Google bookmarks won't be supported past September 31, 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Google bookmarks won't be supported past September 31, 2021

73 pointspenguin_booze56 comments

Just logged in to bookmarks, and found this message: https://imgur.com/a/OQ7YZqB.

To be clear, this is not Chrome's ability to save bookmarks and its useful ability to synchronize bookmarks across devices when logged into a Google account.

This is an older bookmark service provided here:

https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

In my case, I see a bunch of locations from Google Maps. It would be nice if those continued to be supported in Google Maps in some manner after Google sunsets the old Google Bookmarks service.

Those maps locations are already saved in Maps.

I think they're just listed in Bookmarks in attempt to make it a more universal bookmark system. It would be like if they showed starred documents from Docs and songs from YouTube Music.

This service seems pretty useless in 2021, it's just a list of links with titles, so people could easily export this and re-import as Chrome bookmarks or whatever browser they are using.

I have a bookmark in there from Nov 9, 2008. hmmm

Tough day for Google, but I wouldn't want to have to compete with Pinboard either

Honestly who even knew this existed in the first place? It dates back to 2005 and at least as far as appearances go, looks as if was never updated since.

Makes total sense to have (the tiny number of) users transfer their bookmarks to a service that's actually widely used and supported.

People might have good reason to criticize Google for shutting down some things... but in this case it's absolutely the right decision.

I did. It’s a remnant of when Google why trying to build a useful website, before the time of mobile apps.

The title has a typo; September has 30 days.

The missing text-post content from above is:

> After September 30th 2021, Google Bookmarks will no longer be supported. To save your bookmarks, click "Export bookmarks".

Google map's starred locations have a limitation of 500 stars to be shown and AFAIK there's not many easy ways to access more than that except the bookmark service. I wonder if they're going to remove this limitation?

Is this some kind of advanced google PR algorithm move to finally kill off something that nobody will mind, because nobody knows it exists?

Google PR didn't announce this, penguin_booze did.

I built https://histre.com/ It does a whole lot more than just bookmarks: https://histre.com/features/

The browser extension is open source btw: https://gitlab.com/histre/browser-extension

It would be cool if you could try it and share your feedback with me at k@histre.com

Hey. I’ll email you. I probably found about it through HN before. My biggest issue is deciding between Histre and Memex. Need to see how exporting/syncing works on both services too probably.

Thanks, I've emailed you.

I honestly don't know why people still use Google products. They have the worst track record I have ever seen.

I bet 99.99% of users never used Google Bookmarks. It will have been available for 16 years. You have to be able sunset unused products at some point.

The real question is: why did the Chrome developers create their own, totally incompatible bookmark syncing system instead of using the already established Google Bookmarks service?

It's of no profit to google.

So I don't know if we have reliable numbers for how many people use Google, but it's probably in the billions. 0.01% of 1,000,000,000 people is 100,000. So I see what you're saying but also calling it unused based on a 0.01% use rate at Google's scale is also silly.

I get that they aren't going to keep every service, but they have over 100,000 employees and it's hard for me to believe that they can't spare an engineer to adopt the project (which would be the proportionate number for a 0.01% use rate).

Or they could put that engineer on Ads and get revenue. They care about Cash more than Users.

Certainly that's the way to maximize short term returns, but at some point you're selling the future to marginally improve the present. Hard to imagine that one engineer makes much of a difference to search at this point.

Like, I agree that Goog has abandoned a user-centered approach, but even the most cynical approach has some diversification.

Google doesn't even have the worst track record of the top 5 tech companies.

Who does? Genuine question. Also how would you rank the top 5 tech companies in terms of shutting down track record? I would have said Yahoo was awful, but they haven’t been part of the big tech crowd in a long time.

People are starting to realise.

I'm starting a project and while i prefer google's cloud platform - i'm gonna use AWS. They have no respect for their users.

I didn't even realize this existed, despite using it. It seems this is what's responsible for storing/managing my "Starred" locations/businesses on Google Maps. I wonder if that ability is going away too. That'd be a bit of a shame.

