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Comment by ketralnis | Hacker News Reader

This seems a bit overblown for what amounts to a performance bug in a feature that few people even use (bookmarks).

It's not just bookmarks. It's history and the location bar. He mentions that one of the things which triggers his crashes is using the back button, which is a feature that I think a reasonable number of people use.

(I can't say that I've seen such issues myself... but it's been quite a while since I used Firefox under Linux.)

Do people not use bookmarks? I have thousands of them. What are the alternatives that I'm missing out on? (big xmarks user too so sync is a must)

I store all my bookmarks in http://pinboard.in, much better organisation, sorting, faster, cross-os, cross-browser.

Looks great, but I'm happy with what I have now so I'm not too pushed about spending money on a service. I'm also old enough to worry about trusting a site to hang around for 10 years with my data. (and by old enough, read: stuck in my ways enough) Must look into the migration effort though. And browser addon support. Its definitely a sweet looking service.

If you go for the premium service, a bargain $25 a month you get the ability to have it scrape and download every site you bookmark. So even if the site you bookmarked goes down, you retain the content.

Pinboard also has good APIs so you can backup your data. No lock-in.

Jeez, did not know that. I was thinking of writing something like that myself with version control for page updates just to be safe.

Holy crap, its $25 a year. That is a bargain.

Urh, sorry - yes. s/month/year/ Total typo, sorry. Worth noting thats 25 minus your signup fee. So more likely $16 for your first year.

Most people use Google, or something like Facebook gets autocompleted.

Most people?

And the autocomplete relies on the Places system, which is what is hanging (or was, until a few weeks ago).

I'd say I do too, even for stuff I have bookmarked. In fact 80% of my bookmarks provide nothing other than peace of mind for a person with a terrible memory. :)

I haven't used the built-in bookmarks feature for years. I checked just now, and I have 10 bookmarks stored (all of them used for quick searching in FF). I still use the concept though, I just offload them to Delicious where they can be properly tagged and shared.

I have roughly a dozen sites I go to. Most of them happen to have different first characters, so I type "f" and Chrome autocompletes http://fark.com/ and off I go. No bookmarks other than the shared history Google keeps for me.

I use them pretty heavily for reference/todo/toread type of stuff. And I have a terrible memory.

Most (non-technical) people I know just use a combination of the browser history and Google.

By chance, can you point me to a proof of that usability point? All I have is anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but I have long wondered.

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