I gave up on bookmarks in normal web browsers. (I still use them on my phone.)
I have five or six permanent tab-pins in each of Firefox and Chrome, and about two hundred open tabs at any given time. Add in search engines and history suggestions, and I'm covered.
It would be nice if unused tabs gradually migrated to a bookmark list, I suppose, but we're already most of the way there with late-loading tabs.
Wait... you mention Chrome... and two hundred tabs open. Given that Chrome (very intentionally) becomes unusable before you get to 15 tabs even on gigantic widescreen monitors, how does Chrome manage to remain in your stable of browsers? I'm in the many-tabs crowd, but not so much to replace bookmarks. Bookmarks to me are 'this is a resource I will probably need later... likely much later'. Open tabs are 'I want to read this soon', and soon might be weeks later (though I usually get time to read on the weekends).
I gave up on Chrome when they took their perfectly usable vertical tabs implementation (which was an experimental feature you had to enable manually through the about:config page at the time) and just tore it out one day for no reason better than 'eh, we dont think that was a good design'. There weren't any problems with it. It wasn't holding back the development of anything else. Just some random dude at Google got a bug up his ass and decided to destroy Chromes usability for a few thousand users. And, of course, thanks to the whole invisible upgrade 'feature', the application just became unusable overnight with no mention.
Personally, I want the solution I've wanted for a very long time - tabs that remain open. Forever. At least, that is how it should LOOK, with the intelligent swapping and like going on in the background. When Firefox came out with the fullscreen tab manager with tab groups and everything I was so psyched.... and then I found out that Firefox actually keeps ALL of those tabs in memory. And you can't close a group and come back to it later. Useless.
I don't push 200, but 80 isn't rare for me (going by TooManyTabs extension count). IME, Firefox slows down much faster than Chrome when browsing this way (on Win7-64 w/ 4-8GB of RAM).
Do you know about the 'load tabs on demand' feature shipped in firefox 13?
I usually leave tabs to read later open and restart my browser each morning. This way only tabs I visit that day will be in memory.
Maybe there should be a dormant tab-space, like on the left side of the browser. If you drag a tab there, it disappears in. Then, you can drag-move or drag-copy (to not lose its place in the bookmark space) back to the live tabs. Maybe give it multiple rows, which you can label (or not).
Posting comments seems to be broken there for me (though I bet that's Ghostery's fault) so instead I'll post it here:
My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they force them into a tree structure.
They're not trees and I hate that I have to put them into one. Tags and labels are where they should be, more like the way things like delicious had them. Even though Firefox has tags, they're not prominent and not the primary way of organizing them, so they're not as easy to use as they should be.
Of course each browser has extensions that provide things like what I want, but none polished enough to make integration seamless and make adding new bookmarks painless enough to use, at least so far as I've tried.
The other important thing for me is being able to clip portions of a page and being able to annotate a page with notes, references and comments.
For all of those reasons, I'm stuck using an even less tailored tool (Evernote) to do my bookmarks. So, here's to hoping that improving bookmarks ends up being the next frontier.
Oh and -- by the way, your email validation in the comments here is broken. It thinks +'s are not valid.
"My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they force them into a tree structure."
I use bookmarks all the time in Firefox, but never, ever think about a hierarchy. You can very quickly search for bookmarks from the URL bar, and tag them if need to add a couple of keywords.
Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?
Also if we imagine some person starting bookmark list from scratch, with tags - he has to A) make complete tag system from the beginning (I've tried, it's not easy) or he'll be forced to re-tag old ones later; B) type in tags (or select) every time he bookmarks site.With folder trees I use one click to drag&drop bookmark to the intended place.
Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them completely.
On sets with 10-100 bookmarks type of index system is completely irrelevant - you can even keep them in a plain list and still don't waste time.
"Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?"
I would if it were easier to do so.
The extra 2 seconds to do it is the bottleneck, so trimming that is the solution. When I click the star or hit ctrl-d in Chrome (I'm sure it's the same in Firefox), the title of the bookmark is in focus. I almost never change that, so that's useless.
Put the tag field in focus, and make tags autocomplete. That'd put me most of the way there.
Of course you're right -- prepopulating the field with tags other people used would be a much further step.
> Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them completely.
Which is why my dream bookmark manager has a "download and index bookmarked page" checkbox. Tags become optional - but you can still search for your stuff easily. A small-scale local information retrieval system would be way better suited to how we use bookmarks than manual tags, and we have some pretty awesome information retrieval models for closed sets of data that we can't use on the web.
I think mozilla has the perfect UI to get to your bookmarks via tags and complex hierarchy, through the awesome bar.
That is the thing that needs to be improved.. also showing thumbnails? why not, just let me search to get there.
