Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it) | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

blog.mozilla.org

243 pointsspindritf107 comments

Reasons why I bookmark pages:

    1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly
    2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly  
    3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly

My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me.

I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of bookmarking too many things. Next I start fretting over whether they're organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion.

It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is still king in my book!

>no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me.

Ever tried Xmarks?

I likewise use different browsers often during development, mainly for testing and exploring browser specific options, but use Firefox for my main browser and bookmarking etc. When I want to access a bookmark in, say, Chrome, if the page is open in firefox I simply drag globe icon next to the URL from Firefox and drop it onto chrome. If it isn't already open, I show all bookmarks and drag and drop the bookmark from there.

Instead of having to make sure we have them organized, browsers should just index their content and provide good search. Indexing engines are more than fast enough nowadays.

Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks.

But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they plan to address these issues:

1. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political science course.

2. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too. But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many.

3. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for toggling between icon and list view.)

4. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks?

All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not only help you save pages for later, but also help you manage the pages that you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds, 5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".

I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks.

Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visited them once.

All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.

I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of:

* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.

Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack. I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.

I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast.

One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh

What's strange is that the study reveals exactly these different use cases for bookmarks, but doesn't propose a real solution. I currently have well over 100 things in Pocket, and even more in Pinboard, and many different tab groups open in the background (FF). My problem is not how to store things, but how to get myself to follow through instead of seeking out more content.

Maybe if I created a randomly updating HN-like interface for my 'bookmarks' I would be more likely to follow through. Or a daily email to myself of 5 random links.

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end.

For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique.

I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.

The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link.

So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.

It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway.

And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised.

@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use.

Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)

@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.

I think "months" has to be an exaggeration, I don't think I've had ff last months without require being restarted. I could imagine weeks, but not months. (FF 16/linux)

Restarting doesn't get rid of tabs.

not for me, they all restore perfectly, there's likely a setting you're not using to restore tabs.

4 seconds of googling shows this for Chrome

you should try the voice search, it's amzingly fast and got everything right that I asked it. I said "directions to cafe prage san francisco" and as soon as I finished the results came up and it talked back saying what it had found - traffic adjusted driving time and map. I tried "oracle stock price" and that showed and spoke the result back to me.

lots of cool features. its >50mb so you need to be on wifi to download it (for some reason)

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

and this for firefox

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-previous-session

Panorama / Tab groups are amazingly helpful for this, one of the best FF4+ features. This is another good step towards improving the feature.

I'm not sure how well the Dropzilla concept will work with a large number of bookmarks, or folders within folders, but I look forward to testing whatever they come up with.

I thought the dropzilla concept in the final slide looks pretty similar to what tab groups can already do. I hope they do combine them rather than having the two as separate features, otherwise it'll be splitting up bookmarks in different areas.

The Tab Groups feature is really useful but it's also quite awfully done. I particularly hate the way it resizes and moves around groups when you resize the browser. Ideally, it should use an automated layout, similar to tiling window managers, where you have a fixed master area, and a stacking area for other recently used groups. It'd also be fairly handy if you could nest groups, or have multiple panoramas, for people like me who have too many tabs open to fit on the screen at once.

I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a new chance in about a year.)

Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

"Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X)."

I'm on Windows 7, and in my experience the memory issues in Firefox haven't been completely resolved yet (though the Mozilla team are actively working on it). However, as a workaround I have found the Memory Fox add-on useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/

Firefox on OS X is remarkably better in the past year. I ditched Chrome many months ago because Firefox now is better with memory and remaining quick and responsive than Chrome for me on OS X.

Have you used it recently?

A few versions ago, they added a feature where tab contents are only reloaded on-demand, when clicked. You no longer have a big lag when opening up the browser with many tabs, and memory usage is quite reasonable.

That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and Chrome fails miserably.

As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had minor memory consumption improvements. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for more (possibly too much) detail.

If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix....

What is Chrome's bottleneck with hundreds of tabs? The resource load from hundreds of processes? IPC overhead for the browser process to managing the content processes?

