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The best browser bookmarking system is files

77 points by josephernest

by divbzero

1 subcomments

OP describes drag-and-drop creation of *.url files in Windows:

  [InternetShortcut]
  URL=https://www.afewthingz.com/browserbookmark

In macOS, selecting URLs and dragging to Finder creates *.webloc files:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
      <key>URL</key>
      <string>https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

by bsnnkv

4 subcomments

My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links).
I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content.
It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.
My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze.
[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...
[2]: https://notado.app
[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/

by alunchbox

1 subcomments

Just a shout out to https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery. My favorite productivity extension. I'm a tab hoarder, this makes my life manageable and gives my Firefox all the screen real estate by using keyboard shortcuts to open/close the tabs easily.
I also use the Firefox css to hide the top sidebar, so I get maximum screen usage.
Their bookmark feature is pretty awesome too.

by jwells89

3 subcomments

I appreciate how universal and decoupled this approach is, but it doesn’t fix my main problem with browser bookmarks which is that management overhead gets to be problematic and makes me want to not bookmark things unless there’s adequate “justification” for doing so.
This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.
I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.

by suddenclarity

1 subcomments

It's an interesting idea but missing vital features for me. For example, the star in Chrome tells me that I have bookmarked this page in the past so I avoid having duplicate bookmarks even after editing the name. The standard synchronization also makes it easy to bookmark a link on my phone and then deal with it once I'm back at my computer. Now I would have to figure out a way to somehow download the URL as a file on my phone so it syncs to my computer. The favicon is another neat thing to have on bookmarks.
Somewhere along the way it just feels like a backup makes more sense.

by vandyswa

0 subcomment

My own solution is along these lines. I have a static html page on my personal server; that's the home for all my browsers. (It's under git, of course.) Just flip to my ongoing mosh session to my server, and a trip into vim can add/move/delete anything desired. It's currently an HTML table, which tells you how long this technique has been serving me well.

by renegat0x0

1 subcomments

Interesting concept, trick, but no.
- Can I write comments about some bookmarks?
- Can I tag bookmarks?
- I cannot self-host it, hence you have to sync things between devices, which is stupid
- Can it automatically do import / export?
- Can it support multiple users?
I am using my own bookmarking system, which solves these issues for me, but again, it is not a jack of all trades. I do not see your aunt running it in portainer. I am still developing it, so it is not super stable. Even with these shortcomings this is how I consume internet now.
It is "bookmarking system" x "rss reader" x "simple search engine"
Link:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

by mjevans

1 subcomments

Filesystems often aren't very efficient at lots of small files.
If they could handle compressed archives transparently then an array of files, maybe extended from the old windows URL= style files, might work.
An SQLite file also sounds like a great way of handling URLs, which Firefox does:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/464516/firefox-bookmarks...

by clircle

2 subcomments

I think it's mostly a very good idea, but much less accessible compared to the omnipresent bookmarks bar, so I will keep using the bookmarks bar (whose primary downside is the vendor lock in, imo).

by gwbas1c

3 subcomments

I vaguely remember an older browser just creating files in a folder for its bookmarks.
I wish I could find this folder on my work computer: I only have one work computer, so I don't sync work bookmarks with other devices.

by ulrischa

0 subcomment

This acrticle completely ignored mobile browsers. You can not drag and drop a url file here.

by cmiller1

0 subcomment

This is a pretty good idea but I feel like it exposes some of the shortcomings in our modern UI stack and file browsers. Users using the tools the OS provides to solve problems like this should be encouraged, however the separation between the file browser UI and the web browser UI feels like it creates a certain amount of inertia to using such a solution. If my UI had enough customizability that I could easily do something like attach a slide out drawer of a file browser view to my web browser windows, I feel like I'd be much more free to experiment with mixing and matching the various tools at my disposal and using my own solutions to problems like this.

by eduction

1 subcomments

To tag bookmarks just make a folder for each tag and put a symlink/alias/shortcut to the appropriate bookmarks in each tag folder.
Putting tags in the file name with a hash mark feels “ick” and like the Wrong Way to solve this problem. Using folders and symlinks goes with the “grain” of a file system based solution.

