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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

Looking at this reminds me of the "Booksmarks Toolbar". Is there anyone that doesn't remove it? Why is so much screen space wasted for little reason?

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I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows.

Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.

Its called speed dial... Opera has had it for years then Chrome and Safari copied it.

Speed dial is less useful when it doesn't consider context.

Care to expand? I do not completely follow how it would help. possibly a use case?

Sure. I use multiple browsers each day for various reasons. It's hard enough keeping bookmarks synced. Top site pages are also largely useless in that they only keep the most visited pages. I have numerous work pages I visit often that get placed at the top. Numerous news pages, numerous blogs. In each case, I'd rather have some form of context.

For example, I don't need the dial telling me about HN, Reddit, ArsTech, and other tech news sites individually. At the very least, I'd like to just select news sites, and have the browser deal with it intelligently.

The dial is useful, don't get me wrong. But it's far shy of a replacement for bookmarks.

I realize I also might be the exception to the rule. =)

I'm agreeing with Cory on this one: the bookmarks bar should be made obsolete, or at least be hidden by default. Browsers, especially FF, but including Safari and Chrome, allow you to easily search bookmarks from the location bar by title of the page or URL. Aside from that, Chrome offers you the top pages tab page + if the bookmarks bar is hidden, it displays the Bookmarks bar as part of the new tabs page.

I'd love to see the statistics for this, but if most people, like me, only click items on the bookmarks bar upon opening a new tab, then, indeed, there is no sense in keeping it up in the toolbar by default.

Only showing the bookmarks bar after opening a new tab is much less efficient for my case: I have a number of bookmarks that I want to open in tabs, but it's a varying subset of the toolbar set.

To do it I now I just command-click all the bookmarks I want opened, and they open in background tabs. To do it with a hidden bookmarks bar I'd need to open a new tab first, then click.

Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.

Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/

I agree, if I don't have a visual reference in front of me I forget some of the many sites that are important for me to get to. You can get three rows of books marks up top: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-... I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.

No need for it to waste space - just drag it up next to the File/Edit/Etc menu. I use the toolbar in place of the bookmarks menu itself, since I get to organize it exactly how I want it, and with quicker access/better categorization.

The bookmarks toolbar is my place for quickly dragging in stuff I might want to revisit later. For those times when the site doesn’t have a RSS feed or just isn’t interesting enough to subscribe to. Maybe some article I definitely want to read but just don’t have the time to read right now.

I don’t have to worry about deleting things (old stuff just gracefully disappears to the right but is still searchable and in approximate chronological order – my bar has 201 bookmarks at the moment) and some custom ordering is possible (if something is super important I will just not put any stuff to the left of it which means it will stay where it is and not disappear).

Sure, bookmarks are searchable through the address bar but that means the approximate chronological structure gets lost. The bookmarks bar has also a reminder function. Whatever I put there I can forget because I won’t have to search for it. It will just be there. A quick glance whenever I open a window is enough to know whether there is something I absolutely wanted to check out again.

The bookmarks bar is tremendously helpful for me and I couldn’t live without it.

I find that if there's something I'll want to read later in the day, I just leave it open in a tab, and if it's something that I'll want to read some other day, I just star it, and it will appear in the "recently bookmarked" menu. The idea of using the bookmarks bar as a shelf is kind of interesting, but I think I'd still rather have the screen space.

I’m not so sure, actually, what should be the default. It’s not a easy question. I know many people who don’t use the bookmarks bar and for them it’s definitely a waste of space. It might just be a sensible to default to not display it. Those who need it and use it might also be those who (like me) know how to show and hide it.

Re: Tabs. I like the bookmarks bar because it is a lot more persistent. After a long day with a lot of open tabs it is very easy for me to accidentally close a tab I actually wanted to read or even needed to read during my regular tab cleanups. That’s why really important stuff gets promoted to the bookmarks bar.

You might love Instapaper's "Read Later" bookmarklet: http://www.instapaper.com/extras

I tried it, doesn’t work for me. Too complex, too many steps, too much work. I need a simple, accessible way to save bookmarks, not a sophisticated but somewhat complicated one.

That’s not to say Instapaper is a bad idea, it’s just not the right thing for me. (It’s also that I’m using only one laptop and hardly ever any other computer. I can afford to save bookmarks locally but I can see how that might be a problem for others.)

You are of course entitled to your opinion but I'm curious what is too much work about it: with the bookmarklet set up, simply click a "Read Later" bookmark to save any page you are currently viewing, and when you want to go back and view some of the pages you've saved for later, simply click your Instapaper bookmark.

The bookmarks bar is always visible, I have to click at least twice if I want to access Instapaper (three times, actually, if I hide the bookmarks bar which is the point of this whole discussion).

That’s not a big difference but sometimes that’s enough. (There is also a ever so slight delay when loading a webpage. Native UI is just faster.)

These days when so many people have widescreen laptops, I wonder why things like the bookmarks toolbar don't default to docking to the left or right side. I can't afford to give up space at the top or bottom of my screen, but my left and right sides have room.

I think it is because it is harder to fit text on a vertical bar. It has to be rather wide to fit a couple of words horizontally, and even then the text will often get cut off. The text could be rotated to read vertically, but that is hard to read.

One reason is perhaps it's much simpler to have only horizontal bars. With horizontal and vertical bars, an interface tends to look really messy — just look at Opera.

The side bar is really only used by a "super" user. Also you can move the tabs and everything to the left, having no bars on the top if you so chose to.

Bookmark toolbars are a thing of the past; Bookmarklet toolbars aren't. :)

I hide my toolbar in Opera by defeault, but I enable it when I want to use Readability or Instapaper.

Edit: Didn't see c1sc0's reply.

Um, I like my Bookmarklets, ok? I'd be lost without the delicious bookmarklet.

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