Raise your hand if:
- Bookmarks are less important to your web use in 2009 than they were in 1999
- Trying to find one bookmark in your bookmark menu is like looking for a needle in a pile of a thousand needles
- You do searches for pages you know you have bookmarked, because using Google is easier than hunting through your bookmark menu.
- You create about ten bookmarks for each one you come back to later.
- You know you could make your bookmark menu more manageable with tags and folders… but it’s so much work that you never get around to doing it.
Bookmarking was a great feature back in the days of the first web browsers, but on the modern Web it feels a bit creaky. Maybe bookmarks are no longer doing their job as well as they could be.
Before we can figure out how bookmarks could do their job better, maybe we need to figure out what their job is. When you tell your browser to bookmark a page, what is the meaning of that action? What do you really want out of it?
Based on a lot of informal discussion, and observation of my own and others’ web use, I think there are at least four different things that we want when we bookmark a page. My working hypothesis is that bookmarks are one feature trying to do the work of four features — and not doing any of them very well.
The four categories I’ve observed are:
- The Todo List. “I want to look at this, but not right now.” Someone gave me a link to a cool video about robots, but I don’t want to watch it right now, because I’m in the middle of something. Or, there’s a web form I need to fill out, but I don’t have the information I need yet. I bookmark the page because there’s an action I want to take later.
- Sharing. “Oh man, this is funny!” This time, I found the cool robot video, and I want to show it to someone. I found a hilarious picture, or a news article that proves I was right in that argument we had a week ago. Either way, the value is in the sharing. I bookmark it so that later on I can give the link to others.
- Frequently Used. “I want to get back here fast.” The page where I view my bank account status, the central documentation page for the project I’m working on, or a hub from which I often start surfing. I bookmark it because I expect to return often and I want to get there fast.
- The Research Collection. “This fits right in to something I’m working on.” I’m a history teacher, preparing a lesson plan, and I’m collecting resources about World War 1. Or, I’m a political blogger, and I’m collecting links about all the ways my Least Favorite Politician has screwed things up. I bookmark pages because I want to add them to my growing collection of data on a certain topic.
Those are the use-cases I see. (Am I overlooking others?) Let’s examine each use-case and see how bookmarks measure up against other ways of accomplishing the same thing.
- The Todo List: Bookmarks make a poor todo list, because they provide no visible reminder that there’s something I wanted to do. And there’s no way, by looking through the bookmark menu, to tell which things I’ve read and which I haven’t. I’ve completely switched over to using tabs as my todo list. If there’s something I need to do on a page that I can’t do right now, I’ll leave the page open in a tab (serving as a visible reminder) until I get around to it. Others install a specialized extension like Read It Later to fill this need.
- Sharing: When I want to share something, I want to share it, not bookmark it. If possible, I’d rather share it immediately, so that I can then forget about it and free up my mental space. Thus, the popularity of extensions like Shareaholic, that add UI to the browser for sharing links in fewer steps.
- Frequently Used: For getting back to my frequently used sites, fast, nothing beats the Awesomebar interface. A few keystrokes, matched to the title or url, almost always get me to the page faster than the bookmark menu could. (Putting bookmarks in the quick-link bar can be a decent alternative, but it requires a lot of gardening work on the part of the user; the awesomebar learns your favorite sites on its own.)
- The Research Collection:
If you’re disciplined about tagging each bookmark, so you know which ones go with which topics, then bookmarks can be a good way to collect your research. But you know what’s even better? A shared research collection. Like de.icio.us, which lets you not only build and tag your research collection, but share it and access it from anywhere.
Are bookmarks obsolete?
Are there other bookmark use-cases I’m forgetting? Is there an add-on that you’ve found to be a good bookmark replacement for a certain purpose? How would bookmarks have to evolve to make them more useful than the alternatives?
If the bookmark menu disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss?
Not The User's Fault 
April 21, 2009 at 12:22 am
Would I miss bookmarks if they dissappeared?
No.
I stopped using bookmarks when I started using more than one computer. It was just easier to remember what needed doing and seeing than trying to keep a computer’s bookmarks updated. Too much work to prune things days or weeks after I didn’t need them. Also, google is a relatively reliable way of finding things, so I couldn’t be bothered to explicitly record anything that I might want again.
