Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken?
I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember.
Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken.
If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.
I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago:
A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall, Pocket remains a roach motel: articles check in but they never check out.
What I really want is a persistant, local, tagged, searchable, entirely-offline-usable archive of content. There seems to be little interest (or supreme obstacles) in providing this. (I've looked at Zotero, Calibre, and Mendalay, none really suit my workflow.)
I've utterly given up any hope of browser vendors delivering this.
It's weird. The exact same problem affects to-do apps and note taking apps. I'm pretty sure it was a HN post I recently read where the problem of to-do apps was discussed. People go through phases: discover an app, start with a clean slate, get a better night's sleep because you get to write down all the things you're definitely going to do, work your way through x% of the list, gradually accumulate a list of things you shamefully failed to do, and eventually getting thoroughly depressed with the app and stop using it (or nuke the list every few months). Browser tabs are just another to-do list. So are those kitchen drawers, garden shed workbenches with half finished projects on them, tech books you insist that you'll read, and Udemy courses you bought in a sale and never used. These things all remind me of the 90 year old man who lives half a mile from my house, who has two beautiful old cars in his garage. One is an Austen A30, the other a '65 Jaguar S-Type. Both sit quietly rusting under disintegrated tarps. I'm sure he must have had dreams of fully renovating them when he bought them 30 years ago, but he knows that when he dies they'll end up as scrap, or maybe as some other retired gentleman's project that'll never get completed, and whenever he sees them, I'm sure it eats away at him, like the rust eats his cars.
And yes, there's a lot there that resonated strongly with me.
The cars-under-tarps anecdote is an excellent one. As life goes on, one accumulates an ever-growing list of gates which have closed irrevocably behind one. The German word Torschlusspanik is a brilliant invocation of this. The English equivalent is roughly "mid-life crisis", though the German captures far more of the essence and slowly-building grief.
There's saying (memory says Chinese though I'm unsure and can't locate it): a wise man is prepared to part with his possessions several times in his lifetime. That might extend to dreams and expectations as well as physical cargo.
Funny to come across this thread. Just a week ago my best friend had been moaning for two years about tidying his garage. I came with two beers intent on a chill weekend watchinh olympics but I happened to run into his wife as she was parking her car in the garage. We spoke for a minute but I decided we'd rather start working on his garage. My friend came out and we started. A few hours later, tired and hungry, his SO served us with a pretty full meal which is both extraordinary and unusual since Ive never been given anything by her in the ten years we've known each other nor have I seen her cooking. I have no doubt my boy got some that night but it was satisfying to just work and do something useful to bond.
I think there is something fundamentally ancient about it, like how young women braid each others hair and probably been doing it since year one of humanity's existence. Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.
Now that you mention it, it seems that there is indeed a phenomena worth exploring here.
I may have done many things in life that I perceive to be valuable for our family, but nothing earned me as many 'points' with Mrs. as did the act of just sucking it up and cleaning the entire garage one day.
>> Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.
I think there is a lot of truth to this actually. Admittedly I'm a little sleep deprived right now in that way that leads you reading a statement and feeling it is incredibly profound in a way you might not otherwise... but still I think you are really onto something.
Working with someone smooths out the edges well when things go poorly (if something goes wrong and you are alone it is easier to be grumpy about it than if you have someone with you to say "oh well, we can do X instead" or "It doesn't really matter"), they make the work feel seen and therefore feel more valuable. I can enjoy cooking for (and especially with my partner) but I can never be bothered to really cook for myself, even if I'd enjoy the meal more in the end it doesn't feel worth the time and energy investment when I could just slap together a sandwich or something.
This extends to hobby projects as well in a big way, perhaps even more. Sure I could spend hours painting a picture and have people say "wow, that's impressive" (this is just an example, I can't actually paint), but it feels hard to justify when I have other things I might need to do. If someone else is working on the same thing with you it makes you feel like you are investing that time in them, which is inherently fulfilling.
Even in your example of you helping your friend, once they've accepted you are helping they will feel like every bit of work they do will make your life easier. It's less intense but they will still feel like they are contributing to your efforts in someway, or at least like they are working towards a mutual goal instead of something kind of isolated.
Good explanation of something that I've felt and discussed a few times before.
