[HN Gopher] The best browser bookmarking system is files
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The best browser bookmarking system is files
Author : josephernest
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-09-30 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (afewthingz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (afewthingz.com)
| josephernest wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do some of you also use this bookmarking
| technique?
| lambdaba wrote:
| I don't but I also avoid data silos whenever I can, so I paste
| links and other things in a text file.
| james-bcn wrote:
| I use raindrop.io, which has the advantage that it is easy to
| share bookmark lists with others, which I use fairly
| frequently.
| vadansky wrote:
| Seconding raindrop.io. Went from being a tab hoarders with
| Tab Outliner, but the extension finally broke and isn't
| supported. Thankfully I managed to import my huge list by
| munging the JSON file into a CSV. Hate that it's stored on
| the cloud, but I just export it out into CSV so if I have to
| move again I can. That said the autotagging and
| recommendations are great. I have a ton of tabs I didn't
| organize and it automatically suggests folders to move them
| to that are correct 99% of the time.
|
| I would mention how many tabs I migrated to highlight how
| good the performance is, but I'm embarrassed to admit how
| many I saved...
| tconfrey wrote:
| FWIW I wrote a blog post on how to get off of Tabs
| Outliner: https://braintool.org/2024/07/01/The-best-Tabs-
| Outliner-alte...
| anjel wrote:
| With this scheme, you can't automatically sync bookmarks across
| multiple machines though.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Put the folder in OneDrive, iCloud, DropBox, Google Drive,
| Syncplicity...
| Filligree wrote:
| That's going to mess up when I use both computers
| simultaneously.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Why? Unless you're adding and deleting bookmarks every few
| seconds, I don't see why it wouldn't keep up.
| Filligree wrote:
| The network isn't that reliable. It could easily take a
| couple minutes for sync to succeed, which is far too much
| chance of a conflict.
| erremerre wrote:
| Syncplicity is a name I haven't heard in a while. It was the
| best (free for home) from all those names in the list 10
| years ago. It seems they have abandoned the home user space
| nowadays.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| 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.
| josephernest wrote:
| What is the real problem on having duplicates? They are only 1
| KB files.
|
| Having duplicates with different names is even better, and
| helps to find it more easily in the future: let's say I have
| bookmarked 2 times this question
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19165259/python-numpy-
| sc...:
|
| 1. "python numpy/scipy curve fitting"
|
| 2. "scipy.optimize.curve_fit question"
|
| Later I can find it with query="curve fitting", or I can also
| find it with query="optimize". So it increases the chance of me
| finding it again :)
| suddenclarity wrote:
| It's probably tied to how I use bookmarks but I strive for
| quality over quantity. Some are just temporary until I get
| the chance to write down the important information or watch
| the video - others are more constant, but when I go through
| and purge bookmarks I want them gone. They will just clutter
| my bookmarks, waste time and make it difficult to find
| things. In your example about bookmarking the question I
| would instead transcribe the knowledge to Obsidian and link
| to the source.
|
| Not saying there's a right or wrong. Just down to how people
| treat bookmarks.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| In Firefox, it's an SQLite database in the profile folder,
| readily accessible by normal SQLite tools. The profile folder
| is accessible through the Help menu, if you don't like to dig
| for it in a file manager.
| worble wrote:
| You can also export them to json from the bookmark manager, I
| do that semi-frequently so I can "spring clean" my bookmarks.
| My old ones are still backed up and can easily be grepped
| with no external tools if I need them.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Firefox/Netscape used to do that.
| Kneecaps07 wrote:
| Didn't Internet Explorer do that? It was just the "Favorites"
| folder c:\users\username.
| alunchbox wrote:
| 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.
| dhoelzgen wrote:
| Thank you! I just learned I don't need Arc to achieve this
| rantingdemon wrote:
| 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.
| budafish wrote:
| I use Linking. It's quite good and actually being developed.
|
| https://linkding.link/
| rantingdemon wrote:
| This looks very interesting. Thank you for the link.
|
| It doesn't support Safari as far as I can see. An extension
| for Safari (especially on IOS), is quite important. This is
| perhaps only for me, because my general workflow tends to be
| quickly scanning a couple of articles that I would want to
| read later, and I would like to easily bookmark them from
| Safari.
|
| Secondly, its self-hosted only. This is perhaps not so bad -
| it just means I have to put some thought into where I would
| host it.
|
| But again, thank you so much for linking linkding :). I am
| definately quite interested in trying it out.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| On paper, tagging is objectively better for the reasons you
| describe. But in my experience, the human brain has an
| intuition for location and object-permanence which is confused
| by having the same thing in multiple places.