Another comment suggests that Google is just cross-posting your starred Maps locations to Bookmarks, not that your starred locations are part of Bookmarks.

Now I know there are tons of bookmarking services, each with its own pros/cons. I'm curious to know the services the HN community uses (apart from the built-in browser feature). In particular, in response to GB going away. Do share, pls

Pinboard. They've had issues in the past, but they seem rock solid nowadays.

I've found that my web browser works perfectly fine for saving bookmarks, and these days you can even synchronize them between devices, if you choose.

I have used Pinboard in the past, and it's nice, but I'd rather just have it all in my browser.

Pocket. Well integrated into FireFox (for good or bad, thats a different discussion).

I am also trying a locally running Zotero. But not getting the hang of it yet.

I moved to Diigo when delicious died, it does alright even at the free tier (I've never had incentive to use anything but the basic/free bookmarking features). https://www.diigo.com

An org-mode file in Emacs, tagged, synced and version controlled.

I use raindrop.io.

Have had great experiences.

I wish they would actually sync the bookmarks with the browser though.

All I have ever wanted was cross-browser bookmark sync and it seems impossible.

FoxMarks, then XMarks, used to be great (though a little too eager to duplicate at times).

Then it was acquired by LastPass. Then killed. I relished the day I could log off LastPass for the last time.

I just have an extension installed in both Chrome and FireFox. It takes a few more clicks than native bookmark functionality but worth it to me for the portability and the durability.

same, great service.

Hopefully they'll sell it to Pinboard, lol.

(https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...)

Why would that be a good thing? One is free and the other requires a subscription and is closed source. There are a few different good open source Pinboard alternatives.

It appeals to my funny bone; the idea of Pinboard vacuuming up all the dead and dying competitors like he did with Delicious entertains me.

How am I supposed to save important places on google maps now?

Move to Bookmark OS and don't look back

I so look forward to the day when we have Google Cloud won't be supported past <a few months in the future>.

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I guess I'll move everything to Firefox.

This is the bookmarks you save in your Google account, at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/. It's not your web browser's bookmarks. It doesn't even sync with your Chrome bookmarks when you're logged in to Chrome.

It does seem like an odd product to kill off. It's one of those things that takes very little dev resources, and it's probably really useful to the few people who actually use it. Another example of Google's odd product decisions I guess.

You never know about these very old products. It might be built on Python 2 or something that the company is trying to turn down across the fleet. There may be no one left at the company who knows how the app is built, etc.

Also, keeping a service running exposes you to liability in the event of a data breach or GDPR violation. As I understand it, even if a tiny service that nobody cares about is found to violate the GDPR, the company can be fined up to 4% of its global revenue, which for Google would be quite a lot of money.

Chrome bookmarks are safe. This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Bookmarks

Google truly have a knack for competing with themselves. Hopefully this shutdown represents further consolidation rather than part of ongoing product churn.

Google Bookmarks was launched before Chrome existed.

Sure, but Chrome then introduced Chrome bookmarks rather than just using what already existed.

It would be weird to couple together the Chrome bookmarks and Google bookmarks at https://www.google.com/bookmarks, by doing so Chrome bookmarks which is a browser specific concept would only be accessible through an internet connection, thereby making bookmarking an extension of a cloud based Google product rather than something the user can choose to decouple.

A better solution could be to automatically backup users Google bookmarks in a new folder under the Chrome bookmarks or move them to Collections which seems to be the new Google bookmarks

You could easily have chrome bookmarks work offline and also sync with chrome bookmarks. Other services have been able to do this in the past. There’s likely code on GitHub that takes some managing that can do this with other bookmarking services.

If Google Maps stars were added/synced to Bookmarks, it makes sense for Chrome bookmarks to have some coupling as well when Chrome bookmark syncing was introduced.

Sorry, you misunderstood me. My argument was not that they should've introduced Chrome bookmarks and then merged them together.

My argument was that they should not have introduced two separate things when improving the one that already existed to simply work offline would have sufficed.

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