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Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#171

Post by FranklinMaillot »

aleken wrote: post #118
mamoriamohit wrote: post #95

You're almost right! You're not alone. I am with you. To add to your little annoyances, I'd add one as well – categorizing the bookmarks. Even if I end up bookmarking a site, I find it hard to organize it nicely in a place that I can go to later on. I'd love to put some hashtags on bookmarks to search for later. Just me?

After reading your comment, I went to the bookmark manager in Firefox. Looks like Firefox supports tagging bookmarks. But finding them again using tags seems a bit cumbersome. You have to go the the menu to search bookmarks and then enter the tag.

ctrl + L to go to the address bar then type * to search in your bookmarks.

Replace * with ^ to search in your history or % to search in your open tabs. You can also try @google or @wikipedia to search on those websites.

I love those shortcuts! This is the kind of features that make Firefox far superior to Chrome in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#172

Post by abetusk »

I got burned many times when losing hard drives or computers, upgrading computers, switching between computers or just using different browsers, that bookmarks tied to the browser are ephemeral and shouldn't be trusted.

I effectively solve this by creating custom websites to service those needs. RSS was invented for some of those purposes and still exists today. "SaaS productivity" is out of scope for a bookmark and I wouldn't trust a browser extension.

You want a UX that's tailor crafted to your workflow? Build one. Or find a service/FOSS project that has one built for you. I'm not sure expecting a basic feature of "save this website URL in a CSV file" should be elevated to anything more.

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#174

Post by FranklinMaillot »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #35
black_knight wrote: post #30

I bookmark very aggressively when I browse. I use Firefox and have search suggestions turned off. So, when I start typing in the bar Firefox instead suggests from my bookmarks. I wish that worked slightly better, since it only searches titles. Would have been cool if some key words were distilled from the page when bookmarked. In Utopia the browser would crawl a bit from the bookmark to make a completely personal sea…

Even if you have search suggestions on, using "*" at the start will limit the suggestions to your bookmarks. "^" does history which is almost indecently useful.

And "%" to search in your open tabs. I also use @wikipedia or @amazon quite often.

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#175

Post by dotancohen »

fmajid wrote: post #98
lozenge wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical screen space was very precious when Chrome came out. I remember their first feature over Firefox was moving tabs into the title bar and removing the menu bar, bookmark bar and bottom status bar, so saving about four bars of space for page contents. Since launch, they've reduced the vertical space of the tab bar/title bar, even as screens gained more pixels. Original design- https://www.google.com/googlebooks…

Vertical space is still at a premium because most laptops use the obnoxious 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s why I keep my tabs on the right in Vivaldi.

I've tried that, but you haven't lived until you've tried Tree Style Tabs in Firefox.

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#176

Post by rvba »

The most irritating that "history" is so unintuitive.

You open the history, search for some keyword -> say you get 50 results.

Then you want to go through result 1 to 50 to find the page. But nooo, the results arent "fixed" in their positions. If you go to page 2, it jumps to position 1. If you go to page 3, it jumps to position 1.

In current Firefox it is even worse: now it just closes the whole history window, so you cannot quickly scroll through those 50 sites. The history window closes after you pick one (and moves the site as first on the list).

It seems that Chrome can at least keep the history fixed.

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#177

Post by MasterYoda »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #101
mg wrote: post #28

I don't know about Chrome, but in Firefox: Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default Not sure if it is the default, but my Firefox bookmark bar is always visible load common favorite news sites & blogs or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites. Shift+Click on a bookmark folder does that pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole Right-Click on one of the open tabs, click "select all tabs", right…

>so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format Firefox automatically backs up current bookmarks in lz4-compressed json under $profiledir/bookmarkbackups ($profiledir by default being like ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxx.default). Can also autoexport to an HTML file by setting the following about:config prefs: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML => (boolean) true browser.bookmarks.file => (string)…

I may misunderstand! But how often is the bookmarks autoexported to html? Can you set the interval also?

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#179

Post by littlecranky67 »

narag wrote: post #96
littlecranky67 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do mostly that in Firefox itself. Bringing up the bookmarks side pane (CMD+B on a mac). Right click on any folder -> "Open all bookmarks" will open the full folder. Creating folders and subfolders is as good as categorizing will get, so you could organize your bookmarks by month by creating folders per month. I also recommend using Firefox Containers (mostly for privacy and security reasons), and then you can…

Thank you, but that's not what I meant. I don't want to open all bookmarks. I want to list them in HTML, like the front page of this very site. Actually that was how Firefox used to export bookmarks, as one HTML page with clickable links. Edit: I've just checked and Firefox still can export the whole bookmarks collection. What I would love is the option to export just a folder, not the entire database. Edit2: Now, if…

I don't see a big difference with having them in a HTML page, vs. the side bar. You get a full list of your bookmarks with icons in a vertical-sorted way, including search. What difference does it make?

Re: Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?

#180

Post by franga2000 »

fmajid wrote: post #98
lozenge wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical screen space was very precious when Chrome came out. I remember their first feature over Firefox was moving tabs into the title bar and removing the menu bar, bookmark bar and bottom status bar, so saving about four bars of space for page contents. Since launch, they've reduced the vertical space of the tab bar/title bar, even as screens gained more pixels. Original design- https://www.google.com/googlebooks…

Vertical space is still at a premium because most laptops use the obnoxious 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s why I keep my tabs on the right in Vivaldi.

Not to mention most websites love to waste vertical space. Navbars keep getting thicker, designers insist on having top bars even when the navigation is in the sidebar and the bottom is eaten up by cookie banners and chat/feedback popups.
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