| tconfrey wrote:
| ^This!^
|
| With my app, BrainTool ( https://braintool.org ), I emphasize
| a visual hierarchy, but also allow notes and full text
| incremental searching across all saved content. Along with
| comprehensive keyboard commands, this enables a workflow
| where you can start typing what you are looking for, iterate
| through matches and then hit enter when you find it to open
| in a new tab, tabgroup or window.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| Not sure about other browsers, but Firefox's built-in bookmarks
| support tags - no need for external apps.
| rantingdemon wrote:
| I would like to give Firefox a try. I currently use only
| Chrome/Edge/Safari. Let me check if it works in IOS.
| westurner wrote:
| Firefox can store bookmark tags, but they don't save with the
| bookmark export without reading the SQLite database with a
| different tool: "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" (9
| years ago)
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916
|
| With bookmarks as JSONLD Linked Data, it's simple to JOIN
| with additional data about a given URI.
|
| The WebExtensions Bookmark API does not yet support tags.
| depingus wrote:
| Not only that...but Firefox Mobile doesn't support tags
| either!
| cxr wrote:
| Firefox's bookmarks manager exports tags just fine (whether
| to JSON or the bookmarks.html format). WebExtension APIs
| are a completely separate issue.
| josephernest wrote:
| But this file-based bookmarking system totally support tags :)
|
| Example: - Let's say you bookmark my article
| https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark - drag and
| drop => it creates a file "The best browser bookmarking system
| is already built-in.url" - you rename this file into
| "The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in #tag1
| #tag2 #productivity.url" in 2 seconds - later when
| searching, you search with query="bookmarking #productivity",
| bam, you find it with tag "productivity" :)
|
| You can put all .url files in a single folder with "#tags" in
| the filename. It works exactly like a tagging system, no more,
| no less.
| depingus wrote:
| Every once in a while I go down this bookmark rabbit hole. Tags
| is the correct solution (for all the reasons your mentioned). I
| hate the standard folder / tree based bookmark system that
| browsers and most 3rd party bookmark managers use. Firefox
| supports tags, but Firefox Mobile doesn't. Raindrop is clunky
| as hell. And...for along time, that was it.
|
| Luckily, a few years ago I discovered xBrowserSync, which
| turned out to be exactly what I'd been looking for. It's a
| stupidly simple tag only based system that syncs across
| devices. The browser extension makes bookmarking easy. Your
| data is locally encrypted then synced. It has a phone app. It's
| open source. And I can self host a server if I want to. There
| is no "organizing" or sorting of anything. Bookmarks live
| almost ethereally in the plugin (tho they actually live in your
| browser's built-in bookmark manager too...but we never need to
| visit that place).
|
| My only concern is that it hasn't been updated in forever (not
| that it's ever been broken for me). But I fear the day it does
| break and wonder if anyone will be around to fix it.
|
| Someone in the comments below mentioned Linkding, which looks
| like it could work (if the browser extension or bookmarklet
| turn out to be mobile friendly). I'm definitely going to give
| that a run and see how it fits. Anyways, enough shilling for
| xBS (I swear I'm not affiliated with them). Good luck in your
| search.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| josephernest wrote:
| For me, it totally fixed the problem you mentioned: each time I
| find something really interesting, I drag and drop the bookmark
| to either a folder "MISC" (unsorted) or to a dedicated folder
| if it's specific to a project I'm working on.
|
| Since the shortcut's file name contains the Page title, I can
| later search with my OS's search tool "curve fitting .url" =>
| it finds the right bookmark.
|
| If I use it in a particular project, I can copy/paste this .url
| file into the project folder, etc.
|
| Having thousands of bookmarks creates no real problem: you end
| up with thousands of 1KB file in various folders, there is no
| mental burden in that: it doesn't add "weight" to the UX of a
| particular browser extension, since they are only files.
|
| Drag-drop only takes 1 sec, there is no friction, no prompt.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Management overhead must be self imposed? I have tags on some
| of my bookmarks and put them in folders sometimes but that's
| it.
| immibis wrote:
| and if you really aren't sure you can put it in "unsorted"
| which is no worse than a forever tab
| jwells89 wrote:
| Perhaps. In my case bookmarks tend to be append-only because
| going through and reviewing them for relevance, link rot, etc
| is tedious, which then makes finding bookmarks later more
| difficult, particularly when it's been long enough to not
| remember the title/address of the bookmark. Tags can help but
| like folders lose effectiveness with number of bookmarks.
| hawski wrote:
| For some time now I had a similar tab hoarding problem. My
| stop-gap solution is crammming a locally hosted markdown text
| editor in a new tab page. This way my bookmarks live as a
| Markdown file on my computer and I can easily add or remove
| links with as much additional comments as I like.
