The best browser bookmarking system is files | Hacker News Reader

The best browser bookmarking system is files

afewthingz.com

267 pointsjosephernest163 comments

My monthly opportunity to put out the idea that bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links).

I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[1] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[2], and I have never looked back to browser bookmarks or services like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readwise etc. which are built around bookmarking metadata instead of content.

It's amazing once you get the mental model, and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.

My favourite part of this mindset switch is that it makes bookmarking user generated content[3] both sane and easy, and automatically enriching those bookmarks with additional metadata a breeze.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...

[2]: https://notado.app

[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/best-of-hacker-news-comments/

There is also a self hosted solution called Wallabag https://wallabag.org/

Same concept its about archiving rather than just the link, given how quickly links often die its often what you want depending on why you bookmarked it.

> Same concept

Unfortunately it looks like Wallabag has the same fundamental issue of treating links as primary entities and scraped content as additional metadata that I described in the first article linked in the parent comment.

Especially when it comes to long form articles which cover multiple topics or are by their nature inter-disciplinary, it is essential for highlights or slices of content to exist independently of their source, while retaining their source as metadata, and allowing them to be linked independently (via tags, collections, feeds, titles etc.) to other slices of content (ie. commentary on the same article).

Archiving is an important step forward though, especially for a self-hosted solution, and especially after so many people have been burned by Pinboard's failure to deliver on its archiving promises for a paid product. I ultimately took a different approach to this and instead of maintaining my own scraping/archiving product, built an integration with the Wayback Machine[1].

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

The internet changes too much, that bookmarking for content is sometimes a futile effort. And even then, a browser like Firefox lets you tag liberally, if that's your thing.

I don't know... when I bookmark a page, it's because I want to get back to that exact, specific page in the future.

... which is what happens when you click either the link to the source which is stored as metadata or the link to the automatically archived website copy.

Well, of course.

I was responding to this:

> bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links)

Perhaps I'm not understanding exactly what "centered around" means, but to my ears, that statement sounds like it would not be an improvement for my particular use case.

Not saying the idea is a bad one at all -- just saying it doesn't sound appealing to me personally. But I also suspect I may not really be understanding it.

Bookmarks become outdated or the pages may be updated to no longer have the text you are interested in. If you're bookmarking a page that's fairly static, you're probably more interested in the content than the URL.

Do you mean you want to go to back to the exact specific sentence(s) on the page you remember reading?

You advocate what you call a “content first approach” but that’s not what your solution is. It is a text first approach.

Text is one kind of content. There are many more.

I have built similarly informed systems for bookmarking video and audio content; my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use.

> my system for text is the only one that is publicly available for others to use.

Why?

(Not that I'm probably a prospective customer for any of them; just curiosity as to what makes the difference.)

I completely agree that bookmarks should prioritize content over metadata. This is actually what led me to develop the "semantic-bookmark-manager" [1]. It uses LLM to summarize the content of bookmarked pages and generate relevant tags. Additionally, it utilizes RAG to facilitate semantic searching within your bookmarks.

[1] https://github.com/dh1011/semantic-bookmark-manager

Interesting. My first thought was of Google Notebook, a service that died well over a decade ago and I still remember only because I used it to bookmark recipes.

Online recipe sites tend to either be horrible ad-clogged messes, have unreliable URLs (or hosts), or both. Notebook let me select the text of a recipe (ingredients and instructions) and save that along with the URL, something I made frequent use of during its life.

Since Notebook died, I... Print recipes. On paper. Which also hosts the content, annotates with the URL, and allows me to easily take notes. And also doesn't cost me much if I spill things on it. But there are certain downsides as well.

>bookmarks should be centered around content and not metadata (links).

Also known as my 500-ish tabs in a single window.

Yes, there are multiple windows.

How's this pitch style on your landing page working out for you? It's breaking most of the conventional rules. Are you seeing customer adoption? I'm always interested in learning new methods of communicating ideas.

I’ve got the tab open and am strongly considering buying a subscription to see what it’s about, so it (and the low price) is working on me

It reads like a good documentation and not a sales pitch, which helps a lot. Also, the design is great too, looking almost as simple and beautiful as c2.com. Both of these give off "made by an engineer for engineers" vibes.

Honestly, adoption isn't amazing (ie. not at Raindrop or Readwise levels which I guess is the bar these days in this product area), but I have more than enough subscribers to pay for all the hosting costs.

To be completely honest, even if I didn't have a single paying subscriber I would still happily pay to host it out of pocket (and for a long time, I did) because it is the perfect tool for my own needs and it is so deeply integrated into all written knowledge consumption in my life[1] - I will use it until the day I die (and then my wife will open source it).

[1]: I use it to save comments from HN, Reddit, Twitter etc., I use it to save highlights from web articles, I use it to save/import my Kindle highlights, I use it to highlight parts of newsletters in my email inbox - the list is endless

You'd probably multiply those numbers substantially with a little rearrangement of the content.

