Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

441 points by ethanpil ↗ HN
How do you still use bookmarks? How do you organize them? Why are they useful to you?

457 comments

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I do, but I've always find it pretty hard to use them, because I forgot what exactly I bookmarked and in what folder.
I do, but I have them export and upload to my server daily so I can keep them in sync. I don't organize them, I just use search and find. They're all relevant links I wish to look at or read at a later date.
How do you remember everything you have saved? What do you use to upload and search them?
They are uploaded via scripts or manually to my server, which I then can view a list of all the items. I dont remember everything, but I generally remember enough to find the item again. I don't have thousands either. In the past I have created a custom bookmarker site but switched servers and never set it up again, this method is much faster for me since its integrated into my browser already, bookmark and done. I also only save relevant content, guides, tutorials, that type of stuff.
How often do you find yourself going back and searching for a specific bookmark? And do you find it within one search?
Weekends, or if its something really important that night. I just view the exported bookmark document in my browser off my server. CTRL+F
I do, but I consciously keep only a small number of them (ideally not much more than 100) and regularly purge.
When do you make time to purge? I find that I procrastinate tasks like reviewing. How often do you do it? Daily? How much time do you set aside?
A good way to do this is after you've read/viewed/gotten what you want out of the bookmark, delete it right away.
Yes, but I use Alfred and Chrome Bookmarks to search them.
I use the bookmark toolbar in Firefox, but I delete the text and leave the favicons so that I can fit ~50 bookmarks in one row. I also have folders containing bookmarks for particular categories, like "Work", "Stuff to watch", etc.
I do this in Chrome with my most used sites. I've got about 12 sites that I visit regularly which I keep up there.
I just posted about doing this before I read your comment. I wondered if anyone else did the same as me. It started out as a way to fit more than a few bookmarks on the bar, then I realized that I recognized the icon faster than I could read the text, and squeezed all my most used bookmarks on there.

Great minds do think alike! :-)

A lot of our sites all use the same favicon. I keep the names short and sweet, but I keep them named.

When I ran out of room on the bookmarks bar I just started organizing things into folders on the toolbar.

Only for short-term. For things over a month of age: key words + web search is faster, at least for me.
That really depends. Sometimes, things can be pretty generic or the main site can be badly organized. In that case, I find that a folder in my bookmarks bar with links can be a lot faster. Even without using the bookmark, autocomplete in the bookmarks bar can be faster than a search engine.

In other cases, it can be a pain to get specific enough. If I want the English version of Chihayafuru Volume 1, but on Bookwalker, not Kindle/Comixology? How much typing am I going to have to do? Note that if I'm not specific enough, I'll get a bilingual edition meant for Japanese people to learn English as the first result. It's an imported physical book and not a digital one, either.

I still do, but I find Google Chrome bookmarking system to be a bit too simplistic.

I mean, Google is usually strong on that from with labels in Gmail, Keep but for some reason they never implemented that in their bookmarks. It would makes more sense than using folders IMO.

It is to Google's advantage for you not to use Bookmarks. They _want_ you to rely on using Google to search in every case possible.
Yes, but in single folder (maintaining tree structure is pain) and rarely access it. Del.icio.us was very convenient, seems that it still exists but seems that they deleted all old data and may close again soon.
I used Stache to save a copy of the site and thumbnail. It was a pretty nifty app, but is pretty much end of life from insufficient sales.

There is an opportunity to do something better than bookmarks, but not likely as a business.

I have a web server on my home computer, so I make a "bookmarks" page on there which I can use to visit web sites I want to go to.
Yes, I have Chrome synced between all devices and PCs.
only the toolbar for quick access to the sites I use the most, and those are kept only as the site icon so I can have many, for everything else I want to keep I use pinboard
I need to access 3 pages and 7 google drive folders almost every day for work. Those are the only browser bookmarks I have because they save me 20 - 30 clicks/day.
Yes. I use the bookmark toolbars in ff and chrome with icons and no text for common pages (like this http://imgur.com/a/uZBB8).

My only other use is for groups of pages that I'm referring to or want to come back to as part of a project. I usually delete them after a few weeks.

For long term bookmarks I use pinboard.in

I do, but I've also come to rely on a plug-in called 'scrapbook'. It allows you to cut a snippet from a webpage and save it along with the url of the original.

Very handy, and it also protects somewhat against linkrot.

I've tied it to a hotkey to copy any bit that is highlighted to the currently open scrapbook. (shift-ctrl-b) without further notifications or interaction other than the keystroke. Super quick and it doesn't get in the way of continued reading.

I have using scrapbook for ages now, but to save entire pages. It's simple and just works. It's one of my must haves apart from Ublock-origin.

