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I think this really hits the nail of why I am a tab-collector. If we could store “state” as part of the bookmark instead of just a URL that would go a long way.

But additionally, discoverability of bookmarks is also lacking, flipping through tabs is fast and easy but in order to do that with bookmarks you have to know what the domain and title of a page is/was. If you could “preview” a bookmark then it might help a fair bit.

It baffles me that bookmarks and history browsing in current browsers is still so terrible. In some cases it feels like it has gotten worse compared to a decade ago. Browser history certainly has, because for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.

I used to put bookmarks in folders. Now, in Firefox, it takes about six clicks to access those folders, so I stopped using them.

I have folders in my bookmarks bar in Firefox. The contents of my top-level folders are a single click away.

That's the way I've always overcome the problem of getting to bookmarks also. You give up a little real estate to keep the bookmarks bar visible, but it is a good way to organize things by subject matter, project, urgency, etc.

That being said, I'd love a configurable cache that would allow me to open a group of bookmarks to exactly where I left off on each page (or where I had frozen the data to keep a static record.)

Doesn't Firefox's URL bar autocomplete/search from the contents of your bookmarks? Am I imagining that?

I just tested it, it's using both the history and the bookmarks.

I think the bookmarks UI has gotten so bad (or stayed stuck where it was instead of improving)... because so many people use tabs for what they could be using bookmarks for. A really well designed bookmarks UI might be able to do even better for them, but with tabs being 'good enough' (and better, for their needs, than the bookmarks UI they had historically when they started using tabs)... attention to bookmarks UI languishes.

A good bookmarks UI is a hard problem, and there's no guarantee you'll succeed at getting people to use it instead of tabs, so the cost-benefit-risk isn't motivating.

If someone did want to create a 'next gen' bookmarks UI... I'd start by intensively studying how and why people use tabs. :)

Bookmarks used to launch in a little docked file browser style window. It was ugly, but it was easy and quick to organize. You can still get it to behave like that, but it takes a lot more effort so, it has definitely gotten worse in my opinion. Certainly it takes more effort to organize.

Really, what they should have is a "Snapshot" option and a bookmark option where the snapshot saves a static local copy of a site and a bookmark saves a link. Bookmarks should have RSS integration so you can optionally sort by recently updated. History needs a meaningful search option and a way to group/nest by domain. We haven't even tried to pick the low hanging fruit.

Bookmarks are however, antithetical to Google's worldview and business model which I think drives some of their languish given that so much of the internet now relies on Chrome.

> Bookmarks used to launch in a little docked file browser style window.

They still do in Firefox. Just press Ctrl-B anywhere and you get a sidebar with your bookmarks.

> for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.

The pessimist in me would say that's to make you go back to Google and search for it again in the hopes that they can show you more ads on the results page.

I don't know why you're downvoted because I think that's the very reason : they want you to search rather than organise.

Yes!

I don't understand that Firefox shows me a great start page with my recent visited pages with thumbnails but my bookmarks are still an obscure text list.

I've searched for an extension that would turn the bookmark sideboard into a full page with thumbnails but I haven't found one. (And I am too lazy to start such a project. I also assume that the Firefox team will light up a turn the bookmarks sideboard into something like the start page.)

Adding an option to store a copy of the page in the bookmark would make this a great usability enhancement.

booksmarks as implemented lock down a particular url, whereas tabs keep the state of what i am working on (reading) a tab may contain the the last article i read on a blog (for example it keeps the last day when i read hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-06-19

if i am busy for a few days, then i know exactly where i need to continue reading to catch up.

works for web comics and anything else posted in serial form.

i DON'T want to bookmark these pages. because every time i read them, the url changes. i have found some extensions that update bookmarks as i go along, and that worked well to track webcomics, but ultimately it always came down to keeping a set of tabs open, because that is really the only way to track your progress, including a history that allows me to go back.

another use is actual research. i may research a problem, that takes me to stack overflow, then i follow a link to a referenced article, etc...

the tab keeps track of where i was when i last worked on the problem, and allows me to continue effortlessly.

if i bookmarked these, i'd have to remember to remove the bookmarks after i am done. with tabs i can just close them.

I wish browser tabs also snapshotted the page if you close it and open it again. I have space on my harddrive. Use it.

What I'd like is a search history graph with full-text searchable snapshots for each entry. I don't think I'd even need tabs anymore.

