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How often do you go through your bookmarks/favorites?
I recently switch browsers from Safari to Orion after many, many years. I imported all of my bookmarks and then realized that I couldn't remember the last time I went through them to see what was still useful (or even around).
I also realized that I don't save a ton of bookmarks anymore as I keep all of my browsing history available and search through that.
How often do you all go through your bookmarks/favorites?
Literally never. But having things bookmarked is still beneficial for auto-completion in the address bar.
This is it for me, with the exception of maybe a folder or two and my bookmarks toolbar. Everything else is kind of a mess in multiple unnamed folders which have named folders (or not) within them. I also use plugins like Tab Stash and OneTab.
Nowhere nearly as often as is necessary to keep up with link rot and relevance shifts. Much of this can be owed to browser bookmark managers not being particularly good I believe… adding bookmarks is low friction but managing them is not, which is a recipe for runaway accumulation.
It's also part of why I'm a tab hoarder and make heavy use of good implementations of tab groups (like Safari's tab groups) and vertical tabs where they're available. Tab management is lower friction and because tabs are always on-screen they get cleaned up more frequently since they're highly visible.
One feature I wish that browsers would implement is snapshots of the page at the time it was bookmarked. Then even with link rot the bookmarks remain useful.
That would be really nice. Even better if it has Syncthing-style P2P between devices so you use your phone to pull a page you archived on your desktop.
The Wayback Machine browser extension has an option to automatically save a snapshot of a page when you bookmark it. I would prefer a local snapshot with the option for a cloud one, but it's better than nothing.
@Akir That's a brilliant idea! I mean, it might use up storage on a device what with all the cruft that websites now use; but still so very much worth it!
What vertical tab solutions have you been using?
I am in full agreement with you that bookmarking has become irrelevant once I got into tab-hoarding. Actually, I’m mildly different: I used tabs for “I should check this out one day” and bookmarks for “done with this for now, but it may prove useful in the future.”
When using Windows and Linux, it's usually Firefox with modified userchrome.css to hide the hideous sidebar header and pull the sidebar up into what was formerly toolbar space, along with the vertical tab extension Sidebery, which looks like this. On macOS where Firefox is my secondary browser I use a setup that's similar but simpler, with Tab Center Reborn being the vertical tab extension of choice.
On macOS, I've been bouncing around. Traditionally I use Safari which doesn't have vertical tabs, but implements its tab groups in a vertical sidebar which works well as long as I'm diligent about grouping my tabs well. For a while I was using Orion which is designed basically to be a power user's Safari which has native vertical tabs, but it's still a work in progress and has some lingering issues like memory leaks. After that I was using Arc which has a very good vertical tabs implementation (and in fact, doesn't even support "normal" horizontal tabs), but it's Chromium-based and I don't like furthering the Chromium/Blink web engine monopoly, so for now I'm back on Safari.
I used Firefox with Tree-Style Tabs when I was slumming it with an RPi4 (8gig RAM) as a desktop. Before that, I used Tree Tabs. Do you have a preference between Sidebery, TST, and TCR? Tree Tabs was my fave until I discovered development stopped. It may still work, but I can't expect them to fix any jank if the last update was in 2019.
I look forward to this fall's new Safari release on the Mac. The addition of multiple account containers and dock icons for web apps means that I can switch back to Safari as my primary browser and use Firefox for specialist cases, such as Reddit, Philomena-based boorus, and Niantic Wayfarer, where I need Firefox-specific addons (or Violent Monkey scripts). The difference in battery life from Safari vs. Firefox is notable.
It might sound stupid, but I never used TST much because I couldn't get it looking quite the way I wanted it to. That pushed me to the original Tab Center experiment by Mozilla, which I liked more despite having fewer features because of its aesthetics.
So that puts TCR and Sidebery over TST for me. I don't clearly prefer one over the other; TCR is better for machines where my browsing isn't going to get "serious" and I just need tabs to not be a scrunched up mess, whereas Sidebery is better suited for machines where heavy duty browsing is more likely to happen.
On my main Mac I'm running the Sonoma beta which comes with that new Safari release you mentioned. Multi-account containers hasn't landed yet, but PWAs have and yes, they're nice, especially since unlike with Chromium's implementation, PWAs can be open without also launching the host browser. That quirk of Chromium PWAs has been keeping me from using them, because it's infuriating to Chrome or Edge or whatever open too when you really just want to open your YouTube PWA — it basically assumes whatever you created the PWA with will also be your default browser, which is not necessarily true.
Occasionally but I completely changed my bookmarking process. I integrated it with my notes.
I have a tag in my notes (Joplin) which I call "bookmarks." When I come across a website, a link, whatever, that I want to save, I save it as a note in Joplin and then I give it a tag of "bookmarks," and then I add usually a comment or two about why I saved it.
