Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
so much of my time is spent in chrome tabs / windows / and searches. someone's average chrome tab count is a badge of honor / horror. Chrome now hides the bookmark bar by default. you can create tab groups for a session, or pin them so that they consume all your bandwidth and memory next time you open your session.
But that's not what i want.
i want rich bookmark behavior.
i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.
i'm not alone right?
269 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadbut i just wish there were some talented engineering teams at the leading browser creators (cough couch google, mozilla, MS, apple, etc) that would integrate this as a first class feature. a design goal, not a supported extension.
Search is a lot easier then.
Well, Vivaldi does support autocompletion of nicknames. Just tried it with HN (save it as a bookmark and add hn as a nickname)
Now I just print to PDF any websites to bookmark into relevants folder of my local cloud drive and sync them automatically so I can access them later from any of my devices.
I think seamless bookmark is a simple case study of local-first software and that it can be a killer application for it [2].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
[2]https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
This is the most helpful extension that I've installed on my browser.
(Available for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... and Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-session-manage...)
It understands whether a bookmark should be opened as a pinned tab, and the tree structure of tabs saved together as a window if you use tree style tabs (in Firefox). It also saves the history of the tab, so going back on history works
It can even open the tab session window in a tab instead of the small tooltip, by clicking on the expand button in the corner. For me this is a killer feature
The only issue is that it is oriented towards saving whole windows (or even whole sessions) rather than a single tab. There is UI for saving just a tab at once but it's a bit hidden. But for your intended use cases, its workflow is perfect
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
Saving a whole window at once is much better for this
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
Saving whole windows at time is much better for restoring your working memory, specially if you use tree style tabs.
Anyway the author has a patreon https://www.patreon.com/sienori (no affiliation, I'm just a fan/user)
Control+shift+B is the shortcut to hide/unhide the bookmark bar. If you unhide it, it remains visible, even next time you restart chrome. You can create bookmark folders. Then right click on the folder -> "Open all" or "Open all in new window". Etc. It's intuitive, efficient, and prominent ("Open all" is literally the FIRST item in the right-click context menu on a bookmark folder).
Also you don't even need to know a magic keyboard shortcut. On Mac at least, literally the first menu item under "View" is "Always Show Bookmarks Bar". (You can right-click on the bookmarks bar as well for a menu to keep it always visible, also intuitive.)
There's literally an entire Bookmarks menu, both in Chrome's menu and in the Mac menu bar. The third item is "Bookmark all tabs..." and below that is the list of all your bookmarks. You can also bookmark all tabs by right-clicking on the empty area of the tab bar.
Bookmark functionality is all over Chrome. It's there in every new tab page. Heck, a recent update brought a brand-new Bookmarks sidebar to Chrome as well.
Sometimes it's a legitimate complaint that features are too hidden... but in this case it seems like the poster hasn't bothered to even glance at the interface. This post makes utterly no sense.
There is a fix; add in about:config an item "browser.toolbars.bookmarks.2h2020" set as boolean False.
Some pages are difficult to find again as time goes on though, so I’m a heavy bookmark user myself.
I used Firefox for 20 years and it’s better for bookmarks. Edge is only acceptable at best. My time resisting Chromium was over though. Time to give up that hill for me.
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
That is behavior that Firefox had more than 15 years ago, and still does. I used it frequently, until I learned about RSS, which is a vastly superior solution to the same problem.
Is it really necessary to post weird e. e. cummings-style art pieces about how you long for functionality you already have?
i still am able to do much of what i want natively - def not all.
like, i have a 'News' tab that i right click to open 32 media sites that give me all the ways the world is prob going to end today.
i have a bunch of 'search engine and site search' shortcuts that get me to all sorts of places - right click the location/url bar and go from there.
google/chrome type-ahead/lookahead pulls up a few of the sites i like to go to.
i've recently gotten better about opening the bookmarks with a shortcut and then searching for a keyword for some bookmark i want.
last time i built my own bookmark extension, i had 8,000+ bookmarks, i think. prob never looked at most more than once.
maybe google is just too good?
outside of that, i think quality can tumble when a solo dev starts to lose interest -- i.e. burnout.
I haven't used Chrome in a while, but doesn't the bar show up when you open a new tab (and hides when some site is on the tab)? I thought it was a nice intuitive behavior for most people.
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites
You can move those sites into a folder, and one-click-open that folder.
https://github.com/binarynate/omnibookmarks
I use it constantly (probably hundreds of times per day) to load common pages I use for running by business and living my life.
That’s not how it works. If you own the website Ford.com, Google won’t charge you millions to bid on the keyword "Ford". They _will_ do it if you are Chevy and are bidding on Ford.
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
I'm making an assumption we're all talking about the ads above the results, as afaik you can't pay to shuffle the real results
As for how much you pay for a click on any specific keyword, it isn't fixed and depends on two main things. I am simplifying here.