Even the pricing is weird. $1.99/month billed annually... Just say $25/year - if people have bought in on the value proposition here they aren't going to run away scared when you hide $23.88 as $1.99.

Also that sentence is backwards. I stopped reading after seeing the price under the false assumption that I need to pay to try the product.

Instead

"First month Free

No CC required.

If you love it, $25 per year thereafter.

And if it's not for you, no problem, thanks anyways!"

As an aphorism: Free is more fun than fee. You want the fee with the fun of free.

I really like the style. I'll sign up

Why is there a setting to import all comments from HN, but not all posts?

The setting is to import favorite comments - the "favorite submissions" page is just a bunch of links, whereas the "favorite comments" page has the actual content that can be imported. It would be nice if text submissions that are favorited by a user could also be exposed in the latter.

I use Zotero for what you're talking about. It saves a dated copy of the site, the link, has the ability to tag and add notes. Offline first too.

Interesting product! What if I save different selection of an article for multiple times, are they going to be merged in a same entry, or created separatedly?

They are saved as separate entities (also tagged separately if you have any automated tagging rules set up which trigger for them), and they can be viewed grouped together in the context of their source article in the "Library" tab.

Hmm, in this case, Notado is more like a note-taking system than a bookmarking system. Highlights are just notes that connected with a link. Reminds me of https://lazy.so/, it has a very similar workflow [^1], and the notes of a same link are naturally aggregated as links are entities connect with notes.

[1]: https://www.loom.com/share/c56e982f86cc42ef93be31c92570c5ce?...

The goal is instead to copy the content over and link back to the source? I’m a little lost sorry. This seems very interesting and similar to a zettelkasten system.

You desperately need to show your product on your landing page, and have headings that convey the individual use cases and value props of it for the reader.

Simple general rule of digital marketing: No one reads website copy. They look at pictures and scan headings.

Another simple rule: I inherently don’t care about your product if I’m reading your site for the first time, so don’t spend time describing your capabilities. Simply describe how my life will be better if I use your product, and show me the product doing those things.

Less words more pictures. Less words more value.

(Sorry for being blunt, just trying to help with your conversions)

I second this, especially the part about adding headings.

Also, the line length (in characters) is crazy long. You ought to constrain the width of your text by putting it in columns or blocks, because you're trying to sell me something and I'm too lazy to resize my browser window just to get a not-unpleasant reading experience. I'd do this for https://danluu.com, but not yours yet.

Thanks for this detailed feedback. Another user somewhere else down this comment thread gave similar feedback and I think together it's enough for me to throw together some alternative landing page layouts.

Funnily enough I apply some of these things in a different context to READMEs for my popular GitHub projects[1], but whenever I see them applied on a product page I often click away very quickly because I associate with snake oil (it wouldn't surprise me that I'm in the minority here).

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Well one more piece of advice for you, then: Don't use an orange square for your webpage icon, I get it mixed up with all my open HN tabs!

Ha ha only se...mi-kidding, quarter-serious.

It's good, I built something that works similarly but with a very different UI

[0]: https://farosaves.com

Could you create a Firefox plugin? Then I’d love to test it

This is good stuff! I hope you keep working on this.

Have you worked on the paid vesion yet? (10$ after 1000 saves)

I've built a few browser extensions, but not found a super simple way to monetize them. Which technical solution do you plan to use for a paid version of your extension? Authentication? Other?

Thanks for posting, this might be what I’ve been looking for.

Fyi: kul*i is a swearword in finnish, means ’dick’. Dickish may not be the best starting point for social media service.

Yet somehow I feel like if the Finns had made a social media service and named it that, it would be considered the height of hilarity and Finnishness

I've heard this one before. Good thing that there are far more Persian and Arabic speakers in the world :)

Just a shout out to https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery. My favorite productivity extension. I'm a tab hoarder, this makes my life manageable and gives my Firefox all the screen real estate by using keyboard shortcuts to open/close the tabs easily.

I also use the Firefox css to hide the top sidebar, so I get maximum screen usage.

Their bookmark feature is pretty awesome too.

Thank you! I just learned I don‘t need Arc to achieve this

You might like this one too https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...

I'd also add Winger to the list, it makes it easy to group tabs by window and move them between windows.

link: https://github.com/l10nelw/winger

With Sidebery, you don’t need to use multiple windows (which are a PITA). Instead, you use panels which are always visible and easy to switch

OP describes drag-and-drop creation of *.url files in Windows:

  [InternetShortcut]
  URL=https://www.afewthingz.com/browserbookmark

In macOS, selecting URLs and dragging to Finder creates *.webloc files:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
      <key>URL</key>
      <string>https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark</string>
  </dict>
  </plist>

macOS (Sequoia 15.0) also handles *.url files appropriately: file type is identified as Web site location and opens with the default browser.

