It baffles me that bookmarks and history browsing in current browsers is still so terrible. In some cases it feels like it has gotten worse compared to a decade ago. Browser history certainly has, because for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.
I think the bookmarks UI has gotten so bad (or stayed stuck where it was instead of improving)... because so many people use tabs for what they could be using bookmarks for. A really well designed bookmarks UI might be able to do even better for them, but with tabs being 'good enough' (and better, for their needs, than the bookmarks UI they had historically when they started using tabs)... attention to bookmarks UI languishes.
A good bookmarks UI is a hard problem, and there's no guarantee you'll succeed at getting people to use it instead of tabs, so the cost-benefit-risk isn't motivating.
If someone did want to create a 'next gen' bookmarks UI... I'd start by intensively studying how and why people use tabs. :)
Bookmarks used to launch in a little docked file browser style window. It was ugly, but it was easy and quick to organize. You can still get it to behave like that, but it takes a lot more effort so, it has definitely gotten worse in my opinion. Certainly it takes more effort to organize.
Really, what they should have is a "Snapshot" option and a bookmark option where the snapshot saves a static local copy of a site and a bookmark saves a link. Bookmarks should have RSS integration so you can optionally sort by recently updated. History needs a meaningful search option and a way to group/nest by domain. We haven't even tried to pick the low hanging fruit.
Bookmarks are however, antithetical to Google's worldview and business model which I think drives some of their languish given that so much of the internet now relies on Chrome.
> for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.
The pessimist in me would say that's to make you go back to Google and search for it again in the hopes that they can show you more ads on the results page.
That's the way I've always overcome the problem of getting to bookmarks also. You give up a little real estate to keep the bookmarks bar visible, but it is a good way to organize things by subject matter, project, urgency, etc.
That being said, I'd love a configurable cache that would allow me to open a group of bookmarks to exactly where I left off on each page (or where I had frozen the data to keep a static record.)