I've stopped using todo apps and just write the daily/weekly list of high-prio items in my paper notebooks. That way it doesn't accumulate a bunch of items that'll I'll likely never get too. The most important things will resurface anyway.
I feel much better not dragging along a list that keeps growing. Sure, that means I'll sometimes forget or be late or need reminding, but from my perspective, that's an acceptable trade-off.
I have a short list of daily todos that include six subjects that I want to focus on. If I do something towards that task, I add a checkmark for every day of every month. It is interesting to see how consistent or inconsistent I am with tasks over time. This is primarily motivation towards learning basics or attempting master of something.
People should be taught to pursue things on a daily basis from a young age. I think it helps temper expectations about what can actually be done over time, which is not a skillset I had when I was younger: I was in constant pursuit of too many things all of the time.
Check out BrainTool (https://braintool.org) it's a browser extension that allows you to trivially add pages to a custom hierarchal 'Topic tree' along with notes on why you're saving the page, and then to control opening and closing tabs by topic. Everything is saved to an org-mode syntax text file. So of your requirements it's persistent, local, tagged and entirely-offline-usable. Incremental search is in the works.
It works with tab groups on Chrome, Edge and Brave which adds another step toward keeping your browser organized.
Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment.
It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed.
The remaining possibility would be a generalised HTTP/HTML (and if possible other document markup) programming libraries.
> Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users.
Please do!
I already sent some money in that direction and will be happy to send more.
I will also be happy to test it (commit to 1-2 hours or maybe more pr week of actual following-a-plan testing not just "using it and see if it works" for a few weeks) but I am afraid I can't learn enough Rust to be helpful at the moment (small kids and a full time job).
I use Pocket a lot. There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do but I find it at least usable for storing stuff and finding it later once you get used to it. Most of the problems in that post have been at least partly addressed, although I don't ever use tags so have no comments about those.
> There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do
Consider that if Mozilla hadn't lied about how it was going to open source it when they announced they were buying Pocket (alternatively, if people actually held them accountable instead of demonstrating that the public's short memory means that you can lie about pretty much anything), then someone would have probably fixed at least a few of those.
If all you're doing is using it to store stuff, then instead of signalling to a company that bad behavior pays off by rewarding them for it, consider using Zotero instead, which doesn't have a history of being insultingly mendacious and by default keeps your data private (in the form of reliable, bog standard files on your own disk). Or, if you're willing to suffer through slightly more geekery, there's Perkeep/Camlistore.
One of my main use cases of Pocket is basically using it like a podcast app (via text2speech and syncing across different devices) with highlighting capability. I've created some of my own workarounds for its failings (such as not being able to save articles behind some paywalled websites).
I'd ideally like to move to something else but I haven't found an alternative that's as good. Not being able to export my data, do any kind of advanced searching, or access a few of my files in Pocket really does suck.
I see Zotero has a third-party Android app, maybe I'll try that and see if it is decent.
I believe it is in Google's and Microsoft's interest to keep bookmarks crippled. Every time you forgo using your bookmarks to lookup something, you instead use their search services, which indirectly translates to money in their pocket.
So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla, telling them "if you ever make a bookmark system better than ours, we'll pull all our Google funding"?
I'm going to stick with Hanlon's razor and assume making a better bookmark system is non-trivial.
The project had reportedly already integrated the major improvements from Servo into the main engine. It's not outlandish to assume that the marginal benefit of working on Servo was lower, compared to working on features on the main browser.
If you really want to go that route, you could make an argument that maybe Mozilla is handicapping Firefox's bookmark feature to get people to subscribe to Pocket... but people in this thread who are using Pocket also complain it doesn't solve their problems. What's the angle there? Pocket doesn't want paying customers?
However Apple has no such agenda and yet Safari has probably the worst bookmark/history management of them all. So it seems to be a question of product management priorities really.
Firefox allows to search your bookmarks by prepending * (an asterisk) to the input of the adress bar. They have also added a button for that a while ago. It's next to the search engine buttons at the bottom of the results panel. These buttons also show the shortcut symbols in their hover-text.
The search functionality is still very limited, though. I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines, I remember mentions of the thing the article is telling about.
Local bookmarks need an offline cache that at least contains the text content and headings of the URL. Otherwise, the search will stay useless because nobody can organize them manually without making (human) mistakes after a while.
