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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?

#24

Post by pmontra »

In Firefox Android I pin the most used sites in the home page that opens when I touch the URL bar (and hides when I touch outside it) or the tabs button. I use my phone to routinely check those sites so I don't bookmark them on desktop. When I want to access them there I click the URL bar and type the first letter of the URL, n for this site. The browser remembers the full URL.

On Firefox desktop I also enable the bookmarks toolbar. I put there the links to the documentation of languages and frameworks I use most. I also got hundreds of bookmarks collected since forever but I ended up not using them anymore. I park pages in tabs. One browser window per customer (different virtual desktops) and a couple of them for me.

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

#27

Post by n8cpdx »

Others have commented that Chrome does this already.

Edge also does all or almost all these things. Bookmarks bar might be disabled by default, but iirc it is a right-click away, and only has to be configured once.

Safari also supports everything here. The “Tab Groups” feature in combination with the bookmarks bar (which safari also supports) makes it super easy to maintain persistent tab sets or just keep certain things separate (the research rabbit hole use case). Tab groups persist between sessions and sync across devices.

I think safari tab groups are intuitive, efficient (no performance impact that I can see), and super prominent.

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

#28

Post by mg »

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-click it again and click "Bookmark Tabs"

    i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set
I'm a heavy user of bookmarks, and I am pretty happy with the state of bookmarks in Firefox.

What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line. Firefox has a nice "Export Bookmarks to HTML" function, but it seems only available from the GUI, so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format. I tried for a while to extract them from the SQLite DB FireFox stores them in, but the layout of that DB is pretty complex and bloated. Even after a bit of fiddling, I wasn't sure I really correctly got the data out.

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

#30

Post by black_knight »

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 search engine.

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