For a while I’d email something to myself if I wanted to look at it later. That helped because I use webmail, and so it’s accessible in the same way from any computer, and I was usually signed in anyways. But that didn’t last for some reason.
Now I mostly rely on my memory or storing the link within a document (googledocs and wikis recently), instead of any given bookmarking. Contextual storage is good for topical references.
I think the biggest pain is that ‘bookmarks’ aren’t right there when I need them. Even my attempts to use online bookmarking such as Delicious haven’t gone anywhere. It’s just something else I have to sign on t, and I don’t want that. I’m married to my gmail account and so I’m always signed in. It rewards me for logging in and so its the only one that I’m trained to bother with.
The awsomebar is wonderful, but I really need to be able to sign in to it from anywhere.
April 21, 2009 at 12:51 am
When Aza presented his first Fennec mockup video, I was thinking: would we still need bookmarking if our Firefox tabs lived on a big 2-D plane where they could be moved around and resized, with the plane being stored online by Weave? I wouldn’t have to decide between bookmarking and leaving the tab open: I’d just drag the tab to a place where it makes sense.
(Bookmarked this post because I wanted to read further comments even if the mail goes wrong.)
April 21, 2009 at 12:57 am
I still use bookmarks for “semi-frequently used”.
There’s some routine, like “open my daily comics folder”, or other sites, that I visit daily, or on a less regular schedule, that I store in bookmarks.
Another thing I use bookmarks for are keyword searches, I actually have quite a few of those, bug ?????, mdc ?????, team ????? etc.
For things that are more frequent, I use the awesomebar directly, as they’re usually variants (mxr on a particular branch, tinderbox for branch, pushlog for repo, etc). Actually, the same holds true for things that I don’t visit often. Every now and then, I actually star a page just to highlight it a tad, but I don’t have any procedures hooked up to that.
For things that are ubiquitous, I just leave the tabs open these days.
April 21, 2009 at 1:04 am
I’ve started to use bookmarks more as a “permanent history entry” for reference articles I want to keep accessing. It’s somewhat similar to “The Research Collection” use case you are describing. The power here is the combination with the Awesome bar which gives me instant access to those entries. Replacing that with delicious wouldn’t really be an option for me unless access to those is as close for me as my bookmarks are through the awesome bar.
April 21, 2009 at 1:05 am
If bookmar bar/menu/toolbar dissapeared i could not get my ‘parcial’ RSS and i woud miss A LOT of webs i share with my friends in delicious, i would nave to remember the exacty search in Google to find my webs.
Actualy in my country or at least in my hometown a lot of peoplel don’t even know wath a bookmarks is, so are realy bookmarks necesary ¿?
Not for a lot but yes for the ones that know howto use them(at least in my case)
April 21, 2009 at 1:13 am
RSS and awesomebar replaced many of my bookmarks. But I still keep a folder of ~10 frequently visited sites on my bookmark toolbar which I can open in tabs with a single middle-click… Awesome bar is good for getting to a single site, but it can’t open a group of related sites in one action.
April 21, 2009 at 1:14 am
I read a bunch of web comics and other such content, and check them daily via the “Open all in tabs” feature on the bookmark folder. Yes, RSS might be a better match for that kind of thing, but only if RSS feeds are available, which they’re not always.
I also use the bookmarks toolbar extensively for frequently used sites – nothing like having one-click access to most frequently needed sites.
April 21, 2009 at 1:19 am
Recently I was wondering why it was so difficult to bookmark a page.
With firefox I need at least 3 clicks and I won’t find it on any of the 3 other computers I use.
I don’t use this feature anymore.
With del.icio.us I need to tag the page, and sometimes sign in. So I use it only for important pages.
With twitter I can share a link and have feedbacks about it from my friends. It’s one of the most important reason why I use it. But I don’t know if int three months I will be able to find back the link I sent this morning.
RSS feeds also transformed a lot the way I used bookmarks. Now a bookmark indicates me that I have to read it! Fantastic!
