Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough (2024)

My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links).

I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content.

It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.

My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...

[2]: https://notado.app

[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/

Just a shout out to https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery. My favorite productivity extension. I'm a tab hoarder, this makes my life manageable and gives my Firefox all the screen real estate by using keyboard shortcuts to open/close the tabs easily.

I also use the Firefox css to hide the top sidebar, so I get maximum screen usage.

Their bookmark feature is pretty awesome too.

OP describes drag-and-drop creation of *.url files in Windows:

  [InternetShortcut]
  URL=https://www.afewthingz.com/browserbookmark

In macOS, selecting URLs and dragging to Finder creates *.webloc files:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
      <key>URL</key>
      <string>https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

I appreciate how universal and decoupled this approach is, but it doesn’t fix my main problem with browser bookmarks which is that management overhead gets to be problematic and makes me want to not bookmark things unless there’s adequate “justification” for doing so.

This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.

I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.

I would definitely agree, now that I have started to save my bookmarks into a dedicated section on [my personal site][1]. I want my blog to become my central place for all my knowledge dump, that is indexed the way I want, and can be explored through simple Linux tools (grep, find, etc.). I might also try linking it to a local LLM to query more naturally.

Also, I personally miss good old [del.icio.us][2]. It was way ahead of time.

  [1]: https://divinedragon.github.io/saves/
  [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

It's an interesting idea but missing vital features for me. For example, the star in Chrome tells me that I have bookmarked this page in the past so I avoid having duplicate bookmarks even after editing the name. The standard synchronization also makes it easy to bookmark a link on my phone and then deal with it once I'm back at my computer. Now I would have to figure out a way to somehow download the URL as a file on my phone so it syncs to my computer. The favicon is another neat thing to have on bookmarks.

Somewhere along the way it just feels like a backup makes more sense.

My own solution is along these lines. I have a static html page on my personal server; that's the home for all my browsers. (It's under git, of course.) Just flip to my ongoing mosh session to my server, and a trip into vim can add/move/delete anything desired. It's currently an HTML table, which tells you how long this technique has been serving me well.

The approach that makes my life much simpler is to list all the bookmarks on one page. Seeing everything in front of my eyes just takes the mental load off my mind. I experimented with the idea and built a browser extension with it. It has become my daily driver for web navigation.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-page-favorites/...

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/one-page-f...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/one-page-favo...

Interesting concept, trick, but no.

- Can I write comments about some bookmarks?

- Can I tag bookmarks?

- I cannot self-host it, hence you have to sync things between devices, which is stupid

- Can it automatically do import / export?

- Can it support multiple users?

I am using my own bookmarking system, which solves these issues for me, but again, it is not a jack of all trades. I do not see your aunt running it in portainer. I am still developing it, so it is not super stable. Even with these shortcomings this is how I consume internet now.

It is "bookmarking system" x "rss reader" x "simple search engine"

Link:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

I have bookmarked and highlighted nearly everything I've read, by topic for the past 10 years.

I agree bookmarking could be files, but the reason for keeping the bookmarks is important to consider and important not to lose.

The piece that makes bookmarks hyper valuable, is remembering why or what was important about them. Annotation-centric bookmarking for me is really valuable. That usually means highlighting.

There's some nice options listed in the comments, I use diigo.com for a while as a paying customer and it's quite capable. Every so often I want to see what's out there, appreciate the links

In my mind I don't bookmark a page, as much as a sentence on it.

First step is am I just keeping it, or reading it. If I read it, I don't want to lose that time to have to spend it again in the future. If I read, I always highlight as I go anything. It kind of makes a journal, and also helps you reinforce if what you're reading is applicable to something you're currently needing to do.

The unfair advantage? When I come back to look for a link, I'm often actually looking for a sentence, phrase, or something I highlighted. I might occasionally put notes on the highlights. You can end up with dozens or hundreds of snippets explaining in and around a concept.

Annotating web pages, creates a feed of those by tag, which can then be fed to other things like sharing topics with people easily. There are other tools too like Readwise that help a lot to extract the insights.

I'm working on a personal-use bookmark manager project, after a realization: tabs, bookmarks, and history, are all just various points on a spectrum of URL frecency. I think the UI for managing and browsing these objects should reflect that.

With multiple synced devices, I should be able to see all synced tabs, and all bookmarks, and manage and search them, all from one unified interface. The Firefox local cache makes this possible.

This acrticle completely ignored mobile browsers. You can not drag and drop a url file here.

I think I need a browser extension with a button you can click that says "bookmarked!". And it doesn't have to do any thing or store anything. Because I have 1000s of bookmarks and I never go back and use them :)

A person's bookmarks accumulated over many years can amount to privacy sensitive information. I was recently surprised to learn that Firefox's URL bar not only autosuggests stored bookmarked URLs as you type but also speculatively pre-connects them [1]. Can be disabled in `about:config` at `browser.urlbar.speculativeConnect.enabled`, at least in Firefox for Windows. If you save many bookmarks for a long time you may not want nor expect your browser to years later pre-connect to whatever URL or bookmark name happens to match some characters you type! I disabled it. Privacy benefit at a small speed cost.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1eqjl70/major_issu...