The real question is: do Windows and Linux browsers handle the .webloc variety?

At least on Linux it'd be relatively trivial to have a small script or application that registers to handle webloc files and feeds it into xdg-open.

It should be trivial on Windows too

Weird note: you can't Airdrop .webloc URLs to your iPhone/iPad, ditto .textClipping, etc. macOS's edges have become more pronounced over time. Don't get me started on how many of Apple's apps don't have spring-loaded folders...

The lack of spring-loaded folders in apps drives me crazy. Apple needs to enforce for their teams because all the Electron Apps don't need another excuse (Slack is a particular pain point)

Didn't know about this. Thanks!

I appreciate how universal and decoupled this approach is, but it doesn’t fix my main problem with browser bookmarks which is that management overhead gets to be problematic and makes me want to not bookmark things unless there’s adequate “justification” for doing so.

This is what fuels a lot of my tab hoarding. Tabs are quicker/easier to clean up. This has led some browsers (like Arc) to blend tabs and bookmarks into the same thing, but I’m not sure how that this is the right approach either.

I’d like to explore bookmark manager design/UX in a project of my own at some point. It’s not something that’s gotten much attention in browsers in something like a couple of decades, and while plenty of external managers are out there none I’ve seen really nail it IMO.

For me, it totally fixed the problem you mentioned: each time I find something really interesting, I drag and drop the bookmark to either a folder "MISC" (unsorted) or to a dedicated folder if it's specific to a project I'm working on.

Since the shortcut's file name contains the Page title, I can later search with my OS's search tool "curve fitting .url" => it finds the right bookmark.

If I use it in a particular project, I can copy/paste this .url file into the project folder, etc.

Having thousands of bookmarks creates no real problem: you end up with thousands of 1KB file in various folders, there is no mental burden in that: it doesn't add "weight" to the UX of a particular browser extension, since they are only files.

Drag-drop only takes 1 sec, there is no friction, no prompt.

Management overhead must be self imposed? I have tags on some of my bookmarks and put them in folders sometimes but that's it.

and if you really aren't sure you can put it in "unsorted" which is no worse than a forever tab

Perhaps. In my case bookmarks tend to be append-only because going through and reviewing them for relevance, link rot, etc is tedious, which then makes finding bookmarks later more difficult, particularly when it’s been long enough to not remember the title/address of the bookmark. Tags can help but like folders lose effectiveness with number of bookmarks.

For some time now I had a similar tab hoarding problem. My stop-gap solution is crammming a locally hosted markdown text editor in a new tab page. This way my bookmarks live as a Markdown file on my computer and I can easily add or remove links with as much additional comments as I like.

What I would like to add to it besides tons of polish is for it to be an extension that would also expose those bookmarks back to browser in form of bookmark folder syncing with the underlying markdown.

Give BrainTool a look. Its designed to address tab hoarding by making it easy to file and close out tabs and tab groups and then re-find them with search and hierarchy and notes. Associated keyboard commands make it easy to open/close and navigate tabs as a group (eg open a tabgroup with all tabs for a given topic). Everything can be synced to a plan text file. (Disclaimer, I'm the developer, but also a user!)

[0] https://braintool.org

I've kinda given up on my project, at least for now, but you can check out the design of it for reference. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITR1xloUslE

For me Arc was exactly the wrong approach. I thought about asking for bookmarks, but switched back to Safari instead. A menu is just a better tool for keeping track of more than a few dozen things than Arc's sidebar is. If I had thought of OP's idea of files, I might have gone for that. I still might, although I think I'll look at some combination of AppleScript/KeyboardMaestro to get the job done.

I would definitely agree, now that I have started to save my bookmarks into a dedicated section on [my personal site][1]. I want my blog to become my central place for all my knowledge dump, that is indexed the way I want, and can be explored through simple Linux tools (grep, find, etc.). I might also try linking it to a local LLM to query more naturally.

Also, I personally miss good old [del.icio.us][2]. It was way ahead of time.

  [1]: https://divinedragon.github.io/saves/
  [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

It's an interesting idea but missing vital features for me. For example, the star in Chrome tells me that I have bookmarked this page in the past so I avoid having duplicate bookmarks even after editing the name. The standard synchronization also makes it easy to bookmark a link on my phone and then deal with it once I'm back at my computer. Now I would have to figure out a way to somehow download the URL as a file on my phone so it syncs to my computer. The favicon is another neat thing to have on bookmarks.

Somewhere along the way it just feels like a backup makes more sense.

What is the real problem on having duplicates? They are only 1 KB files.

