An update about the new Chrome bookmarks manager | Hacker News Reader

An update about the new Chrome bookmarks manager

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58 pointspaublyrne32 comments

I'm certainly happy about this (at least for now) reversion. It is frustrating when a product you use loses functionality in the name of progress.

For me, the basic functionality was folder selection to save the new bookmark into, which no longer seemed to work in the last release.

It did actually, but it was just not very clear and took a number of clicks to do.

Typing the name of the folder you wanted as a search did not work, or at least the behaviour was erratic.

You needed to use the mouse to drill through to find the dir you wanted.

Yeah, this was the biggest annoyance for me as well.

If you want to be able to bookmark quickly, you should check out Booklight, it's an open source Chrome plugin for rapid bookmarking via keyboard shortcuts and it also allows you to open bookmarks quickly.

I never quite figured out where the bookmark goes when you don't pick a folder.

Good that Google reverted it back and don't bring it back - keep it optional. I am just moving away from IE11 (as Edge won't come to Win7) and Chrome is a good alternative and the bookmark functionality was fine. If there would be Servo build for Win7, I would use it.

> If there would be Servo build for Win7, I would use it.

Glad to see this confidence in Servo, but ....

Servo isn't ready to be used as a proper browser, even if it did work on Windows (I've been casually trying to port some of it for the past few days, though I'm not familiar enough with MSVC to really do this properly and mingw doesn't work for some of our deps).

It's still missing a lot of DOM features and CSS. Most of these aren't hard to implement, just that there are a lot of them and we haven't gotten around to it.

Its chrome (chrome = stuff that is not the engine), servo-shell (https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell) is pretty rudimentary too. Servo is a browser _engine_ , so stuff like bookmarks are out of its purview. Projects like browser.html and servo-shell can provide these, though. Otherwise I believe it works with the Chromium chrome via CEF.

I contribute a lot to Servo and still don't use it for regular browsing. I do use release builds for googling things whilst studying (generally I just need to load simple html pages and wikipedia, which work awesomely), but not much more. As more and more features get implemented, this should change though :)

I would consider to contribute to Servo and Servo-shell. But my dev PC is Win7. And dog fooding only works when you use it for your own usage too.

servo-shell should work in Firefox too if you want to contribute.

I asked this question ( Why no Edge for Win 7) to one of the developers concerned with Edge development during BUILD Tour.

He told me that Edge is built on the Universal Windows Apps Platform which is going to be launched with Win 10. So because of its dependency, it won't be possible for edge to run on Win 7. The good thing about this is that MS is using the same platform that they will give to developers, to build Edge.

So people shouldn't hope that at some point Edge will come to Linux or Max OSX.

The other good thing is that Windows 10 is a free upgrade, so if users want the new browser there isn't a purchase barrier stopping them.

Doesn't apply to enterprise licensees, but enterprises aren't known for upgrading to new browser versions even when they're available, so no huge loss there.

> the Universal Windows Apps Platform which is going to be launched with Win 10 ... it won't be possible ... to run on Win 7

"Universal App Platform" Oh, the irony.

Thanks for letting us know why Edge won't be on Win 7.

I'm sure I'm in the minority here but personally I wish I could opt into Google keeping my bookmarks online and letting me search all the bookmarks including their content AND all my history and its content forever! I'll use incognito mode when I don't want something up there and they already have an online UI to delete stuff from my search history for those few times I forget.

I'm sure other wouldn't like that feature but I'd love it!

I've been wanting this since day one. I was so excited when i first heard about "Google Bookmarks", and then let down each day when Google seemingly did nothing about integrating Bookmarks into Chrome.

I've pretty much given up on having a good quality, insanely well integrated _(very important imo)_, bookmarking process for Chrome. /shrug

http://fetching.io does something similar.

Try pinboard.in

For me, problem with old bookmarks manager is that I have to make my own categories to store all items there.

It's much easier to just make bookmark without much thinking, knowing that later I can find it by keywords search. This way I'm not affraid that these bookmarks could grow as hard-to-lookup categories jungle.

Would be cool if they added tags feature, in case I want to group items.

You might want to look into Pocket if you don't know it already (getpocket.com). If it's still not satisfying your needs, you'll probably be interested in the product we launched recently. (cf profile)

Firefox has bookmark tags and it takes just one click to make a bookmark (it is put into "Unsorted bookmarks" folder, but you can usually find them through typing a relevant keyword into the URL bar)

The thing is, bookmarks were never supposed to be used that way. Bookmarks are shortcuts to frequently used sites, say for instance apps or repos. If you are looking for a way to archive links, you are better off using a service that was designed for archiving like evernote or pocket.

Now hopefully they will do the same thing for Google maps

I guess I'm the exception, I thought the old new bookmark system was nice enough.

It felt like an overwrought demo of material design. Glad to see it gone--bookmarks are like files in a filesystem. This was the appeal of the old-style bookmarks at least to me.

chrome://flags/#enhanced-bookmarks-experiment = False did the trick for versions with the "new" nice looking but feature lacking bookmark manager.

Can anyone describe what happened to the chrome bookmarks manager?

I've been happily off in Firefox land, I have no idea what this hubub is about.

They redesigned the bookmark manager with a very Android-ish looking interface, where bookmark folders were represented as "blocks", similar to the Windows 8 start screen. It suffered from a few problems:

* Massive decrease in information density compared to the tree & list widgets of the "old style" bookmark manager.

* Clunky interactions. I'm pretty damn good with a computer, and I regularly ended up with bookmarks in the wrong place.

* The new interface required more clicks to get where you were going, and more clicks to perform common tasks.

Visually, the new style was more aligned with Android interfaces, but it suffered from significant UX flaws.

Thank you for the overview. Now looking at that separate "extension" that has the new behavior... I see what people are complaining about.

Maybe someone can give a better description, but you know how sometimes they redesign stuff to make it look "better" (and maybe it does look better) but it ends up being harder to work with? That happened.

oh, my god! The old bookmark system do not works for me. The synchronization is broken for long(Only affect some users include me). There has many people complained about the problem but Google never fix it.

Bookmarks in folders not syncing properly - Google Product Forums https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/9ftiKp...

As a heavy bookmarks user, I'm happy they reverted to the more practical old solution

Classic UI mistake, increased the amount of clicks and then suffered the user rage.

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