Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 270 posts

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

#61

Post by lozenge »

adaml_623 wrote: post #23

I thought it was a commonly held thought that Google didn't want Chrome users using bookmarks because it directly competed with their search (and advertising).

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/chrome/small_12.html

The competition- https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot-of-Mozi...

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

#62

Post by knorker »

onion2k wrote: post #52

The one feature that's missing from browser bookmarks in my opinion is aliases. If I could bookmark a page, and then assign it an alias like "hn" so I could just type "hn" in to the address bar to go to that bookmarked page, that would be so helpful. It's possible to do this in Chrome by abusing the site search feature (add a new site search, give it a name, use a URL but don't put a %s search query in it... now it's…

To go to hn i just press ctrl-l to go to address bar, then 'n', and chrome already knows the rest, so i press enter.

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

#63

Post by mg »

alin23 wrote: post #47
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…

I actually had to do this yesterday for a small fuzzy search through bookmarks thing I’m building for myself. It was something like: SELECT url FROM moz_places WHERE id IN (SELECT fk FROM moz_bookmarks) You can find more info on that database here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Places/Places_SQL_queries_best_prac...

That only gives you the urls though.

You lose the names, the folder structure, the order and the keywords.

The HTML format FireFox can create is so nice, that for now I am willing to manually book them up to get that. Until someone can come up with a way to automate it.

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

#64

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

I think FF has some sort of responsive /platform layout thing going on with the browser, my FF developer in a crappy windows laptop has a slightly different layout where the top menu is hidden within a hamburger icon on the right and that is different on my bigger mac display. Which makes sense, I don't have a lot of real estate on this machine (need to tell the work it's not going to cut it I guess)

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

#65

Post by a9h74j »

Imagine if your word processing program held all documents -- your work product -- in its proprietary database.

I have been of the opinion that a set of bookmarks is a work product in the same sense. In that sense opening a browser instance might be matched to intentionally opening a portable bookmarks or comparable file.

Why I onload autoformat all my links from a source "links" text file. (I keep an editor tab open to this file, for live maintenance.)

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

#66

Post by yosito »

n8cpdx wrote: post #27

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 th…

After a year of using an open source and self hosted ecosystem, I recently went all in on the Apple ecosystem. My main concern was avoiding trusting Google and other companies with advertising-based business models. I think Safari is really the best browser out there these days in terms of avoiding ad tracking, plus it has the most efficient energy usage of any browser on my M2 Mac. I've been pleasantly surprised by the tab groups feature, especially how seamlessly it syncs across devices and persists across sessions. It's everything I've ever wanted from browser bookmarks. I also like that when I try to open a website that's already open in another tab, it switches me to that tab automatically. I'd be more comfortable if I could easily export the tab groups to a text, yaml, json or xml format that I could convert to bookmarks in another browser, but other than that, it's perfect.

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

#67

Post by okramcivokram »

onion2k wrote: post #52

The one feature that's missing from browser bookmarks in my opinion is aliases. If I could bookmark a page, and then assign it an alias like "hn" so I could just type "hn" in to the address bar to go to that bookmarked page, that would be so helpful. It's possible to do this in Chrome by abusing the site search feature (add a new site search, give it a name, use a URL but don't put a %s search query in it... now it's…

Firefox has this feature. When you edit the bookmark, you have the "Keywords" field that says "Use a single keyword to open the bookmarks directly from the address bar".

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

#68

Post by Curzel »

I swear I don't understand of some people seems to be using browsers... Let me know if the following sound weird to you, this is what I usually do...

I have 3 browser windows:

- Chrome window with personal Google Account and 2-5 tabs

- Chrome window with company Google Account and 2-5 tabs

- A third browser window as a media player (https://github.com/curzel-it/pipper)

Bookmark bar is set to always visible, and I have exactly 10 bookmarks: Company browser:

- Mail

- Backlog view

- Sprint view

- Company doc tool (Confluence, Nuclino, ...)

- Calendar

- Gitlab

- Some other link Gitlab

Personal window:

- Gmail

- Hacker News

- Whatsapp

If I need any reminder for reading something later I will use the reminder app.

I will try my best to either read right away or just discard.

Once I read a tab I close it. I can reopen it later, no need to have more than 10 tabs at a time... Right?

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

#69

Post by dijit »

onion2k wrote: post #52

The one feature that's missing from browser bookmarks in my opinion is aliases. If I could bookmark a page, and then assign it an alias like "hn" so I could just type "hn" in to the address bar to go to that bookmarked page, that would be so helpful. It's possible to do this in Chrome by abusing the site search feature (add a new site search, give it a name, use a URL but don't put a %s search query in it... now it's…

Firefox used to have this (it probably still does), it was called "keywords"; it wasn't very useful for me honestly.

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

#70

Post by neilv »

In Firefox and Tor Browser, I restrict the location bar completion to bookmarks, disable search, which makes a large number of bookmarks very fast to use.

Then have some Firefox "query" bookmarks selected by keywords like "g" (Google Search), "gi" (Google Image Search), "gm" (Google Maps), "d" (DDG), "w" (Wikipedia), particular shopping sites, shipping tracking number lookup, etc.

(I just realized that this is not so different from my 1996 solution, from when browsers and search engines were much more limited: https://www.neilvandyke.org/webjump/ )

Post reply on HN