I think it fits into the four use-cases you describe (so maybe a fifth 😉 ).
As I’m writing I think that I would like to see the comments after mine. I know that some blogs provides RSS feeds for a specific post but I see it more like a discussion and I don’t want to give it the same status than other feeds.
Oh, as I’m submitting my comment I see the option “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.”. So here email is the alternative to bookmarks.That reminds me that when a link is very very important I use emails as solution to the “Todo List” use-case.
(I don’t really speak English, sorry for the mistakes)
April 21, 2009 at 1:27 am
I use bookmarks for two of the use-cases.
First, I do use the “Bookmarks Toolbar” feature for frequently visited sites. I have all the basics there – Gmail, Facebook, Pandora, NYtimes – anything I use every time I open my browser, along with anything I use several times a week in a folder.
Second, I use it rather sloppily as a research collection. When I am researching a specific topic, I keep all the sites open in tabs, then use the “bookmark all tabs” feature to put them in a folder with the topic and date.
Finally, I use bookmarks for “this will be hard to find again with google”. Those just get bookmarked, and I can always search or browse through the bookmarks later. Some of this functionality has been replaced by the awesome bar, but since I occasionally clear my browser history, I need something more permanent. This could be accomplished well with something like del.icio.us, if I cared to use such a service, but I don’t.
April 21, 2009 at 1:34 am
“Open all in tabs” and visibility in the Awesomebar are all I use it for. For my todo use cases there’s Taboo, and delicious fills the others.
April 21, 2009 at 1:38 am
I mostly use bookmarks for:
1) Money-related sites (want to make 100%
sure that I’m going to the right URL
without letting the phishers get in the
way).
2) Bookmarklets.
3) Sites that I don’t use often (so
awesomebar is useless) but that are a
huge pain to find. This includes
intranet sites that I need rarely but
really need them when I need them, and
the mailman page for the mozilla lists.
All three of these go in my bookmarks toolbar; it’s got about a dozen items in it. For everything else I use the awesomebar, though I do star things at times to get them to the top faster.
April 21, 2009 at 1:38 am
There are at least three use cases that I still use bookmarks for, and for at least one of them, I think I’d miss it.
1) I love the AwesomeBar. However, I do still use the bookmarks toolbar extensively, and there are some links that I consistently use the toolbar rather than the awesome bar for, in some case out of habit, and in some cases because it is fairly challenging to find certain links via the Awesome bar, in most cases probably because I use them infrequently.
2) More and more, I find myself bookmarking stuff just to make sure I can find it the second and third time. If a site sticks for me, I’ll just end up using the awesome bar, but sometimes after one visit, I’m not confident I’ll know what to type to get it back with the awesome bar.
3) The case for which bookmarks still really work for me as designed is where I have a bunch of closely related links with similar title that I use frequently. The best example I have is that I have a menu in my bookmarks toolbar called Mozilla. The documents in there all have similar URLs and similar titles, so getting the right one via the awesomebar would probably take more than a few keystrokes.
I don’t know that bookmarks are ready to be retired. In the case of firefox, the problem is exacerbated because many users have lots of old bookmarks, so a new version can’t just drop those.
If I were writing a brand new browser, I might make the bookmarks toolbar the entire bookmarks interface, and users who don’t use bookmarks can just hide it. That tiny fraction of users that really wants and needs to manage hundreds of bookmarks can be served with an extension, or better yet, in the cloud.
Come to think of it, if a future firefox wanted to de-emphasize bookmarks in favor new organizational paradigms, it could still take this approach simply by moving the bookmarks menu onto the bookmarks toolbar. No one loses their bookmarks or the interface to manage them, but it can be out of sight for users who don’t use it.
Jeff
April 21, 2009 at 1:50 am
One more (ab)use-case of bookmarks are the bookmarklets – I do use a few of them. I have no other bookmarks in my toolbar.
I do not use the Bookmarks menu – almost all my bookmarks are unsorted ones created by just clicking the star in the awesomebar.
April 21, 2009 at 2:15 am
If the Bookmarks Menu disappeared (and along with it the Bookmarks Toolbar), I would miss being able to access frequent sites (all 25 of them) using only the mouse. Though I guess that’s what the whole New Tab project is about.
