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Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

news.ycombinator.com

201–210 of 458 posts

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

#201
Yes, I use the star in Firefox URL bar (yeah, I know, they moved it recently for some reason) to mark the websites I'd want to revisit and add a bunch of tags to them. Then, if I forget about something, I can always search by tag. These are filed as "Unsorted bookmarks". I pretty much never use Bookmarks menu, because searching by tag is more efficient.

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

#202
post #185

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 o…

It is, and it is great. Until an update a few months ago wiped everything out.

I have no idea what happened, it just forgot all my history. Everything else was still there, just the history.

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

#203
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.

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

#204
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

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

#205

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 li…

I use bookmarks, but only in the sense that I use the bookmarks bar at the top of my browser. It's quite well curated and sorted so I can get to http://whatever/internal/web/portal/we're/worshipping/this/w... and https://whatever/damned/source/control/system/we're/using/th... at the click of a button. I don't bookmark junk stuff, and I clear off the bar regularly.

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

#206
post #200
post #88

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 importa…

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.

Thanks, never know about this feature. Bookmarked. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 (clickable links)

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

#207
post #151

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 li…

If you pay the yearly pinboard fee, they'll archive everything you bookmark. I doubt if they do a deep copy, but it's something.

Does pinboard archive it? Or do they make an API call to the Internet Archive and rely on that as the canonical version?

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

#209
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay the yearly pinboard fee, they'll archive everything you bookmark. I doubt if they do a deep copy, but it's something.

Does pinboard archive it? Or do they make an API call to the Internet Archive and rely on that as the canonical version?

Pinboard archives it with wget: https://pinboard.in/faq/
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