Memory usage for that many processes. Even with all the sharing it tries to do, its per-origin (there's usually at most one process for each origin, not for each tab) overhead is much higher than Firefox's.

close some fucking tabs sometime

christ

A lot of work has definitely been done in the last year. Two years ago, firefox was unusable on the netbook I had at the time, so I used chrome. I think the situation would now be reversed, however.

> I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark.

There's a Firefox extension called "toomanytabs" that tries to improve the "volatile bookmark" experience. Frankly, I think it should be called "notenoughtabs".

Btw, I have found that Opera can reliably handle 400+ open tabs simultaneously. The downside is that it's not Firefox. And Chrome took out vertical tabs in 2008 or something. bleh.

FYI, Chrome now has stacked tabs and tab grouping.

Thanks, I've been waiting for this. It's still experimental (under "about:flags"). Stacked tabs are great, but unfortunately "tab grouping" is not that, it's just a feature that makes it possible to select several tabs at once?!

With real tab grouping in Chrome, including a feature to only load tabs when selected, I could finally make the switch from Firefox and the great "TabGroupsManager" addon.

Unfortunately, Chrome dev team decided that opening all tabs on startup is a good thing and marked intelligent lazy loading of tabs as "won't fix". I cannot find one good argument against this feature, unless it's extremely difficult technically (which is unlikely).

Source: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105666

I've found that Opera crashes too often with 150+ tabs, often even at startup. What I would like Opera to have is a similar option to Firefox to let tabs remain dormant until you click on them. That might make me switch back.

> And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks.

Woohoo! You're welcome :)

I do the same. My hundreds of tabs are my memory "staging area".

If I revisit them ~3 times or more - they get "committed" to my long term "repository" (aka bookmarked and mentally memorized).

I am also asked to defend my habit again and again. And so I have long struggled and meditated on this problem. What I ultimately decided is that a repository of bookmarks or open tabs, or of any kind of knowledge, is useless as a static collection and quickly degenerates into a backlog never to be accessed again. I abandoned my humongous Delicious account and have since been developing a little something that offers a different take on the subject. I have been saving dumps of my open tabs' urls into files for years now, to preserve my sanity, knowing I would one day get around to the right solution to my own ailment.

My take on the problem is action-oriented browsing. I think that anything you clip or save or note down must have an intended action, now or in the future. Maybe you are saving a bookmark because you want to refer to it when you tackle some personal project you want to do someday/maybe. It must then be triggered by that project when you finally get to it. If you never get to it, the bookmark will die with the project, which is just as well.

Most bookmarks will never be accessed again, but you don't know which ones yet. It's the long tail principle. We don't have time to do everything we want, but in the spirit of GTD, ideally we'd like to map out all that we could want to do, so we can always (say, weekly) review our priorities and be ready to pivot into new directions if situations, or our minds, change.

Even if you are only saving a cute picture of a cat, it is still actionable. Why are you saving it? That's the key question. It may be because you want to show it to some people, so it should be triggered in your next interaction with each of those people, and then you're done with that bookmark and you can let go of it.

Articles that you want to read or reread should by triggered by a reading list, or by study plans for particular subjects, or even by a blog post you want to write on the ideas you read on several of these articles.

It's all about what should trigger that bookmark to come into your attention again. You shouldn't need to remember to check it back on your own, or you may well never do.

You hit on a huge key point: context. For me, that can include:

- Selected text

- Current scroll position

- Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway)

- Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups

- The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it

None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently retained when you restart the browser, either.)

When I leave a tab open for a long time, I almost always have a reason in mind for doing so. However, I can't always remember exactly what that reason was when I return to it, especially if it's been a while. That's the kind of information I'd like to store in a bookmark.

Because of this and other problems, I've often imagined some sort of non-linear visualization of your browsing history. This might look something like a git commit tree, with branches indicating when you opened a new tab from a link, along with other information and "tags" along the way. (One important aspect of this is that just like a VCS, you wouldn't lose your history stack when you hit back a few times and then click on another link within that same tab.) Theoretically, this could even store page states that normally aren't stored in a browser's history, e.g. filling form fields, scroll position, and so on. You could then view your bookmarks, tags, etc in that same interface, with a robust system for filtering and searching of course. Something like this could revolutionize the way I save and recall things online. Plus, I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to see your entire browsing history visualized like that.

