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

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

#51

Post by kijin »

Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks.

But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they plan to address these issues:

1. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political science course.

2. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too. But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many.

3. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for toggling between icon and list view.)

4. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks?

All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not only help you save pages for later, but also help you manage the pages that you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds, 5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".

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

#52

Post by peterjmag »

srean wrote: 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…

You hit on a huge key point: context. For me, that can include:

- Selected text

- Current scroll position

- Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway)

- Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups

- The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it

None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently retained when you restart the browser, either.)

When I leave a tab open for a long time, I almost always have a reason in mind for doing so. However, I can't always remember exactly what that reason was when I return to it, especially if it's been a while. That's the kind of information I'd like to store in a bookmark.

Because of this and other problems, I've often imagined some sort of non-linear visualization of your browsing history. This might look something like a git commit tree, with branches indicating when you opened a new tab from a link, along with other information and "tags" along the way. (One important aspect of this is that just like a VCS, you wouldn't lose your history stack when you hit back a few times and then click on another link within that same tab.) Theoretically, this could even store page states that normally aren't stored in a browser's history, e.g. filling form fields, scroll position, and so on. You could then view your bookmarks, tags, etc in that same interface, with a robust system for filtering and searching of course. Something like this could revolutionize the way I save and recall things online. Plus, I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to see your entire browsing history visualized like that.

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

#53

Post by unimpressive »

lurrch wrote: post #45

Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things that suck when (trying) to use one. My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface THINKS I'm…

I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it "fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.

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

#54

Post by damncabbage »

derleth wrote: post #47
kbrosnan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags. A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.

Wow. Okay, thanks for the information. Is there an open bug for this already? :(

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

#55

Post by zemanel »

Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization.

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents would be indexed (taking into account the security implications)

I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks.

As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of bookmarks a user already has.

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

#56

Post by tribe »

This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be in another.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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

#57

Post by Lagged2Death »

zemanel wrote: post #55

Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization. By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL…

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself...

Opera, circa 2008:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in...

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

#58

Post by Lagged2Death »

I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so many eyeballs, either.

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

#59

Post by mh- »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #41
code_duck wrote: post #9

Safari's Reading List comes to mind.

For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using this feature?

better description here than I could muster:

http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari

Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too.

http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...

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

#60

Post by lesterbuck »

zemanel wrote: post #55

Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization. By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL…

At least one bookmarking service, pinboard.in, offers a paid option of full text search on the contents of all bookmarks:

http://pinboard.in/upgrade/

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