My own approach is tending more toward a locally-hosted homepage.

- Can be accessed from any local browser.[1]

- Can be edited with any local text editor.

- Can be liberally annotated.

- Can be readily searched (Ctrl-F, grep, etc.).

- Can be version controlled.

- Can be rsynced to other systems, or served over a local LAN, or privately-managed VPN, should that be necessary.

Within the homepage I can set up various categories, projects, date-oriented classifications (which can be annotations themselves), and of course a healthy and growing "misc" category.

________________________________

Notes:

1. This is occasionally not the case, as file:/// URIs are deprecated. In which case one can serve the file locally e.g., with Python (python3 -m http.server), netcat, etc.

I vaguely remember an older browser just creating files in a folder for its bookmarks.

I wish I could find this folder on my work computer: I only have one work computer, so I don't sync work bookmarks with other devices.

I completely disagree.

If the built-in bookmark systems in browsers could support tags, then I would say yes. However, it currently only supports a basic tree concept, with "folders" for links.

This is very one dimensional. I read loads of articles that talks about multiple topics. Especially Hacker News type articles :). An article can talk about, say geo-politics. As an example, perhaps an article on the recent pagers that exploded in Lebenon. This article may also be discussing some cybersecurity topics too. In this case I may want to tag it with 1->n tags.

I currently use Raindrop.io. It kinda works, but it doesn't really have what I have in mind. It also has more features than I think I need from a bookmarking app.

I kinda feel that Digg (wayback, it was one of the first 'Web 2.0' sites had a model that could work.

If I had enough motivation, I think I could probably produce a simple app that does tagging, and only tagging, with bookmarks.

Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.

There used to be an excellent service that allowed you to save downloaded versions of entire pages to your account, it was called furl.net IIRC. The service was well ahead of its time as it included search capability within the content of the saved documents. It was extremely handy for building supporting documentation for all kinds of research. From time to time I entertain the idea of recreating furl and testing if it would catch on this time around.

Filesystems often aren't very efficient at lots of small files.

If they could handle compressed archives transparently then an array of files, maybe extended from the old windows URL= style files, might work.

An SQLite file also sounds like a great way of handling URLs, which Firefox does:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/464516/firefox-bookmarks...

What I want from bookmarks it's not manage them as files, since those files are just links, I'd like to have eventually collected snapshots (like Zotero does), eventually DIFFING through them (because often articles get modified, without changing title/URL etc), instead of a full snapshot maybe just the "Firefox Reader" version saved so I can avoid wasting space in useless bits, check their on-line status slowly and regularly so when a bookmark is broken I got a small alert and I see it "greyed out" and appear in a dedicated "broken bookmarks" page I can try to update (often the same bookmarked page exist but under a different URL and thanks to the cached copy I can look for the new version or a mirror with a search engine).

Files for UIs was an ancient concept trying mimicking paper files, it's about time to use textual pages and search&narrow UIs more than files for many, many things.

I don’t necessarily bookmark anymore. But I do passively look for a solution to store the content with a reference to the URL and the possibility of sharing it (the original or the bookmarked one) when someone asks.

I come from the world of Delicious and Pinboard (lifetime license). I have also tried many other services, such as Instapaper, Pocket, Raindrop, and other self-hosted ones. I currently run Readeck[1] for less than $2 a month on Pikapods[2]. I like it so far; the readability is superb. Now, I need to figure out if I can make some of the bookmarks perpetually public (currently limited to 24 hours).

I’m also not worried if everything gets lost. I might end up with one of the services, so I won't have to worry about it at all.

1. https://readeck.org/

2. https://www.pikapods.com

To tag bookmarks just make a folder for each tag and put a symlink/alias/shortcut to the appropriate bookmarks in each tag folder.

Putting tags in the file name with a hash mark feels “ick” and like the Wrong Way to solve this problem. Using folders and symlinks goes with the “grain” of a file system based solution.

In the MyIE2 days I wrote a pretty dumb browser script that would combine a bunch of tabs into a html document with links and titles.

When organizing shortcuts on my desktop into folders it was sometimes appropriate to reduce a topic to a single html document. For example if the folder has only 3 links in it and is unlikely to grow or if the topic is not really as interesting as the number of links gathered (like a level in a game you've researched years ago) Sometimes I would drop the link lists in the ftp client and send someone a pile of links.

I just noticed that one cant select multiple links > open on the windos desktop nor drop multiple on a browser. It was long ago but I think that worked once upon a time(?)