Ironically, Chromium's omnibar search worked by searching through headlines for a while; but meanwhile it's broken again, and it never worked for bookmarks and only for history entries.
> I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines
When I open a new window[1] in Firefox and start typing in the address bar, I get matches based on the page title not just on the url.
For example, I open a new window and type "brow" and the matches I get include "I closed a lot of browser tabs | Hacker News" (see image[2].)
So I rarely if ever use bookmarks, I can almost always find what I'm looking for by typing in the url bar, or if that fails by searching in history.
1: Are you seated? Good. I don't use tabs, I just open new windows with ctrl-n and use alt-tab & ctrl-w to navigate. I have middle-click set to open in a new window. I use customise to put the "open new window" icon onto my buttons, next to the address bar. I would happily use a version of firefox with no tabs, they add nothing to my life.
I went the nuclear option in Firefox and disabled search suggestions and history from my omni bar. The only thing that shows up when I type now are my bookmarks, which purposefully only include stuff like personal finance, gmail, and project documentation links.
The omni-bar reinforcing past browsing habits that were formed out of addiction by putting them in the top of the suggestion list is a dark pattern for me.
2. Bookmarks aren't a constant reminder in my field of vision that they exist.
3. It turns the "too many tabs problem" into "too many bookmarks".
Once in a while I "unload" my tabs by bookmarking them into a separate folder. I close the tabs and because there's no visual reminder anymore I forget they exist. Eventually I build to to another few hundred tabs and do it again.
Now I'm dealing with a couple of thousand bookmarks. I once deleted my old bookmarks. A couple of years later I went looking for a specific one. I knew exactly where the bookmark should've been, but I had deleted it.
Edit: all of this is to say that I'm not sure whether this has a technological problem. Maybe if the UX of bookmarks was really good.
100% agree. Bookmarks are cumbersome to make, hard to search, and just generally kind of annoying to work with. They kind of integrate into searching on the URL bar, but not very well. Many of them have tagging support, but the system feels like an afterthought.
And I'll add onto that, the way browser history works is also kind of annoying. I don't really trust that I'll be able to re-find a page I visited at a particular point in time. Visiting the same page twice doesn't create multiple history entries, it's hard to search by date. It feels really unreliable to use as a log.
There's a lot of room for innovation here, we're only just now starting to see browsers merge in tab grouping and containers, which I could have sworn Opera already supported ~10-15 years ago. I don't feel like we've spent enough time actually thinking about what different types of workflows people have for browsing the web and about how bookmarks/history/tabs could be adjusted to make those workflows easier.
It would take too long to list out all of the experiments that would be worth running (bookmarking screenshots or assets on a page, having bookmark "containers" for search, automatically categorizing bookmarks based on the domain or keywords inside the page, offline bookmarks that store the current state/DOM of the page, not just the URL, etc, etc). I think Edge was playing around with marking up pages using a stylus, but I don't know if that's still a thing now that they're based off of Chrome. And web annotations have been standardized for ages now. Still not integrated into any browser UIs that I'm aware of.
In my opinion bookmarks are one of the most underdeveloped parts of the modern browser, closely followed by history, and then by tabs themselves.
This literally was the primary reason to build my peer to peer browser that has a persistent cache which can be shared with other (local) peers.
I think the cache needs to be persistent and offline ready, ignoring ETags and other stupid headers. Otherwise it's a useless cache that is not controlled by the user.
1. Bookmarks fail for medium term usage. There's some research material for a doc or PR I'm actively working on - Why bookmark, catalogue and eventually prune if I'm not going to need it past tomorrow?
2. Bookmarks don't keep page state. As more apps go the PWA route, not all of them have URIs that lead to your preferred state. Even just stuff like expanding/hide comment threads is a start, not to mention things like NPR which redirect me to the homepage if it's been too long since I last did the CMP dance.
Bookmarks are for medium-long term storage. If theres something you don't need right now but might need later on in the week, are you really going to put it in with all your other junk?
Of course you could argue that better organisation and regular cleaning of your bookmarks is needed, but at that point it becomes a job in of itself.
