Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

Evernote web clipper (for Chrome)!

It's bookmarks on steroids, saved for offline, taggable (no assumption of organizing data in a tree), and synced.

Probably the only useful Evernote feature.

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.

[1] http://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0408/h_1491614673_38...

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 don't use browser bookmarks but I do use bookmarks through pinboard.in: https://pinboard.in/u:jcrites

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.

I use pinboard.

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.