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That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing, you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser war.

I'd try a thing for tabs that works like cmd-tab / alt-tab works for apps.

Bookmarking always struck me as a 90s solution to just having fulltext search and analytics over your browser history, there have been a few attempts at browsers that addressed this head-on, but they've all died off over time

IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue

Opera with its unique cache offered the option to have full text search in history and it was great. Then quarterly profit became a priority for the board and they dropped their browser to become a google chrome advanced skin.

It's not like you have to reinvent the wheel even, just use Xapian like notmuch to do the grunt work of full-text indexing.

Have you tried pocket? I used to keep a load of bookmarks but the problem was that after a while many of the source urls would die off. So something like pocket is very handy as it takes a copy of the page you're interested in.

Why pocket when we have opensource wallabag that you can either host yourself[1] or use as a service[2] ?

IIRC pocket has had some serious vulnerabilites exposed.

[1]: https://wallabag.org/en [2]: https://wallabag.it/en

Pocket might get better integration since it was recently acquired by Mozilla. Fingers crossed...

Pocket had a great integration with Firefox when it was an extension. Then they decided to integrate it into the browser and ironically it end up being a piece of shit that was not more functional than a bookmarklet. Not only that but they also removed the original extension from add-ons site so you have had to use the half assed built-in implementation.

How do you organise tabs then? I've god knows how many bookmarks and I've been blindly Ctrl-D-ing since time immemorial, only tagging very distinct stuff and modifying titles if too stupid. When I need to get at sth. bookmarked, typing stuff into the url field in firefox just works.

Tree Tab Style.

Try it, then read the original post and the comments again. :)

I think this is the missing piece on all this discussion.

I do know those extensions, but still prefer bookmarks. I just tag stuff unread and go on.

then link rot and unread stays unread forever.

Well. I've made a little extension that lists unread links. For linkrot, yes that's an issue I plan to solve, and what I will do is I'll either find or write a program that saves my bookmarks as websaves.

Edge's reading list shows newer entries at the top. The problem is you don't have to do anything extra to use tabs. You just... leave them open, and then there's no reason to use bookmarks or reading list or history

Yea, but that reduces the value of tabs overall. You can't just glance at the top of the browser to remember where you just were.

If i don't look at a tab for a few hours, it's not worth keeping around as it just adds to the noise without providing value. If i need to read something, i either read it immediately or bookmark it to read later. The result: i can confidently resume work without distractions at any time.

    > You can't just glance at the top of the
    > browser to remember where you just were.

You just look at the last X tabs you opened. Just because it's not your workflow doesn't invalidate it.

With tree-style tabs, each root represents a train of thought. I just collapse them until I decide what to do with them. Sometimes I bookmark and banish them. Sometimes I come back to that thought next weekend.

Chrome's default tabs at the top, to me, are the distraction where each tab has equal weight. But I'm not going to say that anyone is doing it wrong if that's what they prefer.

There's a good reason not to use edge: it's not available outside windows.

How is that relevant to a UI discussion?

It could be the best UI ever, if it is not available it is useless.

In this particular example microsoft uses edge to push people to use the latest version of their adware/spyware OS.

That says nothing about whether a particular UI feature is good – and browsers in particular have a long history of good ideas becoming widely implemented by most vendors.

It's not just tabs as bookmarks. I can build up a stack of 100 tabs in a day easily.

How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.

Also looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history. In fact going through your browsing history may be faster because you can actually use key words to search for what you want.

I have 2-3 tabs open most of the time. If I am looking something up, I go to 10-12. When I am done, it goes back down to 2-3. I can't even fathom under what situation people are using hundreds of tabs.

> looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history

I have heaps of tabs open, but there are orders of magnitude more pages in my browser history. The latter usually contains so much that is too much to look through to find anything but quite recent entries. The tabs still open are pages still with some relevance to me, while the history is filled with lots of incidental stuff that is no longer of use.

[Edit: also, with open tabs the page content is already there so it's more quickly accessible. This can be useful if you need to look at it to help find the page you're looking for, and to get the content from the page]

I usually max out at around 50. Today I got to 40, by reading several articles in the morning, and then starting a programming project in the afternoon. And the project included several unfamiliar topics, and I opened multiple tabs for some Google searches because not every website has the same take on the matter.

I open a tab as an (internal) signifier that "this might be interesting". I will browse it, and cull the ones that dont fit my interest/mood/timescope.

For me, it reduces cognitive load. I don't keep in mind all tabs that I have open -- that's why I keep them open! To forget about them.

Bookmarks are mentally for things I want to save and reuse. But I'll probably open 40 HN sourced articles (from the main page and comments) per day, and continually cycle/review them for interest/effort throughout the day.

I open almost every link in new tabs. It's faster to close a tab and return to the prior tab than it is to go Back, and the back button often doesn't work with dynamic pages. Plus, when replying in various forums, it's much easier to flip between tabs to refer to stuff that was said upthread, especially when you have to go back a page or two.

Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.

I think a lot of people use it like instapaper? A queue of things to read.

If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think

On the contrary, opening tabs reduce the cognitive load for me. Instead of having to use some of my limited mental space to keep in mind that there's some interesting link I'd like to go when I have finished reading the current page, I just open it now and will go back to later. Same as writing something down in a todo list.

I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.

Couldn't agree more. Bookmarks are so poorly implemented, people use tabs instead. Which is dumb

Doesn't a lazy-loaded tab solve this problem?

To me, the problem is that bookmarks are "while browsing, go to a different component that loads the browser tab with what I want".

Tabs, OTOH, are a placeholder for things that I want to keep just 1 step closer.

Saying it that way, I don't think it makes rational sense. But 1 cognitive step to a page instead of two is huge for me.

Well, which is it for? To make your page come in quicker when you click it, or to be a more accessible UI for choosing among options of sites you've visited and want to return to? To me they are different things, and shouldn't be lumped together the way they are.

Why is it dumb?

I use holmes google chrome extension and it's awesome. Once a website is bookmarked, it can be easily searched with by simply *[tab] and it searches for it. Highly recommended.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmo...

I had the same feeling. Seems like they are using tabs as a history.

A better history may solve their problem.

Sure a better history along with bookmarks and a pile of things could indeed fix my problem. But using tabs also fixes my problem perfectly well.

Bookmarks have been broken in browsers for more than a decade. Using bookmarks requires so much work and time that it makes no sense to use them.

How come?

First you have to create some categories, but that doesn't take long and then you simply throw bookmarks in these categories. the end.

It doesn't help that the bookmarks toolbar is not shown by default. I prefer to keep my tabs down to a reasonable number, and put folders on the bookmarks toolbar instead. If I want to bookmark something, I can just drag that link to the appropriate folder.

I think the main lesson is web browsers are bloated as hell now.