I'm also not sure bookmarks are something you learn to use. If you've ever used any file system before, you've pretty much got the hang of it, its not a terribly difficult concept to grasp. Maybe a refusal to make use of bookmarks, I'd disagree thats the solution but it certainly makes more sense
Yeh they have this feature built into chrome. I liked it, in fact I liked it so much that I kept using it, and once again it became an unmanagable mess that I would avoid for things that are actually want to read later. Over time, this would become for things I kind of want to read later. At this point, I don't even remember the last time I used it.
Tabs work because whenever you are using the browser, they're always in front of you. If you have too many and you know you won't go back and read the next thing thats important to you, you just go through and trim the old ones down (which, as a side note, is much easier than deleting bookmarks).
Is it a discipline problem? Absolutely, but for so many people, myself included, tab discipline is not particularly high on the endless todo list.
As someone with 100+ tabs open as well, I'm not sure that all really holds up. I am actually in the process of moving towards bookmarks with my browsing habits and having FFs sidebar alwas open and just there helps a lot with the "always in front of you" aspect - especially considering that chrome only shows you the first X tabs and completely hides the rest while FF needs you to scroll to see them all. Plus folders or keywords in the bookmarks title help a lot with managing different projects or trains of thought.
Pruning is also somewhat faster and simpler because the tabs don't need to reload first (assuming you are using an extension like supsender or auto discard like i do) you just have the favicon and the whole title in your list and can prune fast with just the arrow keys and "delete".
As someone that's been down this rabbit hole a few times, I'm hopeful for your success but I have my doubts. Mainly down to 2 reasons:
1. The bookmarks pane makes obfuscation too easy. Most of us who fall into this trap do so because of the collectors fallacy. Tabs force us to choose between keeping everything we see versus seeing what we need to see. Bookmarks can be infinitely filed away into neat folders which hide the complexity, so instead of deleting you tend to file something away. The immediate effect is the same as closing a tab, you can see more clearly what you want to see, but long term your bookmark system becomes unmanagable, and slowly your tab count begins to increase again, as your brain says "no seriously I want to read this later, dont put it in there with the rest of the fluff".
I know this because even after I gave up on bookmarks it continued to haunt me, after chrome introduced tab groups. They have the same effect, they hide the complexity behind folders that after a while are so clogged up that they're useless, and you go back to old patterns.
2. The reason why tabs work effectively as a kind of todo list is because tabs are how you navigate the browser anyway. Though bookmarks have been included feature of browsers for a very long time, their not required. What I'm trying to say is, you obviously wont be replacing the entire concept of tabs with bookmarks, you still need to use tabs, even if (and I'd say this is a massive if) you only ever have 1 tab open. Which then means you'll be managing 2 systems for multitasking, one of which is significantly easier than the other.
As for pruning being faster with bookmarks, I'd disagree. I do use a suspender, but I usually dont even need to click the tab (if I do, I have it set so going to the tab doesn't auto-unsuspend it, it shows me the title and the suspension screen). I just see the favicon and the first 5-10 letters and can take a good enough guess what it is, and then middle click it from the tab Im currently on and its gone. I never have 100+ tabs open on one window, I tend to split them out (currenly I have 3 windows, each with a varying number of tabs, generally for context switching).
But, maybe things will end better for you, and I genuinely hope they do, but for me, its become a part of my life I've decided not to optimise and instead just embrace the chaos if it feels right :)
The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed.
I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind
The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.
Bookmarks are downplayed because search is browsers' main source of revenues.
I'd personally accept a bit of ads in the bookmark manager (maybe in a section for suggestions based on bookmarks) in exchange for bookmarks to be better integrated and supported.
Interesting, been annoyed about this for years. I'm bookmarking things both in Chrome and on the Samsung internet mobile browser and neither prioritizes my bookmarks when I start typing something in the search bar. It actually seems completely random, sometimes a bookmark shows up, sometimes it shows 5 rows down, often not at all. Weird, bookmarking a site should count as a pretty strong a signal that I might want to see that page again...
You hit the nail. Yes bookmarking is broke. Most bookmarking services act as dumb buckets of information. Like an endless abyss of links that I'll never return to.
That's why I made https://closetab.email - This one delivers a digest of links from my bookmarks straight to my inbox, every monday. This way I end up consuming them eventually and also close tabs a bit more confidently, knowing I'll come back to it later.
Chrome actually does have that feature, but maybe it differs a bit from how Firefox implements it. It gives you a "switch to this tab" option in the omnibox if your input matches the title or URL of an open tab.