by rantingdemon

5 subcomments

I completely disagree.
If the built-in bookmark systems in browsers could support tags, then I would say yes. However, it currently only supports a basic tree concept, with "folders" for links.
This is very one dimensional. I read loads of articles that talks about multiple topics. Especially Hacker News type articles :). An article can talk about, say geo-politics. As an example, perhaps an article on the recent pagers that exploded in Lebenon. This article may also be discussing some cybersecurity topics too. In this case I may want to tag it with 1->n tags.
I currently use Raindrop.io. It kinda works, but it doesn't really have what I have in mind. It also has more features than I think I need from a bookmarking app.
I kinda feel that Digg (wayback, it was one of the first 'Web 2.0' sites had a model that could work.
If I had enough motivation, I think I could probably produce a simple app that does tagging, and only tagging, with bookmarks.

by red_admiral

0 subcomment

I've been using Trello for a while to organise bookmarks and other snippets, but with the recent force-in to rich text instead of markdown and links displaying as "preview" by default the UX has got a lot worse. Yes, there are extensions that make it almost as good as before, and I'm using one, but still.
From the article, I gather that it turns out that filesystems are a good way to organise vaguely hierarchical information. SQLite isn't terrible though either, people should be able to write third-party tools to help manage that.

by thesnide

0 subcomment

Bah... just give us the good old del.icio.us.
Not the recent .com HD remaster.

by josephernest

2 subcomments

Out of curiosity, do some of you also use this bookmarking technique?

by JohnFen

0 subcomment

For me, it works well for temporary bookmarks. For ones I want to keep long-term, though, the bookmarking systems provided in the browsers is not adequate. It's too difficult to use bookmarks from other places and browsers, and I find the support for organization to be lacking.
So I run a standalone bookmark server instead.

by abhinickz

0 subcomment

I use self hosted https://linkwarden.app/

by ulbu

0 subcomment

“Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough”, proceeds to not mention it again and talk about the filesystem instead.

by peng37

0 subcomment

I used to add my links to a github page :) Now I add all my frequently used links to easyy.click

by basemi

1 subcomments

> No browser extension needed.
No but you need an additional app to search/manage them (the file browser)?

by anthk

0 subcomment

Check Nyxt for something else superior to plain bookmarking: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/dbscan.org

by j45

0 subcomment

I have bookmarked and highlighted nearly everything I've read, by topic for the past 10 years.
I agree bookmarking could be files, but the reason for keeping the bookmarks is important to consider and important not to lose.
The piece that makes bookmarks hyper valuable, is remembering why or what was important about them. Annotation-centric bookmarking for me is really valuable. That usually means highlighting.
There's some nice options listed in the comments, I use diigo.com for a while as a paying customer and it's quite capable. Every so often I want to see what's out there, appreciate the links
In my mind I don't bookmark a page, as much as a sentence on it.
First step is am I just keeping it, or reading it. If I read it, I don't want to lose that time to have to spend it again in the future. If I read, I always highlight as I go anything. It kind of makes a journal, and also helps you reinforce if what you're reading is applicable to something you're currently needing to do.
The unfair advantage? When I come back to look for a link, I'm often actually looking for a sentence, phrase, or something I highlighted. I might occasionally put notes on the highlights. You can end up with dozens or hundreds of snippets explaining in and around a concept.
Annotating web pages, creates a feed of those by tag, which can then be fed to other things like sharing topics with people easily. There are other tools too like Readwise that help a lot to extract the insights.

by anjel

1 subcomments

With this scheme, you can't automatically sync bookmarks across multiple machines though.

by kkfx

1 subcomments

What I want from bookmarks it's not manage them as files, since those files are just links, I'd like to have eventually collected snapshots (like Zotero does), eventually DIFFING through them (because often articles get modified, without changing title/URL etc), instead of a full snapshot maybe just the "Firefox Reader" version saved so I can avoid wasting space in useless bits, check their on-line status slowly and regularly so when a bookmark is broken I got a small alert and I see it "greyed out" and appear in a dedicated "broken bookmarks" page I can try to update (often the same bookmarked page exist but under a different URL and thanks to the cached copy I can look for the new version or a mirror with a search engine).
Files for UIs was an ancient concept trying mimicking paper files, it's about time to use textual pages and search&narrow UIs more than files for many, many things.

0 subcomment