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Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

blog.mozilla.org

31–40 of 113 posts

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#31
post #18
post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

Panorama / Tab groups are amazingly helpful for this, one of the best FF4+ features. This is another good step towards improving the feature. I'm not sure how well the Dropzilla concept will work with a large number of bookmarks, or folders within folders, but I look forward to testing whatever they come up with.

I thought the dropzilla concept in the final slide looks pretty similar to what tab groups can already do. I hope they do combine them rather than having the two as separate features, otherwise it'll be splitting up bookmarks in different areas.

The Tab Groups feature is really useful but it's also quite awfully done. I particularly hate the way it resizes and moves around groups when you resize the browser. Ideally, it should use an automated layout, similar to tiling window managers, where you have a fixed master area, and a stacking area for other recently used groups. It'd also be fairly handy if you could nest groups, or have multiple panoramas, for people like me who have too many tabs open to fit on the screen at once.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#32
post #21
post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a new chance in about a year.) Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

Have you used it recently?

A few versions ago, they added a feature where tab contents are only reloaded on-demand, when clicked. You no longer have a big lag when opening up the browser with many tabs, and memory usage is quite reasonable.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#33
I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume. All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling of being "left behind" more and more.

I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later" tool or process. If I can't read it right now, chances are I won't do it at all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#34
post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

> And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks.

Woohoo! You're welcome :)

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#35

I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks. Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visit…

I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of:

* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#36
post #21
post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a new chance in about a year.) Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and Chrome fails miserably.

As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had minor memory consumption improvements. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for more (possibly too much) detail.

If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix....

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#37
post #16
post #13

Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later date. What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can still read what was on the page.

Have you seen Historious? http://historio.us/

Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the recommendation (what's your username)?

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#38
post #21
post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a new chance in about a year.) Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

A lot of work has definitely been done in the last year. Two years ago, firefox was unusable on the netbook I had at the time, so I used chrome. I think the situation would now be reversed, however.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#39
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me. I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. (I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)

> I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript. Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the relevant data.

If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do this.

If you want simple and dirty.

1. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

2. Pick your favorite scripting language

3. merge the two json backup files using your script

Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#40
post #3

Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.

What kind of error specifically? Also, is the SHA1 fingerprint of the certificate you do receive the same as this: B0:02:9E:58:32:7B:72:16:58:C6:E4:DA:20:9F:20:CC:C5:7D:3F:5F?
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