And then at some point in the future, when I happen to need something I think I saved before, I do a quick search and boom, there it is, in my notes.
This seems to work just fine for me.
I'm looking into changing my process like this. Do you use the web clipper or copy manually into notes? I would love to clean out my ~100 tabs of potentially interesting content on mobile, but it will be tedious since it seems like there's no web clipper for iOS.
Too much automation is like bookmarking a page or adding it to Safari's reading list. It's too easy to do so you'll do it so often that you'll never go through what you saved.
Manual copypasting requires you to do the cost/benefit analysis of "do I actually want to read this later or does bookmarking this make me feel smarter because I saved this?"
Makes sense, thanks. Will start trying out the manual approach this week!
On my phone, I use the share function. If open a website and want to save it, just click share, then select Joplin and that will create a new note with the URL and the title of the page, then I can add more info.
On my computer, on the other hand, not as efficient. I manually copy, paste, and add additional info to Joplin.
How are you finding your experience with Joplin? I've been looking for a good notes application.
It's not as flashy as a lot of the other note taking apps out there but it works. It syncs extremely well (for my needs at least) between three different devices (a Linux Mint computer, a Windows 10 computer, and a Pixel 5 phone).
I actually stopped keeping browser bookmarks almost completely when I started keeping a research notes database. If I find a link that sounds interesting/useful, I throw it in a given note-- the topic is it's most relevant to-- and whenever I'm working on that topic, all my maybe-interesting stuff is right there to be organized, reviewed, and thrown out or re-found if link rot's gotten it.
I've found it dramatically reduces the amount of mental noise I have to deal with, and it focuses stuff on a per-topic basis without having dozens of bookmark folders I'm going to forget exist, and all the links are in a context where I can arbitrarily sort and make notes on why I'm keeping them at all.
I only use bookmarks for useful links that I can't remember, and usually it turns into a big pile of links that used to be useful to me. I clean it out whenever I get bored, usually once a year or so.
I save articles that I want to read with Instapaper, and I pick a few things from that list most nights when I have some time to read. I try to maintain this so it doesn't get out of control, which usually means going on and deleting articles that I saved more than ~6 months ago.
For truly exceptional articles that I might want to refer to again, I save the link in Pinboard, making extensive use of the tagging system.
I've been doing this for years, and it works well for me.
I have a few folders which are useful ([food], [music], [patient safety]) and I try to keep those sensibly organised. I also have a lot of other stuff which is less useful, and probably could do with clearing out.
EDIT: I just exported them from Firefox to a bookmarks.html file, and that's 2.6mb, so that's quite a lot of cruft.
I like Oliver Burkeman's post "Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket":
I usually read things as I find them, if not, I save them in plain text notes for the evening. Latter is rare though and only do that when I am in a hurry. I usually let go of links I don't read immediately - if I am not interested now then would I be later?
And if I did find a link of use and want to find/share it later, I put it on my links page of my GitHub Pages MkDocs site so I can find them anywhere regardless of wether I have access to my bookmarks (like when I want someone to pull the link from their own phone while I don't have mine at hand).
I read this same blog post (maybe a few weeks ago?), and it made me feel so good; like, relieved somehow. :-)
I noticed myself lessening the rate at which i have been bookmarking stuff after reading it; so its been effective for me, that;'s foir sure!
You can check my post history for more on this, but for the last 3+ years I've been bookmarking content, not URLs (the URLs and archival versions of the websites are stored as metadata).
I use fuzzy full-text search at least once a day to find something I have highlighted and saved for some reason or other. My highlights are pretty good so usually I don't need to go to the source (which can be a significantly longer piece of text in some cases), but sometimes I do go back to the source for additional context.
If the source is no longer online I check out the web archive version that automatically gets saved for every website that I highlight and save something from.
I've declared bookmark bankruptcy. I'm using Arc now and it doesn't even have the concept of bookmarks, just pinned tabs. I thought I'd hate that at first but I actually love it. If I'm working on something and need references I'll create a folder and pin it. When I'm done with it I'll either delete it or if there was something really valuable in there, I'll add it to a list of resources I keep on my website.
So I in essence replaced my mess of open tabs with Raindrop to be used as bookmarks. Not the most efficient system, but I guess for now it works.
I go through 'em about once a year or so, or whenever I get a wild hair on my honeybun. I've accumulated some sites for inspiration, stores I frequent (or infrequent, but still use), and social media.
The ones I frequent most are also linked on my New Tab page or the Bookmarks Toolbar. What're mostly shunted to the Bookmarks corner are: specialty stores, wishlist stuff (mostly obsolete due to save-for-later feature on most eCommerce sites), utilities and money management (paying bills online, bank), media (streaming or otherwise), handy online web tools (Coolors being a recent addition), and Marge's Potato "I Just Think It's Neat" folder. Everything else is either an app or RSS.
