have keywords in their titles. I use a WebExtension [0] to update my bookmarks with website descriptions, increasing the odds of finding them.
I use browser bookmarks for pages I visit every day, or for pages that I intend to view again in the near future. An icon on a toolbar right on top of the browser is much easier to access than a link stored in a third-party app or website.
Of course I could just keep all those pages open in background tabs all the time, but I don't like clutter. Having too many open tabs also consumes a nontrivial amount of CPU and RAM. Bookmarks are also safer in case the browser crashes and fails to restore all the open tabs.
I use Pinboard for pages that I might view again at some time in the future, for research or some other purpose. The archive feature is very useful for this.
Unfortunately yes. And they are a mess. I have different bookmarks in Safari and Chrome, and on desktop and mobile. I have them synced between devices but the UI for navigating them is completely different and this doesn't help me so much.
I have so many Chrome bookmark folders that I don't know where anything is. The only way to find one is to just search in the Bookmark Manager. It sucks.
It also doesn't help that my preferred browser on different devices is a different browser.
I hope you are asking this question because you want to do something about this State of Affairs. I would gladly enjoy a good service that solves this problem in some innovative way that my brain cannot come up with.
I use bookmarks in Firefox in three ways. Sites that I use frequently go in the toolbar. Sites that I use rarely go in folders in the toolbar. Sites that I just want to remember go in "other bookmarks", and later I search for them.
I have lots of bookmarks, mostly for a few purposes:
1 - Pages I want to autocomplete so I don't have to remember and type the full address or verify that I'm on the true site for my bank and not a phishing site
2 - Content to do something about in the future. Stuff to read later, stuff to download to my local machine, etc.
3 - Resources that I want to remember exist and be able to find. For example, I've got a page saved that produces blank graphics in whatever dimensions you want for use in stuff like web design. Forgetting what it is called, I could look it up in my bookmarks pretty quickly instead of having to open photoshop and create such graphics manually
I do, but only for frequent things, and I'll clean that out periodically.
For longer term bookmarks I use pinboard.
I use a middle-ground for a few things: I may bookmark, say, news sites in pinboard under the "news" category. Every tag and combination of tags on pinboard has an RSS feed; I bookmark the "news" tag's RSS feed in Firefox, and everything tagged shows up.
The RSS is not for the content of the target sites, it's for what goes in and out of the news tag. So I might add another news site to my pinboard news tag, and vi-ola, it shows up in my Firefox RSS bookmark. Delete something from the pinboard tag and it's gone in Firefox.
I have hundreds of bookmarks stored across dozens of folders based on topic. I've been burned in the past with Google changing their search algorithm and not being able to find material easily, so I just bookmark everything I want to refer to later now. To that end, I primarily use Firefox and periodically archive them using the "Import and Backup" option from the bookmarks folder. That works alright as it produces an HTML file with the entries, but I'd like something more program independent. Does anyone know a good utility for offline archiving of bookmarks in a mostly browser independent way?
More heavily than ever, I have every bookmark in my bookmarks toolbar, all in folders such as 'home' and 'work' for local URLs, 'checkout' for things I've found but not researched, 'git' for URLs to my GitLab / GitHub projects etc... pretty much every fancy bookmark management service or replacement has massively disappointed me, overly complicated or requires running background services (like xmarks) etc... the only reliable one is the built in Firefox sync, then I use a plugin to export bookmarks to HTML on quit which exports to a directory in my Dropbox directory.
I do still use bookmarks, but only for places I go a lot, and I sync them via Chrome. Pocket is a godsend for the "cool links" that I check out when I have time and then usually archive away, never to look at again.
Ironically, I just cleared out my chrome bookmarks today. Found it far too difficult trying to find the correct folder hidden in a long list of old/dead folders/links. After I purged, I stumbled upon the chrome bookmarks manager browser extension that makes the process of adding a bookmark much easier as you can type to search (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/g...)
I do, but I have them export and upload to my server daily so I can keep them in sync. I don't organize them, I just use search and find. They're all relevant links I wish to look at or read at a later date.
They are uploaded via scripts or manually to my server, which I then can view a list of all the items. I dont remember everything, but I generally remember enough to find the item again. I don't have thousands either. In the past I have created a custom bookmarker site but switched servers and never set it up again, this method is much faster for me since its integrated into my browser already, bookmark and done. I also only save relevant content, guides, tutorials, that type of stuff.
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.