April 21, 2009 at 2:16 am
@Boris – that’s true, I’d forgotten bookmarkelets. As a developer, I use them quite a bit to jump to a specific page within an instance of the application I’m working in – same urls, but different host/port.
April 21, 2009 at 2:19 am
Do I use local bookmarks? Nope. I frequent many different computers daily. Do I use a service like Delicious? Yes.
If the bookmark menu disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss? Not a thing.
April 21, 2009 at 4:16 am
bookmarks are very useful to me. awesomebar history works well but there are some pages i need to save so that i go the exact url. and synchronizing is completely seamless and invisible with foxmarks. i use the auto tagging feature extensively too. like there is this site downforeveryoneorjustme.com. it is rarely used but very useful when need arises. i book marked it and tagged it with down, for, everyone, me, just me, site down. so in the rare case i get a no reply i just type any of those tags and it comes out on the top. another example is youtube. when you watch a video too many times, awesomebar does not return youtube.com, it gives you pages of already viwed videos. solved easily with bookmarking with tags you, tube, youtube.
April 21, 2009 at 5:13 am
It’s interesting for me to read this analysis, Jono, as it’s basically the same as the foundation that brought us to the Awesomebar. We boiled it down to two categories, though:
A – places you might want to get back to someday
B – places you want to get back to frequently
Class A is entirely underserved by the bookmark infrastructure. The cost of creation, organization and maintenance of a huge set of sites you might someday want to return to outweighs the potential benefit, so people just don’t use them. The goal of the starring/tagging UI was to drastically reduce this overhead, and combine it with a “recall” function which is the Awesomebar. At this point, bookmark means “don’t forget”, returning it to something approximating the original intent without the associated costs.
Class B are also pretty underserved by the current system, as heavy users will be disappointed by our tools for organization, and light users will find the bookmarks we ship by default to be distracting.
While I understand the other two cases you pointed out, these seem to really fall within Class A to me; in all cases the use cases are about being able to quickly recall the link, though the endpoint and eventual purpose are different.
My feeling is that our infrastructure is getting more right, but our UI expressions aren’t quite there yet, and (by design) represent an evolution away from the old style of bookmarks and into a new format of annotations on history. A star or tag means “never forget this item in my history”. Some pieces of your history are elevated and given the status of a button. What we’re missing are the ability to bundle off parts of your history to send to others, or to register parts of your history as a “to do” or a “I want this to come back when I’m bored”.
April 21, 2009 at 5:40 am
Yeah, I do what Henrik does.
Back in the day, my bookmarks list became so long that it became quite unwieldy to use. By the time I moved to Firefox (from Netscape/Mozilla Suite), I had pretty much stopped using bookmarks and just searched for whatever I needed, or remembered the URL (hah).
Now that we have the Awesome Bar, I just use bookmarks to ensure that it always comes up in my results list.
On a side note, I have also always used the little-advertised feature of setting keywords to bookmarks to do quick searches of various types.
April 21, 2009 at 7:49 am
In work, I generally use bookmarks as to dos and ‘frequently used’.
About the latter category, I mostly use the bookmarks as a set of recommendations for my future selves.
I have several working routines. Some of them I do each day, some once a month or even once a term. Most of these routines imply visiting a page to either look up information (dictionaries, wikis, etc) or to remember a process (tutorials, manuals). This second case is specially important for those routines with low frequency. I dump a lot of sites in my bookmarks.
Now I have become a fan of the autofilling function in the adress bar. This function either searches my history or searches my bookmarks! I the bookmarks bar for everyday links and I dump most of the low frequency bookmarks into the general bookmarks menu (I classify the entries), knowing that if I type either the title or part of the URL, the autofilling function will help me.
April 21, 2009 at 7:57 am
My bookmarks toolbar has:
1) Bookmarklets
2) data: uris (small code examples)
3) irc:// links to channels (since chatzilla doesn’t)
4) chrome:// links for various internal or extension things I’d rather see in a tab.