OMG, that's hilarious! @albinanigans I don't think i have ever heard this term, and now you've taught me a thing. lol :-D Thanks!
Basically never. They just accumulate and accumulate and accumulate and I never even use them.
I go through them whenever I feel like I need to? I have a few core ones I use daily for work, but then everything else just sort of sits. Especially on my phone.
I actually just went through my computer ones a month or so back. The phone ones, I went through them a few months ago, but mostly to organize them into groupings.
I weirdly do it both ways, on my desktop PC I have a decent amount of bookmarks, a mix of sites I like and folders where I have a bunch of stuff bookmarked as a list of things to remember.
Then on my laptop I have 0 bookmarks, I just use my frequently/recently visited list to go where I want or just google.
On my pc I will occasionally clean it up a bit but thats fairly rare.
I have some I click regularly, others I just keep because I'm just used to seeing them and it feels weird to have them gone. Moving or deleting them, even if I don't use them, would mess with my muscle memory. I actually do wish I had more "active" bookmarks though, purely for nostalgia purposes.
I use a bookmarks toolbar on desktop and have a 'speed dial' on mobile. These allow me one click access to sites I visit frequently - Gmail, etc. One thing that made this work for me was to have the bookmarks stored with no name, so they just display as the sites favicon - I can fit loads in this way. Occasionally the favicon is poor / doesn't work so I use a heavily abbreviated name too. I do update these semi regularly as my browsing habits change.
I don't particularly use bookmarks beyond this, but occasionally do flag a page I think might be useful in the future because it contains some useful info - but equally I find myself scouring my browsing history for sites like this occasionally too. Ivery rarely sort of tidy this.
Information I identify as super important / useful I copy and save into Google Keep.
I use Firefox with the Bookmark Dial plugin. I have a folder called "Quick Dial", and under that a "Work" and "Home" sub-folder. For FF at work I use work, for FF at home I use home. It's all in the name. That way I can just middle click on every thumbnail to open the relevant websites for each location, but dont have the super slow loading times of having the tabs set to auto open.
I guess this means I go through them pretty much daily?
The only other reason I use bookmarks is to force them to show up in Firefox's "Awesome bar" or whatever they're calling it now. Items that are bookmarked show up at the top which makes it easier to get to with keyboard shortcuts. Those I basically "go through" them any time I use the awesome bar to go to a site so I guess I'd notice pretty quick if they stopped working.
Bookmarks are also good for websites I want to use but can never remember the name of. Like Kagi Search. I can never remember the thing when Google and Bing haven't given me what I need, so it's in the bookmarks. Those rarely get looked at except when I'm trying to remember a domain and I'll often search the bookmarks for a description or tag I've given it than anything.
In the past, i used to go through my bookmarks maybe once or twice per year at most. Nowadays, i think i go through some sections/sub-folders once per month...i'm trying my best to carve away stuff, and diminish my digital hoarding habits. Or, at least for truly important stuff, try to save/archive it offline in order to fend off linkrot. That being said, some time ago, i had an idea to craft up a little python script to export all my bookmarks, run through a process to check if they're broken or not, and kill off any broken ones, etc. But, then, i got dismayed because things changed so much on the web...so never did create that script...Maybe this is the nudge that i need to get forward movement on it? ;-)
Never. I stopped bookmarking pages on my browser as I started using Reddit more and more and just used the save function over there. Looking back through my saved posts on Reddit is pretty overwhelming as I have hundreds of links saved lol. I’ve started a similar hoard here but currently only have one post saved I think. My bookmarks these days is just the main websites I browse. Only times my bookmarks change is when I get a tracking link for something I ordered but those only last a few days at a time.
I have a bookmarks folder full of music I've discovered that I want to check out again and perhaps purchase / download. I go through once in a while and remove whatever I download or decide I don't like that much. There are about 170 bookmarks in there at the moment, some from as much as 5 years ago due to tracks never getting released. I don't do streaming music, my library is approaching 20k MP3s and AIFFs. I sync select playlists with the music player on my phone so at any given time there's ~3000 songs on my phone too, organized into my own playlists, and I can listen to almost anything I want without needing an internet connection (great for camping!)
Also a folder with 50 or so recipes I enjoy, might have to do some culling there eventually.
Other than that I don't really bookmark much. Got my frequently used sites in the bar and that's it.
Actual bookmarks? Almost never for personal use. I have a few essentials on the bookmark bar in a work context, because there are a bunch of sometimes essential but hard to find internal pages I'll need to access sometimes.
For personal use, bookmarks have largely been superceded by tab hoarding/pinning for the absolute essentials. And also, especially since dropping reddit, I've doubled down on RSS. I cleaned out my list of tracked sites, reorganized, did some research on new ones to follow. That's been a lot of my "keeping updated" reading lately.