Mozilla Mozaic: visualizing the future of bookmarks
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
I have five or six permanent tab-pins in each of Firefox and Chrome, and about two hundred open tabs at any given time. Add in search engines and history suggestions, and I'm covered.
It would be nice if unused tabs gradually migrated to a bookmark list, I suppose, but we're already most of the way there with late-loading tabs.
I gave up on Chrome when they took their perfectly usable vertical tabs implementation (which was an experimental feature you had to enable manually through the about:config page at the time) and just tore it out one day for no reason better than 'eh, we dont think that was a good design'. There weren't any problems with it. It wasn't holding back the development of anything else. Just some random dude at Google got a bug up his ass and decided to destroy Chromes usability for a few thousand users. And, of course, thanks to the whole invisible upgrade 'feature', the application just became unusable overnight with no mention.
Personally, I want the solution I've wanted for a very long time - tabs that remain open. Forever. At least, that is how it should LOOK, with the intelligent swapping and like going on in the background. When Firefox came out with the fullscreen tab manager with tab groups and everything I was so psyched.... and then I found out that Firefox actually keeps ALL of those tabs in memory. And you can't close a group and come back to it later. Useless.
I don't push 200, but 80 isn't rare for me (going by TooManyTabs extension count). IME, Firefox slows down much faster than Chrome when browsing this way (on Win7-64 w/ 4-8GB of RAM).
My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they force them into a tree structure.
They're not trees and I hate that I have to put them into one. Tags and labels are where they should be, more like the way things like delicious had them. Even though Firefox has tags, they're not prominent and not the primary way of organizing them, so they're not as easy to use as they should be.
Of course each browser has extensions that provide things like what I want, but none polished enough to make integration seamless and make adding new bookmarks painless enough to use, at least so far as I've tried.
The other important thing for me is being able to clip portions of a page and being able to annotate a page with notes, references and comments.
For all of those reasons, I'm stuck using an even less tailored tool (Evernote) to do my bookmarks. So, here's to hoping that improving bookmarks ends up being the next frontier.
Oh and -- by the way, your email validation in the comments here is broken. It thinks +'s are not valid.
I think mozilla has the perfect UI to get to your bookmarks via tags and complex hierarchy, through the awesome bar.
That is the thing that needs to be improved.. also showing thumbnails? why not, just let me search to get there.
Judging by the screenshots, this new UI seem to offer zero improvements in my common task of getting back to something I somewhat remember. But maybe it's awesome who knows.
I use bookmarks all the time in Firefox, but never, ever think about a hierarchy. You can very quickly search for bookmarks from the URL bar, and tag them if need to add a couple of keywords.
I have about 1000 bookmarks and have the set the option: "When using the Location Bar, suggest: BOOKMARKS".
This gives me fuzzy bookmark matching from the URL bar. Can find any bookmark in about 2 secs.
Anything else I need, just google search it from the URL bar.
Also if we imagine some person starting bookmark list from scratch, with tags - he has to A) make complete tag system from the beginning (I've tried, it's not easy) or he'll be forced to re-tag old ones later; B) type in tags (or select) every time he bookmarks site.With folder trees I use one click to drag&drop bookmark to the intended place.
Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them completely.
On sets with 10-100 bookmarks type of index system is completely irrelevant - you can even keep them in a plain list and still don't waste time.
I would if it were easier to do so.
The extra 2 seconds to do it is the bottleneck, so trimming that is the solution. When I click the star or hit ctrl-d in Chrome (I'm sure it's the same in Firefox), the title of the bookmark is in focus. I almost never change that, so that's useless.
Put the tag field in focus, and make tags autocomplete. That'd put me most of the way there.
Of course you're right -- prepopulating the field with tags other people used would be a much further step.
That's what "automated tags" are... they don't need inventing.
Which is why my dream bookmark manager has a "download and index bookmarked page" checkbox. Tags become optional - but you can still search for your stuff easily. A small-scale local information retrieval system would be way better suited to how we use bookmarks than manual tags, and we have some pretty awesome information retrieval models for closed sets of data that we can't use on the web.
As for the re-tag, the only way for that to happen is either some advanced AI or simply using crowd-source to get what others tagged that site as.
Making that work across multiple devices is another can of worms. Possibly a very desirable can for some people, who'd like to host the data.
Self-hosting would imply some data syncing service, but it should be one where data is encrypted before leaving home (and stays encrypted until it returns to owner - not the case with Dropbox and most other services). Though the browser or browser extension could take care of that.
I never really used bookmarks before, but this workflow has been lightweight enough that I can use it without thinking or switching mental gears. Ctrl/Cmd-D, maybe add a tag or two (or copy the title if I'm reading a paper with the embedded PDF reader), done.
* Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. * Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. * Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. * Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs. * Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed. * Add # to search for matches in page titles. * Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
Amongst other things, it would grab a default set of tags from the page's meta-content. (Of course, this was back before there was so much gaming of same.) And tags were defined as a whitespace-separated list, which made manual tagging very easy and quick. Search was also a whitespace-separated list, with limited wildcarding. With several thousand bookmarks, it typically took me 1-3 seconds to drill down to the one I wanted. And it took only a few seconds to define a new bookmark with a sufficient set of tags that I'd be able to quickly find it again with an appropriate intersection (or, more likely, one of several possible intersections, depending upon what I remembered of it at the time of recall).
Of course, these days what with disappearing content and the like, one may be better off relying more on local, offline caching/storing of static content, á la Scrapbook, for example.
By "permanent" I mean things which I know I will want to refer back to all the time, rather than just things I might want to look at or read at some point in the future.
A good example of this would be a Trello board for recurring payment services, with a separate card for each provider (along with evaluation notes etc.).
I also have an extensive list of movies and TV shows to watch in Trello, and this approach allows me to categorise/rank/organise them much more easily than any bookmarking system I know.
I basically use it as a mass dump of everything I find remotely interesting on the internet. I just give links enough tags so I can find them again. That way I can use it as a first buffer before doing a full on search. If I want to find a chocolate cookie recipe I can just type in the tags "recipe cookie chocolate" and if I've tagged a recipe like that before I know it's quality because I've tagged it before. Even if I don't remember tagging it.
I rather use tags to organize my bookmarks, even if it is less visual.
Now it is Evernote. With the Chrome plug-in for Google search integrated it works very well.
Why have bookmarks, clips, articles, other notes spread all over different services?
As such, the benefit outlined by the grandparent post is available without having to hand that information over to a third party, unless you opt into a cross-device or cross-browser bookmark syncing service.