That's an extremely difficult problem for browser makers to solve in a generic way: the state of client-side scripts might not lend itself to such a snapshot, and the browser has no way to account for changes that have been made server-side in the meantime (including new versions of the page content, scripts, stylesheets, API endpoints, etc.). Your proposal reminds me of Java object serialization, which I've rarely seen used in an effective way (and only when the code and runtime environment are tightly controlled).

Webpage makers already have the tools they need to do this: the page URI can be manipulated client-side to store state. And they can specify which content should be cached for use in the future without a trip to the server—including full client-side app functionality.

Server side changes are moot (1), because in order to properly do state saving, you have to save more than the assets in a simple cache, but also the entirety of the DOM as of that particular moment and the state of the js engine.

I couldn't even imagine supporting that in an app I wrote, much less in a way that works for every website everywhere!!

(1) moot in the sense that it ought to act to server side changes much like any static pages would become out of date when backend updates are made. If the api endpoint goes away, then it errors, it's not the responsibility of the browser to keep the app evergreen, imho

> because in order to properly do state saving, you have to save more than the assets in a simple cache, but also the entirety of the DOM as of that particular moment and the state of the js engine.

Sure, it should do precisely that, IMO. Serialize it and dump it. All of this is in browser cache AFAIK anyway, so it's not like it's some completely novel programming exercise.

As for keeping up with the server side - I don't care. The "sync to the server state" button exists, and is called "Refresh" button. Nothing needs to be implemented by website author. In fact, I'd prefer if websites didn't have a say in this at all - or else someone will find a reason to screw with the mechanism.

I'ts not hard to do because it's already done.

Firefox will show the previous contents of tabs in place when you update firefox live. So it must already have that ability.

If the server side has changed then I can simply refresh the page if I want the newest page. I'd like the page to be exactly what it was when I closed the browser. I've left computers running for days just to save the state of a single browser tab. I suppose a better way of doing it is to only use browsers inside a VM and them just save the state of the VM.

About websites: I don't want to have to rely on website makers, because they invariably won't do it and it won't work.

> and the browser has no way to account for changes that have been made server-side in the meantime

It doesn't matter. Store and index what I read. Content could be destroyed and altered in the server.

That only works if the page is relatively static. Add in any functionality that requires a round-trip to a server, and things get immensely more complex.

No, they don't. There's a benefit in being able to snapshot the current state of a dynamic application.

But what happens when you want to meaningfully interact with it? It seems kind of useless to me if things are broken the instant I try to do anything.

You can press the Refresh button and suddenly things fix themselves. The utility is in having a snapshot of the site looking exactly as when you left it, with all the benefits of it not being rendered to a image, and with a high probability that at least some interactions still work.

I would be happy for a render to PDF that had some basic parameters around when to perform a render, max storage to be used, aging, or if not that, first in, last to be deleted as new comes in functionality.

Think of it as a cache of things seen. Bonus points for hyperlinked media assets. Double bonus points for those links being to cached media assets.

Somehow these are all reasons why I don't like tabs.

Firefox has pinned tab feature and I liked the idea. I could get rid of my go to bookmarks in the bookmark-bar and save a bit space.

But tabs behaved SO differently from bookmarks, I just couldn't stand it. Everything felt wrong and outdated and I had to constanly refresh stuff after I switched back to a tab.

So in the end I went back to the bookmarks bar.

Safari actually has the ability built-in to export a page as a PDF. Which you can then open in browser. It can be damn useful sometimes because it preserves all of the formatting and everything that's awful to try and preserve when you save the web page itself.

Say that tabs are not the right metaphor is like saying that spreadsheets are not the right metaphor. There are better metaphore for every single case, but it's a very good one for most cases.

I believe Evernote's browser plugin has a feature kind of like this. It's not as smooth (or private) as native would be though.

You may not know it, but most browsers support local bookmarks!

So were FF tab groups the answer after all?

Use local bookmarks, maybe?

Why would I, when I have tabs, and know that if I force-kill Firefox or Chrome, I'll get the "Session restore" screen the next time I run the browser? That's essentially "local bookmarks", but with much better UX.

(Yes, I do really force-kill browsers without mercy when rebooting. It's an effective strategy for ensuring I'll get at least some of my state back, and is more convenient than "session manager" features that keep coming and going.)

You’re not alone. I also force-kill browsers for the same reasons. Odd that this is the easiest way to get the desired behavior but it is what it is.