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Comment by janvdberg | Hacker News Reader

Not to diminish the effort here, but I just want to point out (as someone who has tried lots of bookmark managers) that Floccus is everything I want from a bookmark manager (effortless sync across devices and just using the bookmark manager in your browser).

I am pointing this out, because I wish someone would have pointed it out to me.

https://j11g.com/2023/03/04/floccus-is-the-bookmark-manager-...

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"collaborative" is the key feature that Floccus and all other "syncing" bookmark managers are missing.

Missing features: a good UI for managing and organising bookmarks, automatically archiving bookmarks in case they go offline

Another reason why Safari shouldn't be considered a user friendly browser.

Is this simply because the bookmark manager linked (Floccus) is not available for Safari?

Or better yet, can you elaborate on how any of the content up the chain from your comment that shows why Safari shouldn't be considered a user friendly browser?

People who consider Safari a friendly browser do not look before iCloud and do not look after iCloud. No matter how it behaves/performs. That’s how Apple ecosystem rolls. And the ones who do not consider it a user friendly browser do not use it.

I’m open to an answer to GP’s question but this wasn’t one

Which reason are you referring to?

The fact that you can't use this extension (amongst many others) with Safari - therefore Safari on MacOS and iOS/iPadOS cannot benefit from this type of sharing. Walled garden strikes again.

I'm not saying that Safari is a bad browser, but artificial limitations imposed by Apple on the browser and the OS is quite frustrating for me.

Safari supports the same extension standard as the other browsers, they even have a tool to convert extensions into the Safari format. All the bookmarks are also in an sqlite database which you can access, or export them as a file, this is not a case of a wallet garden.

I know because I did just that with my Firefox and Chrome extensions. The only thing that's keeping developers from doing that is that you have to pay the developer fee to publish the extension app, on top of the regular differences between the browsers that you have to take care of if you are building an extension.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

That's all great but neither this nor www.xbrowsersync.org supports Safari.

That's the reason I don't use Safari beyond random superficial browsing.

Here is what xBrowserSync has to say about it:

"Will xBrowserSync support Safari?

No and it is extremely unlikely this will ever happen due to Apple moving away from the WebExtensions API and forcing developers to purchase Apple hardware and pay $99/year to develop on their platform."

eeeeh.

Shiori looks like it'd work infinitely better compared to floccus. It has an extension, tags, and everything is stored in a central repository you can visit from web (or server itself) any time you want. It also archives your bookmarks. It has been working flawlessly for me for a couple of years now.

https://github.com/go-shiori

I've been self-hosting and using Shiori for couple years now. Originally it was my replacement for pocket. It’s the closest thing I found to Pocket. Not only for read-it-later, but also as my archiving tool. My only issue with Shiori is that I have not been able to find a working browser extension or get the official Shiori extensions to work. So adding URLs is a manual process. So I only use it archive dev and longform articles for reference later.

Really? The official extension works fine for me. What issue are you running into?

I couldn't get the extension working on any chromium based browser. (or chrome or edge either)

Using the chrome extension - I get an error "json: cannot unmarshal bool into Go struct field .remember of type int" when attempting to login to my local Shiori server.

The extension - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shiori-create-book...

Looking at the reviews on that extension,that seems to be the common complaint.

That looks like a web app, not an actual browser bookmark sync.

Apples and oranges.

There is a value in using native browser bookmarks and syncing them cross browsers/OS's.

>There is a value in using native browser bookmarks and syncing them cross browsers/OS's.

Don't most browsers do this automatically WITHOUT a third party app? Firefox and Chrome both sync bookmarks across devices. What is the usecase for a third party bookmark syncer in that case?

Shiori acts both as an archiver as well as bookmark saver. My bookmarks are ...cluttered otherwise. I have a OneTab page with over 37000 'tabs' saved.

They don't natively sync cross-browsers i.e. chrome/brave/firefox.

Safari would be a welcome addition but alas.

Genuine question, not trying to bash the project -- the link here seems to really stress that floccus is just for syncing, but can't you just use Firefox Sync for that?

I already have the ability to send my tabs across devices or sync bookmarks, it's built right into Firefox. The UI could be better, but it doesn't look like Floccus changes the browser UI, which is my primary complaint with Firefox bookmarks.

I'm not sure what I'm missing.

Thank you! This is exactly what I needed, and what I've been looking for for years! Open source, lightweight, and stable.

xBrowserSync is another one.

You can use https://github.com/ishani/xSyn for self-hosting.

I ended up just creating a page in Notion and imported a CSV file.

Thank you, seems like what I wanted.

doesn't look like i can use my own server with floccus

If you have a WebDAV server, you can use that.

I use several browser profiles (stuff like social, entertainment, dev), and now I can put the usual sites I visit with each of those in the top level of the their bookmark bar directly, but also have a single folder for the ones I want to share between all of them, yay! I am very happy right now. Thanks GP.

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