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Comment by nextaccountic | Hacker News Reader

I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark (so you can still see it when they are taken down) and make it fully searchable.

Actually, I've been trying to find Firefox extensions that give a better interface to bookmarks and there doesn't seem to be one. It's like, people don't use bookmarks anymore and accept that it might as well not exist, and use something else.

It's telling that Firefox has two bookmark systems built-in (pocket and regular bookmarks) and they aren't integrated with each other; I suppose that people that use pocket never think about regular bookmarks.

edit: but my pet peeve is that it isn't easy to search history for something I saw 10 days ago but I don't remember the exact keywords to search.

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The difference, to me, about Pocket is that I use it specifically as a to-read list. My list is just "sites I want to visit/read/watch later", whereas bookmarks are more of "I want to go here regularly". Also, all the bookmark systems I've ever used treat links as files that can only be in one folder, whereas Pocket at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics.

>at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics

This has applied since ever to regular bookmarks as well. Basically you can just throw everything in unsorted and use tags only.

Firefox has bookmark tags

> I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark

Have you tried Zotero?

not op.. I used to use zotero for exactly that, about 3 computers ago. Sitting here thinking, why am I not using it now.

I guess it's just easier to not install an extension and right-click, save page as.. and move on with life.

I can't remember if zotero was that simple - it may have been. I enjoyed using it back when. I can't recall if there was a good backup/export system with it back then.

currently it's easy for me to have docs/webpagesaved auto backed up to an external drive, which gets me through.

I may revisit zotero as I liked the idea behind it and the extra category / sorting stuff that was available / optional.

I think I went through a phase where ffx really bogged down with lots of open tabs (20 versions ago maybe?) then I tried disabling extensions, auto-sleeping-tabs-extension, stuff like that .. and soured on some extensions no longer working with newer ffx, and some concern about spyware and such, and never went back to all the addons / personalizations once enjoyed back in the day..

There's an extension for Zotero that allows you to just click and save. What Zotero does in addition to creating a snapshot of the page is generating a reference entry in the user's Zotero library. If you have a good way to catalog and search all the web pages you've saved, then maybe Zotero doesn't gain you all that much. Personally, I find the search capabilities in the app sufficient. You can also export your Zotero DB to any number of formats and throw it into your favorite search tool. I export as bibtex and use pandoc to weave references into my writing.

The academic uses of Zotero lean heavily on the metadata schema is uses, which is tailored for research and publishing. Things like DOI, ISSN, metadata about the publication, etc, might not be terribly useful for anyone outside academia.

Zotero is great for this. set up a webdav docker container and you can sync it easily too

https://www.zotero.org/ also allows sync

>I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark [...] and make it fully searchable.

This, outside a browser, could be implemented as a server/client self-hosted solution with a back-end taking care of downloading/searching and an extension acting as client. Maybe it could even be made entirely as extension?

That would miss all the personalized content, all the content behind authorization and so on.

At the very least, it would need to be able to get the content pushed to it by the client, the way the client has it at moment of bookmarking, making the download/scraping kindof superflous.

Indexing and doing search, however, is hard, but solved. Hard in the sense that it is not something a firefox addon could do very well. I presume a (self)hosted meilisearch would suffice, though.

You and GP might find ArchiveBox to have overlap with what you're describing? https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

Edit: here's the description from their repo

"ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline.

You can set it up as a command-line tool, web app, and desktop app (alpha), on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can feed it URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, feeds like RSS, bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. See input formats for a full list.

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshots, WARC, and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.). See output formats for a full list."

Pocket isn't for bookmarks. It's a reading list. Safari and Chrome have this feature too.

A reading list...with tags, which those browsers don't have, and while I don't have Safari, if it's like Chrome it's just a flat list.

I mean, Firefox's bookmarking isn't perfect by any definition, but they're the only browser (I'm aware of) that has put any effort into helping you use the web in the future. Other browsers seem to say, "if you're trying to use our browser to do something other than use the web at the present moment, we don't care about that. Enjoy taking 8 clicks to do anything other than stare at the viewport."

If you don't categorize bookmarks anyway, Pocket and equivalent might be all-around better than bookmarks.

ehh they only work well with articles that do well to having their adware stripped off and just raw article text displayed cleanly. Not really great for websites that are more interactive or graphical.

Older versions IE used to have something like this. "Favourites" had a "Make available offline" box that could be ticked to keep an offline copy of the page. But they were not searchable.

> I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark (so you can still see it when they are taken down) and make it fully searchable.

Opera v9.5 (released 2008) up to v12 does this.

In Firefox, File -> Save Page As... lets me do this. Local search tools should be able to index such archives (if they can index Word documents, they should be able to index HTML). Seems a fairly solved problem if it's something you need?

Safari reader list does this and it’s awesome.

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