|
| What I would like to add to it besides tons of polish is for it
| to be an extension that would also expose those bookmarks back
| to browser in form of bookmark folder syncing with the
| underlying markdown.
| tconfrey wrote:
| Give BrainTool a look. Its designed to address tab hoarding by
| making it easy to file and close out tabs and tab groups and
| then re-find them with search and hierarchy and notes.
| Associated keyboard commands make it easy to open/close and
| navigate tabs as a group (eg open a tabgroup with all tabs for
| a given topic). Everything can be synced to a plan text file.
| (Disclaimer, I'm the developer, but also a user!)
|
| [0] https://braintool.org
| vandyswa wrote:
| 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.
| basemi wrote:
| > No browser extension needed.
|
| No but you need an additional app to search/manage them (the file
| browser)?
| josephernest wrote:
| You can use your OS file search tool (even the built-in File
| Explorer search), that you use for your everyday file searches.
| falcolas wrote:
| I have to be honest, I search for files about once a year.
| Tops.
|
| Now then in the browser, I start typing a URL and it's auto-
| completed from my bookmarks (and/or history). Even the most
| casual users do the same, just using search results instead
| of bookmarks.
|
| The idea is fairly sound, but it relies on a bookmark usage
| pattern which I think is becoming more uncommon.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| 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/
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| There is also a self hosted solution called Wallabag
| https://wallabag.org/
|
| Same concept its about archiving rather than just the link,
| given how quickly links often die its often what you want
| depending on why you bookmarked it.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| > Same concept
|
| Unfortunately it looks like Wallabag has the same fundamental
| issue of treating links as primary entities and scraped
| content as additional metadata that I described in the first
| article linked in the parent comment.
|
| Especially when it comes to long form articles which cover
| multiple topics or are by their nature inter-disciplinary, it
| is essential for highlights or slices of content to exist
| independently of their source, while retaining their source
| as metadata, and allowing them to be linked independently
| (via tags, collections, feeds, titles etc.) to other slices
| of content (ie. commentary on the same article).
|
| Archiving is an important step forward though, especially for
| a self-hosted solution, and especially after so many people
| have been burned by Pinboard's failure to deliver on its
| archiving promises for a paid product. I ultimately took a
| different approach to this and instead of maintaining my own
| scraping/archiving product, built an integration with the
| Wayback Machine[1].
|
| [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/
| deafpolygon wrote:
| The internet changes too much, that bookmarking for content is
| sometimes a futile effort. And even then, a browser like
| Firefox lets you tag liberally, if that's your thing.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know... when I bookmark a page, it's because I want to
| get back to that exact, specific page in the future.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| ... which is what happens when you click either the link to
| the source which is stored as metadata or the link to the
| automatically archived website copy.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Well, of course.
|
| I was responding to this:
|
| > bookmarks should be centered around content and not
| metadata (links)
|
| Perhaps I'm not understanding exactly what "centered
| around" means, but to my ears, that statement sounds like
| it would not be an improvement for my particular use case.
|
| Not saying the idea is a bad one at all -- just saying it
| doesn't sound appealing to me personally. But I also
| suspect I may not really be understanding it.
| j45 wrote:
| Do you mean you want to go to back to the exact specific
| sentence(s) on the page you remember reading?
| eduction wrote:
| You advocate what you call a "content first approach" but
| that's not what your solution is. It is a text first approach.
|
| Text is one kind of content. There are many more.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I have built similarly informed systems for bookmarking video
| and audio content; my system for text is the only one that is
| publicly available for others to use.
| dh1011 wrote:
| I completely agree that bookmarks should prioritize content
| over metadata. This is actually what led me to develop the
| "semantic-bookmark-manager" [1]. It uses LLM to summarize the
| content of bookmarked pages and generate relevant tags.
| Additionally, it utilizes RAG to facilitate semantic searching
| within your bookmarks.
|
| [1] https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager
| ulrischa wrote:
| This acrticle completely ignored mobile browsers. You can not
| drag and drop a url file here.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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.
| ulbu wrote:
| "Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough", proceeds to
| not mention it again and talk about the filesystem instead.
| josephernest wrote:
| My title was maybe confusing. By "built-in" bookmarking system,
| I mean the built-in feature "drag-and-drop into .url file". (As
| opposed to using a browser extension).