Having duplicates with different names is even better, and helps to find it more easily in the future: let's say I have bookmarked 2 times this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19165259/python-numpy-sc...:

1. "python numpy/scipy curve fitting"

2. "scipy.optimize.curve_fit question"

Later I can find it with query="curve fitting", or I can also find it with query="optimize". So it increases the chance of me finding it again :)

It's probably tied to how I use bookmarks but I strive for quality over quantity. Some are just temporary until I get the chance to write down the important information or watch the video - others are more constant, but when I go through and purge bookmarks I want them gone. They will just clutter my bookmarks, waste time and make it difficult to find things. In your example about bookmarking the question I would instead transcribe the knowledge to Obsidian and link to the source.

Not saying there's a right or wrong. Just down to how people treat bookmarks.

The problem with dupes is pollution, e.g. of search results, and increased cost of maintenance

In your example, how do you add/change tags for the same url if you have multiple files (and you don't even know how many)?

My own solution is along these lines. I have a static html page on my personal server; that's the home for all my browsers. (It's under git, of course.) Just flip to my ongoing mosh session to my server, and a trip into vim can add/move/delete anything desired. It's currently an HTML table, which tells you how long this technique has been serving me well.

The approach that makes my life much simpler is to list all the bookmarks on one page. Seeing everything in front of my eyes just takes the mental load off my mind. I experimented with the idea and built a browser extension with it. It has become my daily driver for web navigation.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-page-favorites/...

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/one-page-f...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/one-page-favo...

Interesting concept, trick, but no.

- Can I write comments about some bookmarks?

- Can I tag bookmarks?

- I cannot self-host it, hence you have to sync things between devices, which is stupid

- Can it automatically do import / export?

- Can it support multiple users?

I am using my own bookmarking system, which solves these issues for me, but again, it is not a jack of all trades. I do not see your aunt running it in portainer. I am still developing it, so it is not super stable. Even with these shortcomings this is how I consume internet now.

It is "bookmarking system" x "rss reader" x "simple search engine"

Link:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

To so many of these the answer is yes.

- Comments? Put them in the filename

- Tags? Put them in the filename

- Sync? Many of us already sync our devices in some way (dropbox/gdrive/syncthing/...). I see it as a plus - it puts me in control, not "the cloud"

- Import / Export? `mv` & `cp`. You can take your export on a USB stick, send it over email, you name it.

- Users? /home/bob/bookmarks, /home/alice/bookmarks

Use extended attributes, putting everything into the filename is awkward.

That makes it much harder to search, sync, export etc. Awkward? yes, but there's nothing wrong with it.

I have bookmarked and highlighted nearly everything I've read, by topic for the past 10 years.

I agree bookmarking could be files, but the reason for keeping the bookmarks is important to consider and important not to lose.

The piece that makes bookmarks hyper valuable, is remembering why or what was important about them. Annotation-centric bookmarking for me is really valuable. That usually means highlighting.

There's some nice options listed in the comments, I use diigo.com for a while as a paying customer and it's quite capable. Every so often I want to see what's out there, appreciate the links

In my mind I don't bookmark a page, as much as a sentence on it.

First step is am I just keeping it, or reading it. If I read it, I don't want to lose that time to have to spend it again in the future. If I read, I always highlight as I go anything. It kind of makes a journal, and also helps you reinforce if what you're reading is applicable to something you're currently needing to do.

The unfair advantage? When I come back to look for a link, I'm often actually looking for a sentence, phrase, or something I highlighted. I might occasionally put notes on the highlights. You can end up with dozens or hundreds of snippets explaining in and around a concept.

Annotating web pages, creates a feed of those by tag, which can then be fed to other things like sharing topics with people easily. There are other tools too like Readwise that help a lot to extract the insights.

I'm working on a personal-use bookmark manager project, after a realization: tabs, bookmarks, and history, are all just various points on a spectrum of URL frecency. I think the UI for managing and browsing these objects should reflect that.

With multiple synced devices, I should be able to see all synced tabs, and all bookmarks, and manage and search them, all from one unified interface. The Firefox local cache makes this possible.

This acrticle completely ignored mobile browsers. You can not drag and drop a url file here.

I think I need a browser extension with a button you can click that says "bookmarked!". And it doesn't have to do any thing or store anything. Because I have 1000s of bookmarks and I never go back and use them :)

Agreed! Internet search and chatgpt have been the best bookmarking service for me.

A person's bookmarks accumulated over many years can amount to privacy sensitive information. I was recently surprised to learn that Firefox's URL bar not only autosuggests stored bookmarked URLs as you type but also speculatively pre-connects them [1]. Can be disabled in `about:config` at `browser.urlbar.speculativeConnect.enabled`, at least in Firefox for Windows. If you save many bookmarks for a long time you may not want nor expect your browser to years later pre-connect to whatever URL or bookmark name happens to match some characters you type! I disabled it. Privacy benefit at a small speed cost.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1eqjl70/major_issu...

My own approach is tending more toward a locally-hosted homepage.

- Can be accessed from any local browser.[1]

- Can be edited with any local text editor.

