Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#251

Post by fela » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 8:41 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#252

Post by gotrythis » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 8:42 AM UTC

steel88 wrote: post #173

Sure, i use Papaly for everything , great service .

Second Papaly. Changed my life. Totally depend on this service.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#253

Post by Corrado » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 8:44 AM UTC

Existenceblinks wrote: post #94

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#254

Post by markatkinson » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:02 AM UTC

Yea it turns out my bookmarks are a graveyard for things I'll never read. The Android HN app I use let's me Mark articles as read later and most the time it works offline so I tend to use that more. When I find myself on a plane with no reception I dip into my list of offline HN articles.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#255

Post by jiiam » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:05 AM UTC

Yep. When I'm doing a somewhat specialized research I bookmark interesting results and add a tag for future reference. Usually the time after which they are forgotten is ~1 week, because they either served their purpose or became irrelevant, but sometimes I still use some of them.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#256

Post by justaaron » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

of course I "still" use browser bookmarks. Bookmarks, back/forward buttons, it's amazing but you don't actually need to kluge more poop on top of browser behavior to make it usable! Believe it or not, they made it right the first time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#257

Post by arm » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

maneesh wrote: post #92

copperx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by web archive? I recursively download sites using curl/wget on websites I want to preserve for a long time. Is web archive something different?

The Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org It's been backing up the internet for over a decade

In addition to the Wayback Machine, there’s also:

https://archive.is/

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#258

Post by weitzj » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

Yes. I use the bookmarks favorites bar, create a folder per project and synchronize across all devices via xmarks.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#259

Post by aerovistae » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:19 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#260

Post by nottorp » Sat, Apr 08, 2017, 9:19 AM UTC

Of course I use bookmarks. Not for sites i visit regularly, the browser takes care of that, but for reference articles I'll need later. I just use per-subject folders, nothing fancy.