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| abhinickz wrote:
| I use self hosted https://linkwarden.app/
| peng37 wrote:
| I used to add my links to a github page :) Now I add all my
| frequently used links to easyy.click
| kkfx wrote:
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| That would compete with Pocket (Mozilla's proprietary,
| commercial bookmarking service). So there's little chance of
| that happening.
|
| See also: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Permafrost>
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| 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
| yoavm wrote:
| To so many of these the answer is yes.
|
| - Comments? Put them in the filename
|
| - Tags? Put them in the filename
|
| - Sync? Many of us already sync our devices in some way
| (dropbox/gdrive/syncthing/...). I see it as a plus - it puts me
| in control, not "the cloud"
|
| - Import / Export? `mv` & `cp`. You can take your export on a
| USB stick, send it over email, you name it.
|
| - Users? /home/bob/bookmarks, /home/alice/bookmarks
| homebrewer wrote:
| Use extended attributes, putting everything into the filename
| is awkward.
| yoavm wrote:
| That makes it much harder to search, sync, export etc.
| Awkward? yes, but there's nothing wrong with it.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| 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>
| divbzero wrote:
| macOS (Sequoia 15.0) also handles _*.url_ files appropriately:
| file type is identified as _Web site location_ and opens with
| the default browser.
| pragma_x wrote:
| The real question is: do Windows and Linux browsers handle
| the .webloc variety?
| jdiff wrote:
| At least on Linux it'd be relatively trivial to have a
| small script or application that registers to handle webloc
| files and feeds it into xdg-open.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Weird note: you can't Airdrop .webloc URLs to your iPhone/iPad,
| ditto .textClipping, etc. macOS's edges have become more
| pronounced over time. Don't get me started on how many of
| Apple's apps don't have spring-loaded folders...
| thesnide wrote:
| Bah... just give us the good old del.icio.us.
|
| Not the recent .com HD remaster.
| clircle wrote:
| 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).
| josephernest wrote:
| Genuine question: why using the bookmark bar which is so tiny
| (a narrow 30 pixel high bar) to browse through thousands of
| bookmarks, when you can comfortably move/delete/rename/group in
| folders/use CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-X, CTRL-Z to undo/etc. in a
| big file explorer window?
|
| My point is: the file explorer seems to have (at least for me)
| a far better UX than the browser's bookmark bar.
|
| Example: you accidentally renamed a bookmark in the bookmark
| bar. Can you do CTRL-Z? No! With files in file explorer, you
| could.
| jcotton42 wrote:
| > whose primary downside is the vendor lock in, imo
|
| I fail to see how bookmarks have vendor lock in. Every browser
| I've used has bookmark import/export to a format understandable
| by other browsers, like HTML.
| anthk wrote:
| Check Nyxt for something else superior to plain bookmarking:
| https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/dbscan.org
| mjevans wrote:
| 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...
| josephernest wrote:
| Efficiency/performance questions would be important if we would
| process thousands of such files per second, but this is not the
| case, or is it? We read/write these .url files at a pace of
| maybe 1 file per second maximum, if we are browsing fast, and
| want to save many bookmarks in a short time.
|
| IMHO filesystem efficiency questions never arise for bookmarks
| of a user of a computer. If one day you want to do some data
| mining on your 10k bookmarks, it will probably take < 1 second,
| even if done with Python.
|
| Do you see a real-life situation for which reading a .url in 1
| us instead of 100 us would make any difference?
|
| (If you're speaking about search/querying, then the OS search
| feature does it for us)
| eduction wrote:
| 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.
| josephernest wrote:
| > 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 [...]
|
| I respectfully disagree. If we were speaking about millions or
| billions of data points, yes, performance would be important,
| and we would look for the "Right Way" to do it, either with a
| DB or with files+symlinks, as you describe.
|
| But here simplicity and portability is key. "Title of the page
| #tag1 #tag2.url" does the job: easily searchable with the OS
| search. Why complicate this with symlinks and folders for tags
| for just a few 10k bookmarks?
| eduction wrote:
| Maybe I was a little harsh there.
|
| I'd prefer the folder approach. Instead of running a search
| you'd just open the folders.
|
| Not hard either, on macOS you can option drag to make an
| alias.
| mikojan wrote:
| 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.
| thelostdragon wrote:
| 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)
| teknopaul wrote:
| alt="Windows user discovers beauty of Unix ;)"
| abraxas wrote:
| 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.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| >Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA
| making this idea less than ideal.
|
| I've noticed this. The worst part is if you are looking for
| some specific piece of information similar to other links that
| are still valid it's hard to tell if you have the correct
| information at hand or not.
|
| Chrome can take a full page snapshot of a webpage but the image
| is not high res.
| bentocorp wrote:
| 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.
| jrks11o wrote:
| yeah, i only use tiktok too
| sogen wrote:
| Shout out to Kinopio[1], an awesome canvas/to-do/mind-map tool
|
| [1]: https://kinopio.club/
| throwiiU wrote:
| 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...
| ks2048 wrote:
| 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 :)
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| 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.
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