- Can be liberally annotated.

- Can be readily searched (Ctrl-F, grep, etc.).

- Can be version controlled.

- Can be rsynced to other systems, or served over a local LAN, or privately-managed VPN, should that be necessary.

Within the homepage I can set up various categories, projects, date-oriented classifications (which can be annotations themselves), and of course a healthy and growing "misc" category.

________________________________

Notes:

1. This is occasionally not the case, as file:/// URIs are deprecated. In which case one can serve the file locally e.g., with Python (python3 -m http.server), netcat, etc.

I do something like this, but I make it public. It’s just a file in a git repo.

https://github.com/shepherdjerred/sjer.red/blob/main/src/lin...

https://sjer.red/links/

I'd consider a public page, though the implications of that on today's Web have shifted considerably.

That said, you'll still find old-school public homepages with lists of links on them, and they really are goldmines.

I vaguely remember an older browser just creating files in a folder for its bookmarks.

I wish I could find this folder on my work computer: I only have one work computer, so I don't sync work bookmarks with other devices.

In Firefox, it's an SQLite database in the profile folder, readily accessible by normal SQLite tools. The profile folder is accessible through the Help menu, if you don't like to dig for it in a file manager.

You can also export them to json from the bookmark manager, I do that semi-frequently so I can "spring clean" my bookmarks. My old ones are still backed up and can easily be grepped with no external tools if I need them.

Firefox/Netscape used to do that.

Didn't Internet Explorer do that? It was just the "Favorites" folder c:\users\username.

MSIE did this, at least through the early aughts, as the "Favorites" folder/directory.

(I've not used it since then.)

I completely disagree.

If the built-in bookmark systems in browsers could support tags, then I would say yes. However, it currently only supports a basic tree concept, with "folders" for links.

This is very one dimensional. I read loads of articles that talks about multiple topics. Especially Hacker News type articles :). An article can talk about, say geo-politics. As an example, perhaps an article on the recent pagers that exploded in Lebenon. This article may also be discussing some cybersecurity topics too. In this case I may want to tag it with 1->n tags.

I currently use Raindrop.io. It kinda works, but it doesn't really have what I have in mind. It also has more features than I think I need from a bookmarking app.

I kinda feel that Digg (wayback, it was one of the first 'Web 2.0' sites had a model that could work.

If I had enough motivation, I think I could probably produce a simple app that does tagging, and only tagging, with bookmarks.

I use Linking. It's quite good and actually being developed.

https://linkding.link/

This looks very interesting. Thank you for the link.

It doesn't support Safari as far as I can see. An extension for Safari (especially on IOS), is quite important. This is perhaps only for me, because my general workflow tends to be quickly scanning a couple of articles that I would want to read later, and I would like to easily bookmark them from Safari.

Secondly, its self-hosted only. This is perhaps not so bad - it just means I have to put some thought into where I would host it.

But again, thank you so much for linking linkding :). I am definately quite interested in trying it out.

You might be missing a German pun there. Dunno if the thing was built by Germans, but the d you missed in the name makes it look like it might be: LinkDing means LinkTHing in English, not "Linking".

On paper, tagging is objectively better for the reasons you describe. But in my experience, the human brain has an intuition for location and object-permanence which is confused by having the same thing in multiple places.

^This!^

With my app, BrainTool ( https://braintool.org ), I emphasize a visual hierarchy, but also allow notes and full text incremental searching across all saved content. Along with comprehensive keyboard commands, this enables a workflow where you can start typing what you are looking for, iterate through matches and then hit enter when you find it to open in a new tab, tabgroup or window.

Not sure about other browsers, but Firefox's built-in bookmarks support tags - no need for external apps.

I would like to give Firefox a try. I currently use only Chrome/Edge/Safari. Let me check if it works in IOS.

Firefox can store bookmark tags, but they don't save with the bookmark export without reading the SQLite database with a different tool: "Allow reading and writing bookmark tags" (9 years ago) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916

With bookmarks as JSONLD Linked Data, it's simple to JOIN with additional data about a given URI.

The WebExtensions Bookmark API does not yet support tags.

Not only that...but Firefox Mobile doesn't support tags either!

Firefox's bookmarks manager exports tags just fine (whether to JSON or the bookmarks.html format). WebExtension APIs are a completely separate issue.

Ah my mistake

But this file-based bookmarking system totally support tags :)

Example:

  - Let's say you bookmark my article https://afewthingz.com/browserbookmark

  - drag and drop => it creates a file "The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in.url"

  - you rename this file into "The best browser bookmarking system is already built-in #tag1 #tag2 #productivity.url" in 2 seconds

  - later when searching, you search with query="bookmarking #productivity", bam, you find it with tag "productivity" :)

You can put all .url files in a single folder with "#tags" in the filename. It works exactly like a tagging system, no more, no less.

Sounds clunky as all fuck.