It's handy to have access to the actual webpages complete with formatting and links, but the store could get quite large if you save a lot of pages

Firefox is looking to integrate an auto-redirect to the Wayback Machine in case of link-rot. There's a Test Pilot experiement going on and it may be extended to allow for auto-saving of bookmarks on the Wayback Machine when bookmarked.
Yes, I use them. I prefer them to any online service because they are completely under my own control. I do wish that I could securely sync them, but ever since Firefox completely broke the security of their Sync system, there's nothing I can rely on to safely sync for me. It's not a huge deal
Curious how that's a security issue? Bookmarks are just public links, so there's no problem if someone sniffs them out, right?

Do you mean if a site stores cryptographic information in the url? Or is it the act of syncing with your local machine that introduces surfaces of attack on your local system?

Firefox Sync used to be protected with high-entropy keys; now it's protected by a (likely) low-entropy password. Moreover, even if one uses a high-entropy character sequence as a password, Mozilla are able to target one with malicious JavaScript and snarf that password at will.
Can you expand on "Firefox completely broke security if Sync"? Do you have a specific incident in mind, or an architectural change, or..?
The old Firefox sync protocol used secure keys to encrypt user data; the new protocol uses one's Firefox account password to encrypt it. A memorable password is a low-entropy password, which means it is an insecure encryption key.

Mozilla's protocol purports not to reveal passwords to Mozilla itself, but the security of the system rests on Javascript files delivered from … Mozilla. They can, if they wish, target a user and serve him suborned Javascript which send the plaintext password back. Unlike a tampered build of Firefox itself, which might actually be noticed, this could be a one-shot attack.

Worse, not just Mozilla as an organisation can do this: it can be compelled to do so on behalf of any government which has the power to compel it (or those employees capable of targeting someone).

It's a terrible, terrible change.

Yes. Anything essential goes in the bookmark toolbar (mostly thinking about internal sites at work). I save a number of keyword searches (like "yt" for youtube, "wp" for Wikipedia).

For personal machines, I've got about 5 machine+OS combinations, with 2-3 browsers on each that I use for various things. I chose not to set up sync accounts in any of the browsers (I've already got too many damn accounts to manage, thank you!). So I sometimes save a bookmark if I'm in the middle of a long series of pages about something, as a sometimes-completely-literal "bookmark".

I do but I'm very slowly moving away from them in some instances.

If I come across articles I like I save them to instapaper instead of bookmark.

For work...I've pretty much created my own wiki of bookmarks using OneNote. Employer uses SharePoint and some pages won't display or work correctly in Chrome, so I use IE for work intranet. So instead of bookmarks I have a notebook and put tags in the notebook for easy searching and I can put a good description of the site.

I started using OneNote extensively after seeing how Mike Conley (a Firefox dev) uses Evernote to organise bug info, knowledge etc.

I personally use it to pick out snippets from podcasts I listen to, some code snippet or a technique I find interesting or just collections of links related to a topic. It serves good for "heavier" bookmarks. I can annotate everything.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmaFLMwlbk8wKMvfEEzp9...

The only part I use is the bookmark toolbar, which I use HEAVILY. Just counted, I have 30 in my toolbar. I never use any other bookmarks now though. I still have all my old bookmarks in backups going back to the late 90s though. Fun to look at every once in a while.
I do but only in the sense that I use it as a sort of bucket that I throw things in and almost never look at again. Basically, no.
Of course I use bookmarks, and never revisit them!

I have some bookmarks.html files from old browsers somewhere that I treat as memories – snapshots of what I was interested in back in college etc.

Would you want to look at them again but forget or are you just bookmarking out of habit?
I use them a lot; there are a lot of obscure searches I do to which I bookmark the result with keywords that make me find it in one go instead of doing the search mambo in Google again.
yes. the 50 links i have to use over and over every day managing a business are all on the bookmarks bar.

for example: i have a bookmark that shows me every invoice issued in the past 30 days.

yes. synced to accounts, for reference material that required complex searches to arrive at - or material I only browse seldomly, such as fitness plans.
I do, for frequent access stuff. Work-related things, personal apps that run in various places, frequently visited sites. The trick is to keep the number low, otherwise I'll never use them because they're impossible to navigate.

For reference material, I built something sort of vaguely like pinboard.in into a home-brew app that I run for myself. It handles search, a modified form of tagging, and a timeline-like view, and I get to it with a JS bookmark (tada) that lives in-browser and sends selected text as a search.

(The app itself is a ridiculous mess, having grown as a sort of cancer in a different app I wrote for myself that now does several unrelated things. Maybe someday I'll pick that crap back apart into something releasable.)