Judging by the screenshots, this new UI seem to offer zero improvements in my common task of getting back to something I somewhat remember. But maybe it's awesome who knows.
I'm too lazy to tag my bookmarks so i hope there's a way to throw all bookmarks into 1 buckets and have some way to search just on those bookmarks. Is there a way to do that now?
* Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
* Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
* Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
* Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
* Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed.
* Add # to search for matches in page titles.
* Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
That's how I do my bookmarking with Chrome. I sync bookmarks across all devices and only customize the bookmark description (by appending a few tags) if the page title isn't identifiable enough by itself. Then I just search them using the address bar if I can remember what I'm looking for. Only very occasionally do I need to use the bookmark manager.
I never really used bookmarks before, but this workflow has been lightweight enough that I can use it without thinking or switching mental gears. Ctrl/Cmd-D, maybe add a tag or two (or copy the title if I'm reading a paper with the embedded PDF reader), done.
No way that I know of, but it is a good idea. Supplemented by "search on sites I visited about a month ago", that should cover it.
Making that work across multiple devices is another can of worms. Possibly a very desirable can for some people, who'd like to host the data.
Self-hosting would imply some data syncing service, but it should be one where data is encrypted before leaving home (and stays encrypted until it returns to owner - not the case with Dropbox and most other services). Though the browser or browser extension could take care of that.
Firefox has Sync so they can build on that for cross-device data search. Comm'on Firefox, you get paid for Google Search anyway so build an extension for this. Do it!
I still miss Powermarks (EOL-ed some time ago). Anyone looking to improve bookmarking owes it to themselves to look into it.
Amongst other things, it would grab a default set of tags from the page's meta-content. (Of course, this was back before there was so much gaming of same.) And tags were defined as a whitespace-separated list, which made manual tagging very easy and quick. Search was also a whitespace-separated list, with limited wildcarding. With several thousand bookmarks, it typically took me 1-3 seconds to drill down to the one I wanted. And it took only a few seconds to define a new bookmark with a sufficient set of tags that I'd be able to quickly find it again with an appropriate intersection (or, more likely, one of several possible intersections, depending upon what I remembered of it at the time of recall).
Of course, these days what with disappearing content and the like, one may be better off relying more on local, offline caching/storing of static content, á la Scrapbook, for example.
I'm an enthusiastic user of Pinboard but over the past few days I've been putting "permanent" bookmarks into Trello instead. This seems to be working out OK for me.
By "permanent" I mean things which I know I will want to refer back to all the time, rather than just things I might want to look at or read at some point in the future.
A good example of this would be a Trello board for recurring payment services, with a separate card for each provider (along with evaluation notes etc.).
I also have an extensive list of movies and TV shows to watch in Trello, and this approach allows me to categorise/rank/organise them much more easily than any bookmarking system I know.
I'm still a big fan of delicious. It's not just having my bookmarks decentralized and tagged, but also since it's easily accessible I can share any tag set with anyone I know.
I basically use it as a mass dump of everything I find remotely interesting on the internet. I just give links enough tags so I can find them again. That way I can use it as a first buffer before doing a full on search. If I want to find a chocolate cookie recipe I can just type in the tags "recipe cookie chocolate" and if I've tagged a recipe like that before I know it's quality because I've tagged it before. Even if I don't remember tagging it.
Installed the beta of their preview extension and it does not look good for now. It is ridiculously long to load, scrolling is painful, and more importantly (as other points can be fixed), I don't like the user experience that is proposed here: it is painful to find a particular bookmark or topic, you end up scrolling through tons of them.
I rather use tags to organize my bookmarks, even if it is less visual.
For this purpose I prefer to use personal wiki such as tomboy (http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/) or notational velocity (http://notational.net/). They both let me quickly organize my bookmarks along with notes in a hypertext format (imagine that)!
Bookmarking, storing, saving - these are all important things that need improving, but the scope of this doesn't go far enough IMO. To make bookmarks useful the page needs to be archived (for when the page disappears, lost a few that way), with full text searching and notes/annotations help too.
I like keeping the ownership of my data as much as I can. Also, I find Evernote really painful to use, especially for bookmarks. I had experienced it a while ago; coming from Delicious at that time; and I had found it painful and badly integrated in the browser.
Chrome and Firefox's URL/omni-bars will pull up partial match results for bookmarks.
As such, the benefit outlined by the grandparent post is available without having to hand that information over to a third party, unless you opt into a cross-device or cross-browser bookmark syncing service.
I have five or six permanent tab-pins in each of Firefox and Chrome, and about two hundred open tabs at any given time. Add in search engines and history suggestions, and I'm covered.
It would be nice if unused tabs gradually migrated to a bookmark list, I suppose, but we're already most of the way there with late-loading tabs.