Every once in a while I go down this bookmark rabbit hole. Tags is the correct solution (for all the reasons your mentioned). I hate the standard folder / tree based bookmark system that browsers and most 3rd party bookmark managers use. Firefox supports tags, but Firefox Mobile doesn't. Raindrop is clunky as hell. And...for along time, that was it.

Luckily, a few years ago I discovered xBrowserSync, which turned out to be exactly what I'd been looking for. It's a stupidly simple tag only based system that syncs across devices. The browser extension makes bookmarking easy. Your data is locally encrypted then synced. It has a phone app. It's open source. And I can self host a server if I want to. There is no "organizing" or sorting of anything. Bookmarks live almost ethereally in the plugin (tho they actually live in your browser's built-in bookmark manager too...but we never need to visit that place).

My only concern is that it hasn't been updated in forever (not that it's ever been broken for me). But I fear the day it does break and wonder if anyone will be around to fix it.

Someone in the comments below mentioned Linkding, which looks like it could work (if the browser extension or bookmarklet turn out to be mobile friendly). I'm definitely going to give that a run and see how it fits. Anyways, enough shilling for xBS (I swear I'm not affiliated with them). Good luck in your search.

Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.

There used to be an excellent service that allowed you to save downloaded versions of entire pages to your account, it was called furl.net IIRC. The service was well ahead of its time as it included search capability within the content of the saved documents. It was extremely handy for building supporting documentation for all kinds of research. From time to time I entertain the idea of recreating furl and testing if it would catch on this time around.

>Too many pages are either ephemeral or generated by an SPA making this idea less than ideal.

I've noticed this. The worst part is if you are looking for some specific piece of information similar to other links that are still valid it's hard to tell if you have the correct information at hand or not.

Chrome can take a full page snapshot of a webpage but the image is not high res.

Firefox can also do full page screenshots of web pages, and is usually pretty clear.

Thanks for mentioning this.

I just tested it out and I think it is a bit clearer than Chrome.

Filesystems often aren't very efficient at lots of small files.

If they could handle compressed archives transparently then an array of files, maybe extended from the old windows URL= style files, might work.

An SQLite file also sounds like a great way of handling URLs, which Firefox does:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/464516/firefox-bookmarks...

Efficiency/performance questions would be important if we would process thousands of such files per second, but this is not the case, or is it? We read/write these .url files at a pace of maybe 1 file per second maximum, if we are browsing fast, and want to save many bookmarks in a short time.

IMHO filesystem efficiency questions never arise for bookmarks of a user of a computer. If one day you want to do some data mining on your 10k bookmarks, it will probably take < 1 second, even if done with Python.

Do you see a real-life situation for which reading a .url in 1 µs instead of 100 µs would make any difference?

(If you're speaking about search/querying, then the OS search feature does it for us)

What I want from bookmarks it's not manage them as files, since those files are just links, I'd like to have eventually collected snapshots (like Zotero does), eventually DIFFING through them (because often articles get modified, without changing title/URL etc), instead of a full snapshot maybe just the "Firefox Reader" version saved so I can avoid wasting space in useless bits, check their on-line status slowly and regularly so when a bookmark is broken I got a small alert and I see it "greyed out" and appear in a dedicated "broken bookmarks" page I can try to update (often the same bookmarked page exist but under a different URL and thanks to the cached copy I can look for the new version or a mirror with a search engine).

Files for UIs was an ancient concept trying mimicking paper files, it's about time to use textual pages and search&narrow UIs more than files for many, many things.

That would compete with Pocket (Mozilla's proprietary, commercial bookmarking service). So there's little chance of that happening.

I don’t necessarily bookmark anymore. But I do passively look for a solution to store the content with a reference to the URL and the possibility of sharing it (the original or the bookmarked one) when someone asks.

I come from the world of Delicious and Pinboard (lifetime license). I have also tried many other services, such as Instapaper, Pocket, Raindrop, and other self-hosted ones. I currently run Readeck[1] for less than $2 a month on Pikapods[2]. I like it so far; the readability is superb. Now, I need to figure out if I can make some of the bookmarks perpetually public (currently limited to 24 hours).

I’m also not worried if everything gets lost. I might end up with one of the services, so I won't have to worry about it at all.

1. https://readeck.org/

2. https://www.pikapods.com

To tag bookmarks just make a folder for each tag and put a symlink/alias/shortcut to the appropriate bookmarks in each tag folder.

Putting tags in the file name with a hash mark feels “ick” and like the Wrong Way to solve this problem. Using folders and symlinks goes with the “grain” of a file system based solution.

> Putting tags in the file name with a hash mark feels “ick” and like the Wrong Way to solve this problem. Using folders and symlinks [...]

I respectfully disagree. If we were speaking about millions or billions of data points, yes, performance would be important, and we would look for the "Right Way" to do it, either with a DB or with files+symlinks, as you describe.