1. How related (google thinks) your page and ad copy is to the intent behind the keyword. More related = (generally) lower cpc
2. The reserve price that google sets for that keyword.
It used to be a second price auction in that you'd only ever pay 1p above the second highest bidder. It has now changed in that there is a reserve price for each keyword based on your page, ad copy and google's valuation of that keyword. This reserve price can be lowered or raised depending on how good and related Google thinks your page and ads are. It can fluctuate lots depending on your input but if google's valuation is high you'll never get it to pennies per click.
Insurance for injury claims for example will always be more than £10 per click no matter how good your page or ad copy is. Google just knows that those conversions are worth tons so people WILL pay high cpcs for them.
So in the Ford Chevy example, Ford's page is much more related to someone searching for Ford, Google knows the intent is likely to find a ford page so ford would pay FAR less than Chevy.
Chevy's page likely isn't matching the intent that google assumes the user has so their reserve price and hence final cost per click would be much higher.
Competitor bidding on google search is expensive.
Brand protection - bidding on your own brand terms - is (in my 7 years experience doing this) always incredibly cheap, 1 or 2 pence per click.
Temporarily intrigued, don't go too far out of your way for my curiosity.
Ad Rank[0] - this is the algorithm that determines essentially how much you pay like I mentioned. It's far more complex than my simplified explanation as it also takes into account context around the user. The device they're on, their previous searches etc. So a user who is on their 5th search for shoes and is now searching from their desktop may be more interested in a product page than an article since google may assume they're ready to buy now and they always buy from their desktop etc.
Ad Rank thresholds[1] - This is the friendly term for the reserve price I mentioned. It's the reserve price for a keyword based on all your inputs. Can go up and down depending on how relevant google thinks your stuff is at that moment for the user but generally google will set a floor for it.
Just more info[2] - more info from Google about how this stuff is worked out and what it means in practice.
If you google around "ad rank effect on cpc" you'll get more relevant stuff if you're interested.
[0] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1752122?hl=en-G... [1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7634668 [2] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722122
When you think about what google is trying to do with ads it does make sense. If they let anyone serve rubbish for any search, people will stop clicking ads and advertisers will stop using it. Google loses out.
It's in the users (arguably, depending on how you view ads), the advertisers and Google's best interest to incentivise advertisers to make their stuff relevant and good.
This is something you have to pay only if someone else is bidding on your own brand. Otherwise you’re already the first result and you don’t need any ad. This occurs only if you’re already a big player, and so $0.02 is nothing for you compared to what your competitors are spending. There’s nothing mafia-like here, it would be exactly the same (but much more expensive) in the physical world.
> This occurs only if you’re already a big
I see this for a tiny local food truck and accidentally click their ad instead of first result many times when ordering lunch, when I'm trying to not cost them by going through Google's "protection."
Yes, and that’s peanuts compared to the money they make from these clicks.
> I see this for a tiny local food truck and accidentally click their ad instead of first result many times when ordering lunch, when I'm trying to not cost them by going through Google's "protection."
I don’t see what’s wrong in having to pay to get back the first place when someone else is already giving money to overcome you.
I can never imagine e.g. my mum turning the bookmark bar off, but I can certainly imagine her just totally ignoring it/not knowing what it is.
Like not letting you add tags? not tagging definitely makes you use google search more.
> Things I'd add to browser bookmark managers someday:
> - Support for (persisting) bookmarks tags. From the post re: the re-launch of del.icio.us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985623
>> "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
>> Notes re: how [browser bookmarks with URI|str* tags] could be standardized with JSON-LD: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916#c116 *
***
WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment "Integration with W3C Web Annotations" https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/issues/4
***
W3C Web Share API & W3C Web Target API https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449716
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...
the settings UI is absolutely awful;
depending on which appearance you choose, it either looks ugly or blurs together;
it frequently has visual glitches;
could certainly be more customisable appearance and shortcut-wise;
doesn’t allow you to have a title or marker as the top level tab;
as far as I can tell doesn’t let you save a session of tabs;
has an unpleasant glitch where if you drop a tab in the wrong place it’ll disappear behind the current window and never be reachable;
the new tab behaviour irritates me;
and probably a few more complaints that I’d have to actually open it up to remember
The whole point of vertical tabs is so you have enough characters visible to tell what the tab is. Tab trees waste this precious space.
I don't know much about Vivaldi. Can you tell me what its monetization model is? Does it strip the google crap out of chromium?
They do strip Google crud like FLoC, don’t pander to crypto scams and are employee-owned, you can check out their statements on Vivaldi.com. The only valid reason not to consider them would be that they are not open-source.
Of all of the terrible UI elements that have become fashionable, this is probably the one I hate the most.
Was it really? When Netscape Navigator came out, 640x480 was probably the most common resolution. It used significantly more vertical space than Chrome has ever done. What happened between then and the release of chrome to make vertical space more precious?