One of the best extensions is the tree-style-tabs extensions. It puts your tabs on the left/right of your window organised in a tree, makes finding tabs much faster than having tabs at the top (and with modern wide-screen monitors also optimises screen real-estate)
My too many tabs problem is more than a bookmarking issue.
- It’s partly ADHD: I lose track of tabs I no longer care about
- It’s partly about state: I have actively performed some unsaved work that wouldn’t be preserved by a bookmark
- It’s partly because I use the same computer for work and personal use: this amplifies both of the other problems, and I haven’t found a good profile management solution to mitigate them
I mean by all means an improved bookmark solution could help, and could potentially help to improve these other issues.
But my current solution is to just treat all tabs as ephemeral, and just close them all periodically. I very seldom bookmark anything, I generally use browsing history for that use case instead
As others have mentioned, it might be in the interest of browser vendors to get you to perform more web searches.
I don't know what browser you use, but personally I feel Firefox at least does a slightly better job than the competition at highlighting your bookmarks when you start typing in the search bar. Not sure if that is objectively true of course.
Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.
I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.
I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.
Compared to virtual desktops, this allows you to close down apps (consume less resources) as well as maintain multiple working context-specific application states.
> Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken?
In some ways, I agree. My own solution was to develop reading lists storage (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/), i.e. an intermediate storage space between “saved for the years to come” of the bookmarks and the “in my face” pinned tabs. They are then displayed on my new tab page, so I can remember to read them whenever I open a new page.
xBrowserSync has completely replaced all bookmark managers for me. No more hunting through extensive folder trees (what a mess that was!). When adding bookmarks, I just manually add a couple tags and be done with it. With xBS, bookmarks are accessed mainly through a simple tag/keyword search.
Bonus: I'm no longer tethered to any particular browser's sync ecosystem. BitWarden has my passwords and xBrowserSync has my bookmarks. I can browser hop on all my devices!
that's the inspiration for my browser extension, Yet Another Speed Dial. it works as the new tab page but basically i use it as a visual bookmark manager. i find it way easier to scan my bookmarks as thumbnails to find what i want. it's open source and supports all the major browsers, check it out!
I was a long time user of Xmarks for online bookmark syncing (cross platform and browser). I was sorely hurt when it was discontinued. I moved over to EverHelper.
These days I don't try to sync bookmarks to browsers, they inevitably get corrupted or lost somewhere shomehow. I just use the EverHelper website as my bookmark manager.
I'd love to find a open source thing I can host myself to fully own my bookmarks too so if anyone knows of that let me know.
I presume they'd be injected by the browser, but it also seems trivial for Google to display your bookmarks in search results if you sync them with your Google account.
also;
From any bookmarked page, I want to be able to delete the bookmark, without having to go into bookmark manager, figure out which folder it's in and delete it.
When I've read the page, I don't need the bookmark anymore.
This is the #1 reason why I have > 60,000 bookmarks. I'd bet that 99% of them are obsolete, or I eventually read them. But it's kind of a monumental task to actually curate them.
I try to only bookmark things that are likely to remain relevant to me long term to some degree, and/or would be a pity to lose a path to for some reason.
I use a graph database for URLs. Either Semantic Synchrony or org-roam. That lets me keep any URL in as many categories as I'd like, and neat them however I want, or even create cycles if need be.
Maybe. For some reason many people just don't use bookmarks at all. The question is why don't they use them. Have they tried but found it broken? Or have they never tried?
I don't use bookmarks. I rely on history. If I want to find something, I'll type relevant keywords and the page shows up. It works without using bookmarks. I usually memorize parts of urls or title without effort, if I didn't have that I guess I would need bookmarks.
I think bookmarks would be good for building lists. Like recipes. But I'm not organized well enough to do this.
I don't use them because I have to know which pages are important enough to bookmark when I come across them first, rather than when I need them later.
Usually I rely on finding something in my history. If I need to get around to it at some point, I'll keep the tab open and I'll get around to it when (if ever) I'm closing a bunch of tabs in a row, which takes relatively little effort. If I bookmark it, it'll just sit there and I'll never think of it again.
It's built-in, you can add tags when you create a bookmark in firefox and yep, that tab grouping feature would be nice, Chrome has tab groups and you can name so it gets close.
I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember.
Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken.
If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.