I can find 3) and 4) without much difficulty using the awesomebar but not 1) or 2)
I also keep a lot of keyword search bookmarks that I don’t know how else they’d be stored.. as long as I resist ubiquity.
April 21, 2009 at 8:21 am
I’ve never been a big bookmarker; my total collection now, after starting from scratch for the last time back in 2000 is probably around 200-250 bookmarks. The only bookmarks of those which I use regularly are those I have on the bookmarks toolbar; however, those I use _excessively_ regularly. I think about 80% of my navigation paths start with a middle-click on the bookmarks toolbar (the remaining 20% is evenly divided between google and history). No matter how awesome the awesomebar is, it can’t begin to touch the ease of that click to go places; it probably helps here that the collection of sites I have on the bar is relatively static over time; most changes within it occur in the things I open as a tabgroup: daily weblogs and daily webcomics, and the ease of opening 20-40 tabs with one click is definitely something the awesome bar can never begin to touch.
Bookmarks do have to participate in a yearly cagefight for their right to be on that bar, and once they lose the fight and move to the menu, they’re swiftly forgotten (though there’s a collection of a couple of dozen which I keep visiting three or four times a year).
In a way, the limitations of available horizontal space helps keep my browsing focused, and is an actual feature!
There’s also half a dozen “essential tool” bookmarklets which claim space on the bookmarks toolbar and which I couldn’t live without.
April 21, 2009 at 8:55 am
At the moment, I don’t use the bookmarks *menu* at all. I do use the bookmarks toolbar; my eight most used sites are all buttons on there, and I click those about four thousand times a day. I’d miss that, a lot.
Interestingly, I’ve watched people who aren’t computer geeks (my daughter, my dad, my ex-wife), and they all use the bookmarks menu extensively.
April 21, 2009 at 10:10 am
I found that I use bookmarks more since we’ve added the awesome bar. Before that, adding a bookmark, then rummaging through the Bookmarks menu to find it again was too much of a hazzle for me, a Google search was usually quicker. Now if I know I definitely want to make sure something comes up even in 6 months from now, I bookmark it then use the awesome bar to get back to it whenever I need.
Also, I use bookmarks for keywords and bookmarklets.
April 21, 2009 at 10:57 am
If bookmarks were removed I would re-implement them, for many of the reasons above (open-in-tabs, knowing how to reach important sites even if I don’t go regularly).
In addition, I find a serious flaw in three of your alternatives:
2) Shareaholic depends on a server — I don’t trust that server to keep my records accurate, not lose them, and not to switch to unacceptable terms. I want to be responsible for my own data (which does include on-line backup, but not as the only location).
3) The Awesome bar is awesome, but it reflects fads. Some sites (the web site of my mortgage holder) are very important, even if I more often visit /..
4) Substitute de.icio.us for Shareaholic in item 2.
I don’t trust companies to keep my important information. Every company I’ve worked for has lost backups and important data at one time or another. Why should I think they will be better at keeping my data safe?
I agree with point 1. Todo lists should be integrated with calendaring, allowing tasks to be grouped and assigned priorities and deadlines.
B.J.
April 21, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Very interesting discussion.
I’ve just written an article with my thoughts here : http://macstories.wordpress.com/
I think bookmarks need a change.
April 21, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Indeed the awesome bar has taken over for most things, but I still use bookmarks for opening multiple tabs at once by putting them in a folder and then middle clicking the folder. The other purpose for me is “at some point in the future, I’m probably going to want to find this page again” at which point I type * and a keyword into the awesome bar to search bookmarks only.
April 21, 2009 at 2:21 pm
I guess this falls partly into the frequently used category but my main use for bookmarks is probably to open a bunch of sites that I visit once a day. Using the Awesomebar and Ctrl+T to do that would take a long time.
April 21, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Do I care much about bookmarks? Not really.
One of my 3 toolbar bookmarks is to Google Reader, which completely eliminates the need to keep RSS local.
For the most part, I either: a) Leave things open in tabs; b) Use the Awesomebar; c) Make sure the page can be found with Google/Gmail;
There is one fickle use case I have for bookmarks: Bookmarking clusters of tabs and then closing Firefox windows in an effort to free up RAM and/or make it behave better. As such, I have a handful of bookmark folders that I will probably /never look at again/ that contained pages that were useful at the time, but that time happened to be when Firefox was unwell.