If you use TreeStyleTab (or Tab Groups) then the hierarchy is a major context as well.

Not to mention that creating a bookmark feels like a big decision. Something you want to keep for ages. While a Tab might be simply some a page in a reference manual.

You can bookmark entire trees, though, preserving the hierarchy.

Yeah, context, especially how you got there. I've been wishing for that for years. Also what your other tabs were doing for any particular tab/bookmark.

I leave a lot of tabs open too, all related to each other. There are usually two or three groups of related tabs. TreeStyleTab addon helps a lot with that, since the vertical tab list shows parent/child tab relationships and lets me move things in and out of hierarchies.

I don't even use FF's bookmarks anymore, which is a shame because I miss the address bar integration. I just use pinboard, which is basic but works.

Another reason why I like FF for large tab workloads are TreeStyle Tabs. That way I can easily hierarchically manage my tabs. On Chrome there is simply the tab bar that quickly overflows. E.g., on my laptop the tab bar gets too crowded for my taste with more than 15-20 tabs open.

I'm currently using chrome for Hacker News, reddit, and similar websites. For casual browsing. And FF is for serious browsing where keeping Tabs and large amounts of Tabs are more important.

If you are a vim person, you might want to try Pentadactyl/Vimperator. You can use the ":b $searchterm" to search your open tabs, and ":buffers" to display the list of open tabs. Very handy.

I actually love Chrome for this use case, as I can use the Task Manager view to kill all my tabs while leaving them "open". I additionally made a one-line change to my local build of Chromium so that when I open it all tabs come up "crashed", so I can now manage a nearly infinite number of tabs with almost no memory usage at all.

What was that one-line change? That'd be useful for me as well.

    diff --git a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    index 40ebe27..0cb39b8 100644
    --- a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    +++ b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    @@ -995,6 +995,7 @@ class SessionRestoreImpl : public content::NotificationObserver {
               GrantPermissionsForFile(id, *file, read_file_permissions);
         }
     
    +    schedule_load = false;
         if (schedule_load)
           tab_loader_->ScheduleLoad(&web_contents->GetController());
         return web_contents;

How is Xmarks holding for you? I couldn't get it to work satisfactorily, so I created my own solution for syncing my tabs across computers. Didn't use it for bookmarks, as I use Pinboard.in for that. Just like you I use my tabs as temporary bookmarks, and "proper" bookmarks as permanent ones—there are lots of solutions to handle permanent bookmarks, but not for tabs whatsoever.

My solution for tab syncing was creating symbolic links to my Dropbox to keep my Firefox user directory in sync across computers, and that comes with the added benefit of everything syncing, plugins, addons, customizations, settings etc. which accumulated in my computer through the years of Firefox use, which I can call at this point an UI fork of mainline Firefox. As long as you don’t open the same Firefox in two places, this solution works pretty well. A recounting of how I did it is available at my blog at this link: http://sublunarorb.it/post/34087338428/so-you-need-to-actual... but it’s aimed at casual users, so it’s a little bit chatty.

I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of improving one that is not well known?

The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the History feature, is beyond me.

In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).

Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from the page.

My add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/ combines bookmarks and tab-management. It lets the user group bookmarks into sets that a user can open all at once or singly. This approach almost completely eliminates the need for an address bar.

Another interesting feature of the add-on is that it unifies bookmarks and web-search. The two seem totally disparate but they can be integrated seamlessly in a very cool way. Check http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html for an overview of the approach.

I'm glad they're working on something, because my bookmarks are a good example of horribly broken.

(Ideally I'd have something that looked like the grid-home layout that most browsers have now, but for all my bookmarks. Then it'd have the ability to create / destroy folders, and drag and drop functionality to move bookmarks around.)

I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.

Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later date.

What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can still read what was on the page.

Have you seen Historious? http://historio.us/

Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the recommendation (what's your username)?

I'm a paying user of yours so I don't have any specific problem with you or historious, but I don't like that you're offering a free month here. I'm sure it won't really have any impact, but in theory by rewarding people who say "have you tried <product>" in a HN comment you're incentivising people to make those comments, essentially offering people the chance to use a referrals scheme without it going through referral links.

