I think firefox has everything you need already. I use librewolf in linux but any firefox on a desktop OS should behave in the way I describe below.
> i want rich bookmark behavior.
This points needs specifics. What do we mean by rich? what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve?
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs.
> or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites.
This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each.
One click and half a second... very efficient!
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole.
> and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set.
In a rabbit hole window with X tabs -> right click on the tabs area -> select all tabs -> bookmark tabs -> then from there you can create folder 'rh 17 August'
Next time you open a browser, just right click on that folder and open all. When done, just delete the folder.
Once you learn this, it's a one or two second process so it's very efficient in my view.
You might argue that this option could become a one-click thing (ie a right-click menu item called 'save all tabs as bookmarks' and use an automated name) but that brings a whole new range of problems (cluttered interface for users that don't want this, and therefore decrease in overall UI efficiency)
> i'm not alone right?
No, many people like me relies on bookmarks. I share the frustration others shared around the bookmarks toolbar being hidden by default. However, by using standard behaviour I manage to make bookmarks work in a pretty efficient way.
> This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each. One click and half a second... very efficient!
Even more efficient, you can Ctrl left click the bookmark folder, or even more even more efficient, middle click. Of course, this requires you properly curate your bookmark folders, my News folder has some two dozen bookmarks, and I definitely don't want to open all of them. But this "open all" behavior isn't recursive, so you can just put stuff you don't want to open every time in subfolders.
You'd have to find the bookmark folder first. The bookmark manager is old, crufty and hard to use. The bookmark bar is unusable with the keyboard, only usable with a mouse, and badly. Bookmarks lack metadata such as "added at date" or "added on company laptop".
And don't even get me started about mobile browsers...
And history is equally bad. Internally the browser stores each individual visit to a page, and also the full history trail in case you clicked on links, but the built-in UI only shows the last visit for each URL and nothing else.
Additionally, when I do a history search, there's no way to jump from a search result back to the chronological view (though as soon as I open the result, the chronological view becomes useless anyway because it only shows the most recent visit, which after opening the page becomes of course "right now").
The problem is that quite often I might not remember the exact search terms to find a page again in my history, but can remember and find some other pages I know I visited beforehand/afterwards/etc. If I had the full chronological visit history (plus access to the link trail if necessary), I could just look through that, but with the built-in UI that's not possible.
Unfortunately, it seems that to this day, the best extension for solving this problem in Firefox predates the Webextensions cutoff and as usual the new Webextension API isn't quite set up for fully re-creating it because you can only query for visits by the exact URL, and so no modern add-on exists that is really a full replacement. Thankfully somebody hacked the original add-on to still work in modern Firefox, though of course it needs one of the Firefox varieties that are allowed to load arbitrary add-ons (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).
> i want rich bookmark behavior. This points needs specifics. What do we mean by rich? what are the outcomes we're trying to achieve?
> i want to be able to quickly load common favorite news sites & blogs. > or load a window with all my productivity SaaS sites. This can be easily achieved through folders in a bookmarks toolbar. For example I have a folder called 'News' with my top 4 sites. When I open the browser, I just right-click on the 'News' folder, click on "open all bookmarks" and those sites open on a tab each. One click and half a second... very efficient!
> or pick up where i left off on a research rabbit hole. > and i want it to be intuitive, efficient, and a prominent UX feature set. In a rabbit hole window with X tabs -> right click on the tabs area -> select all tabs -> bookmark tabs -> then from there you can create folder 'rh 17 August' Next time you open a browser, just right click on that folder and open all. When done, just delete the folder. Once you learn this, it's a one or two second process so it's very efficient in my view.
You might argue that this option could become a one-click thing (ie a right-click menu item called 'save all tabs as bookmarks' and use an automated name) but that brings a whole new range of problems (cluttered interface for users that don't want this, and therefore decrease in overall UI efficiency)
> i'm not alone right? No, many people like me relies on bookmarks. I share the frustration others shared around the bookmarks toolbar being hidden by default. However, by using standard behaviour I manage to make bookmarks work in a pretty efficient way.