Desktop computers have had very abundant screen-space for a long time.
On Firefox desktop I also enable the bookmarks toolbar. I put there the links to the documentation of languages and frameworks I use most. I also got hundreds of bookmarks collected since forever but I ended up not using them anymore. I park pages in tabs. One browser window per customer (different virtual desktops) and a couple of them for me.
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 things separate (the research rabbit hole use case). Tab groups persist between sessions and sync across devices.
I think safari tab groups are intuitive, efficient (no performance impact that I can see), and super prominent.
I'm not a heavyweight user of bookmarks. But I do love vertical tabs and grouping, which can be collapsed. Moreover, they can be saved to collections (to get rid from tabs) and collection can are restored as groups. Notes can be added to collections or entries, tho I don't use it
Anyway, not that there would be some kind of search for collections - not even the URL bar detects items in there.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/07/02/tab-groups-in-microsoft-ed...
What I do miss is a way to back them up from the command line. Firefox has a nice "Export Bookmarks to HTML" function, but it seems only available from the GUI, so there is no way to automatically backup the bookmarks in this nice format. I tried for a while to extract them from the SQLite DB FireFox stores them in, but the layout of that DB is pretty complex and bloated. Even after a bit of fiddling, I wasn't sure I really correctly got the data out.
It was something like:
You can find more info on that database here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Places/Places_SQL_queries_best_prac...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.
I only rely on the title, and I’ll extract the text content of the link for a full text search through it because usually I’ll remember something from the contents and will try to search that instead of something from the title. I can’t predict what I’ll remember.
https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash
and unlike some other tab management extensions, it uses native bookmarks to store things which means you can still access the stashed tabs if you sync them to firefox mobile
That's what I think we need is a way to save the whole session of the tab. Not just the last page. Or maybe a way to graph multidimensional browsing history.
How? Maybe you're talking about Mac's global menu bar?
Similarly the ampersand search in history.
We have nearly abandoned menu as UI elements because a CLI-alike search&narrow UI is better in general, just file managers remain lagging behind with their crappy UI...
I think a solution can be easily scripted seeing as firefox stores its internal data in multiple sqlite files.
you can set it to show/hide, but also to "Only show on new tab" which I use. That way I don't lose screen space, but and CMD+T (Ctrl+T on non-mac) will show my most important bookmarks in the bar right away.
edit: It seems that if your new tab is set to 'blank page' it doesn't work, the default "firefox home' works though. For...reasons.
Firefox automatically backs up current bookmarks in lz4-compressed json under $profiledir/bookmarkbackups ($profiledir by default being like ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxx.default). Can also autoexport to an HTML file by setting the following about:config prefs:
If later pref is omitted then file will be $profiledir/bookmarks.html.An issue with depending on this functionality is the backup happens when closing the browser.
I had to set "browser.bookmarks.file" to "bookmarks.html". When omitting it, no file seems to be written.
My favorite feature is being able to save all tabs within a window, send a link to a co-worker, and have them open up all the tabs. It takes like 5 secs, end to end.
Best of all: if they have the histre extension as well, they can instantly open all the tabs at once and even see my highlights - it’s like being able to send a browser window state to another person!
Bookmarks are too primitive imho. It is typically treated as just one link. It is useful to know the whole context around that. How did you get there? What else where you researching? Histre saves all that for you in a tree-style history.
On the other end of the manual work spectrum is elaborate note-taking about everything ("second brain"), keeping that organized enough to be useful etc, which takes too much time for nebulous benefit.
Histre takes care of all your knowledge management needs without making you do busywork.
I've written a Perl script that print bookmarks from Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Edge as <title><url><description>, but maybe it's too raw.
https://github.com/kal247/App-bookmarks
I might add other formatting options (HTML or Template Toolkit) if there's enough interest.
And useful stuff like `*` in the address bar to search just bookmarks.
In Utopia the browser would crawl a bit from the bookmark to make a completely personal search engine.
"^" does history which is almost indecently useful.
On Firefox you can add tags (ctrl D to bookmark plus comma separated tags). If you then type the tag in the search bar it will show all the bookmarks with that tag.
I found it incredibly useful to find bookmarks, instead of a polluted bookmarks bar or a strictly organized tree of bookmarks.
When I'm browsing, I don't want links in the top bar to tempt me to context switch, so my bookmark bar is off and my left hand rests next to my keyboard. If I want to navigate to a site, I either type in the URL if I remember, or hit Ctrl+B to pull up my bookmarks. I put the bar on the right hand side so it doesn't move the starting position of page text, and select using topic based folders (usually within a top-level folder). The whole process is very comfortable. Often I'll be lazier than that and just prefix with a * to directly pull up the link via search.
Its honestly so far ahead of everything else, I feel like I'm on another planet when people say they prefer Chrome for productivity.
With how many exploits Google needs to patch each release it's a little surprising how many security measures seem to get bypassed regularly for them to have any effect.