That's true generally, although it doesn't really apply in this case. I don't usually give free months to people who mention historious, I was just happy to see a mention and gave a freebie.

Arguably, the free bookmarks you get through referrals are more useful, since they don't expire...

http://www.zotero.org/ can do this. It can make a snapshot of the page, and also a copy of all attachments on it (especially useful for pdfs, images etc.)

Both Clipboard and Pocket can do that. Pocket is my personal favorite as it's available on all devices that I own: http://getpocket.com/ https://clipboard.com/

I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume. All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling of being "left behind" more and more.

I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later" tool or process. If I can't read it right now, chances are I won't do it at all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.

This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be in another.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Mozilla's UX posts continue to impress by being thorough and open-minded.

Firefox is improving at an amazing pace for both users and developers. It seems like the rapid release schedule has sparked a flame.

Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things that suck when (trying) to use one.

My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface THINKS I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results.

Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse.

Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own these status symbols du jour.

That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen complex.

Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS

In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox, and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS program to consume and digest RSS feeds.

RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.

I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it "fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.

Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat, the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based version would be much more usable.

I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.

A mind map browser history/bookmark system would be the most intuitive. With timestamps and relations between items.

Most of the time when searching through my browsing history I remember a small bit from the page that I want (like a phrase), but not the whole address or title. So searching for something like "find that page about a Python module, which I opened two days ago" would be truly helpful. Hell, even searching by a page's dominant color would be helpful sometimes, since I have a good visual memory.

For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are:

1. I want to go back to a website for new content; or

2. I want to store content to read/view later; or

3. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me.

So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for 3.

I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely visit.

A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is impossible as I have it set up.

Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search; folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.

Related to bookmarks...

I no longer use Firefox and have long since switched to Chrome, but in doing so my bookmarks have become effectively useless. What I mean by this is, in Firefox, one of the greatest (and probably underused) features was the ability to tag individual bookmarks instead of simply pushing them into a single folder.

This meant that, when I wanted to revisit a bookmark later on, I simply had to start typing in the tags (which I always made broad and diverse). By typing in more and more tags that I thought would likely relate to the article I wanted to reach, it would narrow it down. I never had to remember what the article was called, or where it was, or anything like that.

Now if this automatically happened while bookmarking? Some intelligent manner in which the page could be skimmed for keywords or something. Bookmarking and retrieval becomes much simpler...

Just wanted to throw that out as something to consider :)

(Now, one Chrome, I usually just leave tabs open or try to organize into folders and fail miserably :/ )

I use the Firefox address bar as a lightweight version of this. Since it searches URLs as well as titles of sites in your history, you can just type (parts of) words separated by spaces to find old content.

Tagging is indeed the best way to organize bookmarks and it's what we use to organize bookmarks in noteplz.com . Another useful thing i've found useful is keeping the page referer along with the bookmark (one of the few good things i can think of about referers) .

Welcome to the club. Many of us have realized by now that none of the browsers are following any standards when it comes to bookmarks. The tagging is the exclusive Firefox feature and we were simply hijacked by it over the years. You moved to Chrome after using Firefox for many yeas (so did I) and you realize that your Firefox tags are not welcome at Chrome.

Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps organization.

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents would be indexed (taking into account the security implications)

I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks.

As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of bookmarks a user already has.

By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the bookmark title but by the URL content itself...

Opera, circa 2008:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/indexing-and-searching-in...

Exactly. Thanks! Had no idea that feature existed, going to try it out. Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes (on OSX) and, i admit, mainstreams, make ne not using it much although i do cross html browser tests there

Always have Opera i stalled and the UI is cool but frequent crashes...

I completely understand. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Opera myself. The features and UI are miles ahead, IMHO, but other characteristics are so frustrating. The Windows version doesn't crash often, but there are plenty of web sites that don't get along with it.

At least one bookmarking service, pinboard.in, offers a paid option of full text search on the contents of all bookmarks:

http://pinboard.in/upgrade/

Cool in itself, wasn't aware, but dependent on a thirdy party service and indexing/searching seems to happen online?

A browser builtin local solution could be best

I don't know... I'd prefer an online option, so that I could have the same bookmarks searched from multiple devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, etc...)