April 21, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I am using mine less and less. The serch engine helps greatly. I have actually started using a program called Evernote. Here is a link to my post on the service http://therippelaffect.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/evernote/
I use it as it was intended, as a second brain. It keeps all of your notes, web clips, pictures, and just about anythingelse organized in a time line. You can also tag things. I keep folders for cooking, blog research, a journal, Library lists, movie lists, you name it. It can be accessed from the web, my Iphone and off line on my computer. There is special recognician software that I use to tske pictures, send them to my account via a special email link. For instance yeserday I took a picture of a recipei in a magzine at a doctors office. I sent it to my cook book folder. The software make the print in the picture searchable, so no transcription was needed.
They hook you up with 500mb per month of free data storage. You can pay for more than you wish. I have never gone over and I use it sll of the time. I am currently clipping sites that Iv’e been too and it organizes them. I can use it’s search engine to get back. It has been awesome so far.
April 21, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I like your thinking. Web browser bookmarks are most likely obsolete.
April 21, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I like you perspective. I think the two legacy forces to build on are:
1) Beginning users are trained that browser have bookmarks
2) Like Boris and others – Bookmarklets ( the ultimate low bar extension mechanism )
April 21, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I have to confess, I didn’t raise my hand. None of those things were true of me. I realize that this makes me pretty atypical.
I keep my bookmarks tagged and sorted. I like having them in the browser, because it lets me customize what the “Awesomebar” pulls up when I type tags or terms. Otherwise, it would just use my recent history, and that isn’t good enough.
1) My to-do-list type bookmarks typically wind up in the “Unsorted Bookmarks” folder, for later processing. I have moved this folder so that it is easily accessible in the menu.
2) Sharing is typically done through Google Reader or Delicious, depending on the audience, and sometimes Facebook. I keep a (nameless) bookmarklets folder on my bookmarks toolbar for this purpose.
3) Speaking of the bookmarks toolbar, that is where I keep most of my frequently used sites. The names are removed, so only the favicons show up, and I assign icons to those that don’t have any to make them more easily recognizable.
4) Research collections get tagged and sorted into an appropriate hierarchical folder. I don’t typically share research bookmarks.
Other uses of bookmarks:
a) Bookmarklets
b) Keyword searches – I have tons of these. Think long tail when it comes to frequency of use.
c) The only named thing on my bookmarks toolbar is a “Feeds” folder, with an organized collection of Live Bookmarks for sites that I want to cherry pick based on title, rather than have it all show up in a feed reader. News, link sharing sites, feeds to my own blogs, etc. I don’t want Digg in Google Reader.
Arguably much of this isn’t strictly “bookmarking”, but it happens that the browser bookmarks collection is the best place to keep it out there.
April 21, 2009 at 9:19 pm
“Raise your hand if…”
I ran out of hands halfway through the list. I tried also using my feet, and still ran out.
April 21, 2009 at 10:42 pm
For me, del.icio.us works better not only for sharing, but also for research/reference collection. I think it’s because when I take the time to tag things “for other people”, I’m also tagging them for my future self.
April 21, 2009 at 10:44 pm
“Bookmarks make a poor todo list”
todo lists also make poor todo lists. Is there some way we can sneak the GTD concept of “contexts” into Firefox users’ minds?
April 22, 2009 at 2:19 am
There’s another major use for bookmarks: nostalgia.
I can’t be bothered to keep a journal of my activities, but browsing through my old bookmarks (and old files on my computer) is the next-best thing. Sure, half the links might have rotted since they were bookmarked, but the stored titles at least hint at what I was like several years ago. It’s often quite enlightening to reflect upon my past like that.
April 22, 2009 at 2:33 am
Isn’t this the question that the big ‘Places’ push in Firefox 2/3 was supposed to answer for us? 😛
April 22, 2009 at 10:31 am
at work bookmarking internal sites because internal search is not good enough or the URLs are horrible
April 22, 2009 at 12:41 pm
[…] Jono Di Carlo stellt eine interessante Frage: Do we still need bookmarks? […]
April 23, 2009 at 9:59 am
I use bookmarks less in the Glorious Age of Awesomebar, but still use bookmarks for:
Keyword searches.