This is a pretty good idea but I feel like it exposes some of the shortcomings in our modern UI stack and file browsers. Users using the tools the OS provides to solve problems like this should be encouraged, however the separation between the file browser UI and the web browser UI feels like it creates a certain amount of inertia to using such a solution. If my UI had enough customizability that I could easily do something like attach a slide out drawer of a file browser view to my web browser windows, I feel like I'd be much more free to experiment with mixing and matching the various tools at my disposal and using my own solutions to problems like this.

What about having the best of both worlds? So when you edit bookmarks in the browser it maps the edits to a folder in the file system, no need to drag and drop. And vice versa: your shuffling things around in the folder will be reflected in the browser. Since bookmarks are already organized in tree structure this might be a more transparent way to store things rather than in db.

Will need browsers to support this but doesn't sound too difficult.

Check Nyxt for something else superior to plain bookmarking: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/dbscan.org

> Want to add tags to your bookmarks? Just rename the file Super bookmarking system.url into Super bookmarking system #productivity.url and later you can search your bookmarks with tags, example query in your favorite OS's file search tool: "bookmarking #productivity"

Ok, how do I see the full list of tags and be able to rename a single tag and let it propagate to all bookmarks? Not trivial

> See the video, the drag-and-drop creates a .url shortcut file:

Dragging is worse UI vs a shortcut.

Also, how do you sync with a smartphone?

And what about drag/open on Mac vs Windows where url file formats differ?

I think it's mostly a very good idea, but much less accessible compared to the omnipresent bookmarks bar, so I will keep using the bookmarks bar (whose primary downside is the vendor lock in, imo).

I've been using Trello for a while to organise bookmarks and other snippets, but with the recent force-in to rich text instead of markdown and links displaying as "preview" by default the UX has got a lot worse. Yes, there are extensions that make it almost as good as before, and I'm using one, but still.

From the article, I gather that it turns out that filesystems are a good way to organise vaguely hierarchical information. SQLite isn't terrible though either, people should be able to write third-party tools to help manage that.

Out of curiosity, do some of you also use this bookmarking technique?

I only understood the advantages of browser bookmarks once I set my browser to delete all site-data on close and because of that was forced to use bookmarks.

Now searching for something in the address bar is much quicker because it will be populated only by sites important enough to warrant a bookmark.

I have tons of keywords in muscle memory now to trigger queries on many sites.

My bookmarks are also curated very well because I actually need them to be.

Do normal people nowadays actually use bookmarks at all?

I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of people who get a new phone, for instance, never create a bookmark on its web browser.

Possibly the % is higher on desktop, but then I would guess the number of bookmarks is still probably in the magnitude of less than 5, and they could be considered more like quick launch shortcuts than a true hierarchal bookmark organisation system.

> sadly, it doesn't work out of the box on Ubuntu + Firefox. Mozilla, please fix this :)

Working for me with Mint (21.3) + Firefox (130.0.1). However, Nemo seems to treat the resulting .desktop files specially (reporting them as 0 bytes in size and a text/html MIME type), and trying to open them with a text editor doesn't work from Nemo (but does from a terminal).

I use self hosted https://linkwarden.app/

For me, it works well for temporary bookmarks. For ones I want to keep long-term, though, the bookmarking systems provided in the browsers is not adequate. It's too difficult to use bookmarks from other places and browsers, and I find the support for organization to be lacking.

So I run a standalone bookmark server instead.

Firefox on Ubuntu saves it as a .txt file. Changing it to .url causes Nautilus to recognise it as an Internet Shortcut, but it still opens in the Text Editor by default. I can choose to open it in Firefox, but Firefox has no idea what to do with it, and just tries to save it.

Not that great of a solution IMHO.

Instead add hashtags to the end of the URL and bookmark them like normal. This way you can search them based on context without having to faff about with files and folders.

Of just email the links to an email address and add the hashtags in the body of the message.

I haven't used bookmarks in more than a decade. The few sites I use daily are in mah brane.

I print to pdf and name the file the title of the document. Everything else has failed in some way for me and pdfgrep works well enough.

Maybe something like this could be the best bookmarking system:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695840

(on HN's frontpage today)

Bah... just give us the good old del.icio.us.

Not the recent .com HD remaster.

alt="Windows user discovers beauty of Unix ;)"

“Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough”, proceeds to not mention it again and talk about the filesystem instead.

I used to add my links to a github page :) Now I add all my frequently used links to easyy.click

> No browser extension needed.

No but you need an additional app to search/manage them (the file browser)?

With this scheme, you can't automatically sync bookmarks across multiple machines though.

This is stupid good advice. I use quicksilver as a launcher, and by putting bookmarks in a folder, I can index them and launch them like any other app or document on disk. Thanks for writing this up!

Shout out to Kinopio[1], an awesome canvas/to-do/mind-map tool

[1]: https://kinopio.club/