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

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.

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

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

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

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".

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.

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.