Yes you have a point and according to the Opera link above, the indexes seem to smalish

I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites.

1. Tab - One time read 2. History - I might need to return a few times in a week, month 3. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API

Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it, it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu.

The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.

I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on what computer I am on.

If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose Chrome.

Aside from the content, this is a fantastic exposition of the techniques of UX design, and since I teach a unit on that I wanted to make sure I'd be able to give the link to my students. But I'm on my home computer right now, and I manage that from my office computer, so I...

...emailed the link to myself. :P

Which is actually an interesting confirmation of several points the article made. Most of my save-for-later is "I want to consume this, but don't have time" and "I want to come back to this momentarily", for which I use the leave-tabs-open strategy rather than bookmarking or emailing. I knew this article would be great almost from the time I saw the title....

I hit Ctrl-D and later search for something of resemblance by typing into the url bar and letting results flow in from bookmarks.

I'd much rather just minimize tabs into a staging area than bookmark. And then type things into the url bar and finding pages. Or browsing the staging area visually, much like an eternally long strip of tabs. And tabs preserve context unlike bookmarks.

THe only thing that prevents me from saving too many tabs is that browsers get crashy/laggy when I do that and I have no way to stash the saved tabs to some place where they don't clutter my desktop visually.

I have three uses of saved pages. - The open tab: return to it later - Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar - Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news sites

Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or for very specific functions.

The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.

There's only two things I use the browser's bookmarks for now - firstly to prime the pump for FF's awesomebar. I rely on that when I delete my history (which I do irregularly during development).

The second thing is bookmarklets, which are also a subversion of the mechanism, but let me customize /across browsers/ which most extension mechanisms don't do.

Glad to see Mozilla tackling the fragmented collection of bookmarks I've ended up with as 'favourites' in Google Reader, Hacker News, twitter, youtube, vimeo....

My ideal solution would be to search my pinboard bookmarks from the address bar in chrome. As it is I get fairly close using alfred and a custom search for pinboard.

No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)

Honestly, this is the main reason I always have a tab open to HN. There are so many items on here that I know I don't have the time to look into immediately but will return to, and having them saved just by upvoting feels really good. I very close attention to what I vote for, and when I go hunting for a link I know there's a good chance it'll be saved along with comments for context.

I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so many eyeballs, either.

I worked on a app to let you keep your bookmarks searchable from any browser and share them with others at same time.

http://www.microki.com/

Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.

WFM. (In all browsers I can test on OSX.)

Hopefully you're not experiencing a MitM attack! :)

They present a valid certificate for blog.mozilla.org from GeoTrust to me.

What kind of error specifically? Also, is the SHA1 fingerprint of the certificate you do receive the same as this: B0:02:9E:58:32:7B:72:16:58:C6:E4:DA:20:9F:20:CC:C5:7D:3F:5F?

yeah me too. IE throws a warning. In a corporate environment.

I wish browsers had 3 suggestions for which folder to put the bookmark into - that would save me time scrolling through my bookmarks.

Does Mozilla know that their blog's comment section is probably broken? I cannot submit my comment where it matters.

Safari's Reading List comes to mind.

For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using this feature?

better description here than I could muster:

http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari

Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too.

http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...

Came to my mind as well, both on iOS and OSX.

The article does mention it, though, in the "Various applications and services offer save for later functionality" part, along with other software and services.

My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two bookmark files with tags attached.

Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks. I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. The tags from both original files must be preserved. If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original files, it must be tagged the same way in the new file.

Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option. I like my privacy.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.

I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

(I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)

> I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own; extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.

Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the relevant data.

If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do this.

If you want simple and dirty.

1. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

2. Pick your favorite scripting language

3. merge the two json backup files using your script

Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.

> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the Library window on each machine

I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything except the tags.

A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.

Wow. Okay, thanks for the information. Is there an open bug for this already? :(

Apparently, I was wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4716258

Tags are in the bookmark backup JSON.(Storing tags was one of the primary reasons for moving from bookmarks.html.) Search for "root": "tagsFolder" anything that is a parent of that is a tag.

Hey, thanks. Looking at a pretty-printed JSON file with that little piece of info cleared it up for me.

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