A few bookmarklet buttons in my bookmarks toolbar like prev / next and light CSS.
A folder of “Blog posts on which I’ve commented” (like this one). I want these to stand out more than history, and in Awesomebar they won’t stand out from blog posts I’ve only read. Maybe the browser could automatically keep a history of “pages with textareas I’ve filled out.”
Reference pages. The trouble here is I can’t remember why they’re reference, so I now change their Name in bookmarks to “Great page debunks myth that solar cycle causes global warming” or “Table of power conversions near the bottom”
“Gotta do something else but I’m in the middle of reading these page(s) and I don’t want to rely on the browser’s session restore to bring them back” (I have these dating all the way back to 2004 to wade through. 🙂 ).
Research topics. This last could use some innovation. I was trying to find standalone storage cabinets so I had a bunch of tabs up in a window and was finding good resource pages, specific furniture items at Krapea, other suggestions, etc. I could bookmark the set of tabs in a “cabinets” folder and/or tag them “cabinets”, but what’s missing is how each page is relevant and what’s important on each. I could modify the Name of each in bookmarks or add info to its Description, but like Scott Newson #1 I really want to make a page about the topic and the links. He said “storing the link within a document (googledocs and wikis recently)”; I often use TiddlyWiki or e-mail myself a message in Thunderbird. The ideal would be a scratchpad/document in the Sidebar (which I never use) into which I can drag in tabs to create URLs and also make notes about them. If I drag a text selection into the sidebar it’ll be an href back to its page. This Sidebar mode could also have a history, but only of the tabs in the current window unlike the current useless Sidebar History.
April 28, 2009 at 7:15 am
Personally, my biggest problem is with the bookmarking UI in firefox 3. Clicking that star once does bookmark the page quickly, sure, but it places the bookmark in some weird non-place “Unsorted bookmarks” limbo, which is terrible since 1: I can’t see it the bookmarks menu, and 2: it doesn’t automatically let me categorize it in any way.
Doubleclicking the star (or clicking it again afterwards) does bring up the little dialog that lets you add a tag and place the bookmark in a specific folder, but why not default to this behavior? Also, the dialog doesn’t even make categorizing simple since it only shows the most recently used folders, and you have to click the (imho unintuitive) button to the right of the folder list to see the rest. I realized just how akward the current behavior is when I was setting up FF3 on my parents’ computer. How the hell are they suppose to FIND the pages they’ve bookmarked when they don’t even show up in the bookmarks menu? To summarize: I’ve always found the bookmarking behavior and UI of FF3 to be extremely confusing and essentially flawed.
April 28, 2009 at 6:09 pm
[…] fennec, weave | No Comments I’d like to thank my readers for their comments on my previous post about bookmarks. It was very useful for me to hear about the bookmark use cases that I had overlooked (for […]
April 29, 2009 at 11:26 am
[…] firmware updated to v5.50 The ESA are fans of Pirate Bay decision Jonathan DiCarlo: Do We Still Need Bookmarks? Apple Launches Movie Downloads in German iTunes Store Windows 7 security enhancements Blu-ray in […]
April 30, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Jono, thank you so much for asking the fundamental questions that so often go unasked and un thought about. You’re awesome.
May 16, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I think you make a valid question however the examples that you give point towards a different question: “Are LOCAL bookmarks obsolete?”
Why? Because when you refer to those 4 use cases (The Todo List, Sharing, Frequently Used and The Research Collection) you are also bookmarking but this time you are doing it in the cloud. This is very important to refer because they look like different operations but they are not. What they use are different contexts. Local bookmarks use a “one size fits all” approach whereas the 4 use cases provide more context, meaning, and therefore usefulness to the process of bookmarking (we could could call it GTD bookmarking)
After clarifying what is the question, we need to do a little exercise on how the “extinction”, from “natural causes” (eg. the user just stops using the feature) or by force (Mozilla removes the feature) of local bookmarking could impact the current ecosystem of Mozilla Technologies:
1.The Awesome bar (for example).