But here simplicity and portability is key. "Title of the page #tag1 #tag2.url" does the job: easily searchable with the OS search. Why complicate this with symlinks and folders for tags for just a few 10k bookmarks?

Maybe I was a little harsh there.

I’d prefer the folder approach. Instead of running a search you’d just open the folders.

Not hard either, on macOS you can option drag to make an alias.

In the MyIE2 days I wrote a pretty dumb browser script that would combine a bunch of tabs into a html document with links and titles.

When organizing shortcuts on my desktop into folders it was sometimes appropriate to reduce a topic to a single html document. For example if the folder has only 3 links in it and is unlikely to grow or if the topic is not really as interesting as the number of links gathered (like a level in a game you've researched years ago) Sometimes I would drop the link lists in the ftp client and send someone a pile of links.

I just noticed that one cant select multiple links > open on the windos desktop nor drop multiple on a browser. It was long ago but I think that worked once upon a time(?)

This is a pretty good idea but I feel like it exposes some of the shortcomings in our modern UI stack and file browsers. Users using the tools the OS provides to solve problems like this should be encouraged, however the separation between the file browser UI and the web browser UI feels like it creates a certain amount of inertia to using such a solution. If my UI had enough customizability that I could easily do something like attach a slide out drawer of a file browser view to my web browser windows, I feel like I'd be much more free to experiment with mixing and matching the various tools at my disposal and using my own solutions to problems like this.

What about having the best of both worlds? So when you edit bookmarks in the browser it maps the edits to a folder in the file system, no need to drag and drop. And vice versa: your shuffling things around in the folder will be reflected in the browser. Since bookmarks are already organized in tree structure this might be a more transparent way to store things rather than in db.

Will need browsers to support this but doesn't sound too difficult.

Check Nyxt for something else superior to plain bookmarking: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/dbscan.org

> Want to add tags to your bookmarks? Just rename the file Super bookmarking system.url into Super bookmarking system #productivity.url and later you can search your bookmarks with tags, example query in your favorite OS's file search tool: "bookmarking #productivity"

Ok, how do I see the full list of tags and be able to rename a single tag and let it propagate to all bookmarks? Not trivial

> See the video, the drag-and-drop creates a .url shortcut file:

Dragging is worse UI vs a shortcut.

Also, how do you sync with a smartphone?

And what about drag/open on Mac vs Windows where url file formats differ?

> Ok, how do I see the full list of tags and be able to rename a single tag and let it propagate to all bookmarks? Not trivial

SQL-based system, many-to-one links, redefine the tag name in the Tags table without touching the numerical primary key, the bookmarks keep their numerical reference (via a many-to-many BookmarkTags table) to it. That's how you do it.

Stuff like that is probably why browsers use SQL- in stead of file-based bookmarking systems nowadays.

I think it's mostly a very good idea, but much less accessible compared to the omnipresent bookmarks bar, so I will keep using the bookmarks bar (whose primary downside is the vendor lock in, imo).

Genuine question: why using the bookmark bar which is so tiny (a narrow 30 pixel high bar) to browse through thousands of bookmarks, when you can comfortably move/delete/rename/group in folders/use CTRL-C, CTRL-V, CTRL-X, CTRL-Z to undo/etc. in a big file explorer window?

My point is: the file explorer seems to have (at least for me) a far better UX than the browser's bookmark bar.

Example: you accidentally renamed a bookmark in the bookmark bar. Can you do CTRL-Z? No! With files in file explorer, you could.

I guess i don’t do those modifications very much.

Also im a avid user of keyword bookmarks in Firefox, so I need to store those in Firefox anyway for them to work

> whose primary downside is the vendor lock in, imo

I fail to see how bookmarks have vendor lock in. Every browser I've used has bookmark import/export to a format understandable by other browsers, like HTML.

I just meant that you can’t keep them in sync between browsers. You need a external program for that.

I've been using Trello for a while to organise bookmarks and other snippets, but with the recent force-in to rich text instead of markdown and links displaying as "preview" by default the UX has got a lot worse. Yes, there are extensions that make it almost as good as before, and I'm using one, but still.

From the article, I gather that it turns out that filesystems are a good way to organise vaguely hierarchical information. SQLite isn't terrible though either, people should be able to write third-party tools to help manage that.

Out of curiosity, do some of you also use this bookmarking technique?

I don't but I also avoid data silos whenever I can, so I paste links and other things in a text file.

I use raindrop.io, which has the advantage that it is easy to share bookmark lists with others, which I use fairly frequently.

Seconding raindrop.io. Went from being a tab hoarders with Tab Outliner, but the extension finally broke and isn't supported. Thankfully I managed to import my huge list by munging the JSON file into a CSV. Hate that it's stored on the cloud, but I just export it out into CSV so if I have to move again I can. That said the autotagging and recommendations are great. I have a ton of tabs I didn't organize and it automatically suggests folders to move them to that are correct 99% of the time.

I would mention how many tabs I migrated to highlight how good the performance is, but I'm embarrassed to admit how many I saved...

FWIW I wrote a blog post on how to get off of Tabs Outliner: https://braintool.org/2024/07/01/The-best-Tabs-Outliner-alte...

I only understood the advantages of browser bookmarks once I set my browser to delete all site-data on close and because of that was forced to use bookmarks.

Now searching for something in the address bar is much quicker because it will be populated only by sites important enough to warrant a bookmark.

I have tons of keywords in muscle memory now to trigger queries on many sites.

My bookmarks are also curated very well because I actually need them to be.

Do normal people nowadays actually use bookmarks at all?

I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of people who get a new phone, for instance, never create a bookmark on its web browser.

Possibly the % is higher on desktop, but then I would guess the number of bookmarks is still probably in the magnitude of less than 5, and they could be considered more like quick launch shortcuts than a true hierarchal bookmark organisation system.

yeah, i only use tiktok too

I bookmark lots of things! And then promptly forget about them.

Mostly, I just leave the tab open. I have... Many tabs.

> Do normal people nowadays actually use bookmarks at all?

I don't even know how to create bookmarks on my phone.

On a bunch of computers, though, I have thousands of them, going back years... if not decades.

(So maybe I'm not all that normal.)

> sadly, it doesn't work out of the box on Ubuntu + Firefox. Mozilla, please fix this :)

Working for me with Mint (21.3) + Firefox (130.0.1). However, Nemo seems to treat the resulting .desktop files specially (reporting them as 0 bytes in size and a text/html MIME type), and trying to open them with a text editor doesn't work from Nemo (but does from a terminal).

I use self hosted https://linkwarden.app/

For me, it works well for temporary bookmarks. For ones I want to keep long-term, though, the bookmarking systems provided in the browsers is not adequate. It's too difficult to use bookmarks from other places and browsers, and I find the support for organization to be lacking.

So I run a standalone bookmark server instead.

Firefox on Ubuntu saves it as a .txt file. Changing it to .url causes Nautilus to recognise it as an Internet Shortcut, but it still opens in the Text Editor by default. I can choose to open it in Firefox, but Firefox has no idea what to do with it, and just tries to save it.

Not that great of a solution IMHO.

Instead add hashtags to the end of the URL and bookmark them like normal. This way you can search them based on context without having to faff about with files and folders.

Of just email the links to an email address and add the hashtags in the body of the message.

I haven't used bookmarks in more than a decade. The few sites I use daily are in mah brane.

I only use bookmarks to give priority to certain pages in the URL box

> The few sites I use daily are in mah brane.

The several sites I use daily are in mah browsers' cache, so I just type a few letters in the address bar. (Yeah, not "mah browser's"; all mah browsers.)

I print to pdf and name the file the title of the document. Everything else has failed in some way for me and pdfgrep works well enough.

Maybe something like this could be the best bookmarking system:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695840

(on HN's frontpage today)

Bah... just give us the good old del.icio.us.

Not the recent .com HD remaster.

alt="Windows user discovers beauty of Unix ;)"

“Browser built-in bookmarking system is good enough”, proceeds to not mention it again and talk about the filesystem instead.

My title was maybe confusing. By "built-in" bookmarking system, I mean the built-in feature "drag-and-drop into .url file". (As opposed to using a browser extension).

I used to add my links to a github page :) Now I add all my frequently used links to easyy.click

> No browser extension needed.

No but you need an additional app to search/manage them (the file browser)?

You can use your OS file search tool (even the built-in File Explorer search), that you use for your everyday file searches.

I have to be honest, I search for files about once a year. Tops.

Now then in the browser, I start typing a URL and it's auto-completed from my bookmarks (and/or history). Even the most casual users do the same, just using search results instead of bookmarks.

The idea is fairly sound, but it relies on a bookmark usage pattern which I think is becoming more uncommon.

With this scheme, you can't automatically sync bookmarks across multiple machines though.

Put the folder in OneDrive, iCloud, DropBox, Google Drive, Syncplicity...

That’s going to mess up when I use both computers simultaneously.

Why? Unless you’re adding and deleting bookmarks every few seconds, I don’t see why it wouldn’t keep up.

The network isn't that reliable. It could easily take a couple minutes for sync to succeed, which is far too much chance of a conflict.

Syncplicity is a name I haven't heard in a while. It was the best (free for home) from all those names in the list 10 years ago. It seems they have abandoned the home user space nowadays.

This is stupid good advice. I use quicksilver as a launcher, and by putting bookmarks in a folder, I can index them and launch them like any other app or document on disk. Thanks for writing this up!

Shout out to Kinopio[1], an awesome canvas/to-do/mind-map tool

[1]: https://kinopio.club/

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