This was one of best features of Firefox 3.0. Most of my (and think everybody) Internet searches fall in the “Frequently used” scenario that you’ve stated above. With the awesomebar searching for something in Google fell to 10%.of my Internet searches.
The data that feeds the awesomebar comes from local bookmarks and Internet browsing history. With the upcoming Firefox 3.5 feature “Private browsing” you will probably eliminate, for some users, that data type. If you decide to wipe out local bookmarks then the other data type is eliminated too. The end result is that you lose the awesome bar because of a design decision that wasn’t fully analyzed in terms of its impact on the ecosystem.
I know that Weave could probably solve this by offering an API to sync with 3rd party services such as delicious, however this shifts the power (i.e. data control) from the user and Mozilla to other parties.
I think the current approach is the most flexible, the most respectful of user privacy and allows most use case scenarios.
Probably what we need are better tools, in the browser, to manage bookmarks:
a) Duplicate detection (by url and domain) – BookmarkDD did something like this (minus the domain part) but development activity has stalled;
b) Metadata consistency – If I bookmark an item and tag him the associated metadata should be the same between every services that I use to manage bookmarks (i.e. Between Firefox and Delicious)
Relevant statistics – We need statistics about number of bookmarks by date, tag, domain, etc. Zotero, a firefox extension which is open source, does some of these but I use it mainly to store articles/posts and not the full site of a newspaper, for example.
What do you think about this?
May 26, 2009 at 10:33 am
When I was 13 I used bookmarks all the time, it was like collecting baseball cards. A collection of all the best web pages. Then something went horribly wrong, I shut down the computer too soon, or powered it off without shutting down, and the system went corrupt and we had to reinstall, I lost all my bookmarks. It was devastating, and I haven’t seriously used bookmarks after that.
May 28, 2009 at 5:42 pm
We NEED bookmarks. Absolutely. To discard bookmarks would encourage a much shallower form of web-browsing, where people’s laziness stops them following up a subject they are interested in. People would go to facebook or news blogs to be passively titillated and fed with superficial info-nuggets instead of making the effort to track down some of the incredible information resources out there that we can learn a lot from.
My argument is that while the need for relaxed or superficial web-browsing is there and important for down-time, the use of the web as a form of learning and research is more and more becoming a mainsteam need for the public not just a niche activity for academics. The web is the future of learning for everyone and bookmarks are still the best way of keeping track of the particular sites with the relevant information for your needs. Certain articles can be too long to digest in one sitting, the ability to go back to the document any time in the future is essential for continuity in the learning experience. Browser history/awesome bar/delicious still aren’t good enough at methodically categorising and finding these important links.
Thus, there is a moral imperative, for the good of mankind (i’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek), to preserve and moreover develop the bookmark system! Unless, of course the is a more efficient alternative that acieves the same ends.
June 24, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I just stumbled onto this post. I could not agree with you more! I find myself using sites like readitlaterlist than feature-rich Delicious because I just use ‘bookmarks’ as a todo list. If I want to share, I use facebook and common websites I use “speed dial” in Opera (or the plugin for firefox). The only time I use bookmarks is for the Researching category where I can bookmark multiple tabs into a folder.
I say bookmark systems need to fall into those categories for organization.
July 7, 2009 at 8:04 am
The irony here being that I just bookmarked this page.
My bookmark doesn’t fit into any category that anyone has mentioned here: it fits into the category of “something I could make after I’ve thought about it a little more.”
And the reason I need to think about it a little more is because of that very fact: I, as someone who likes making useful stuff, have a totally different set of priorities from someone else who doesn’t. So the system needs to not have fixed external categories, but it needs to be adaptable to however users want to use it.
People have highlighted the bookmarks toolbar as a significantly useful feature to them, while the bookmarks menu is more or less obsolete. This points to something very interesting, which I don’t think anyone has explicitly stated: the problem with bookmarks is that you never go through them; you don’t see them on a day-to-day basis.
That might not sound like a lot, but consider a clothing management system where you either quickly hang a shirt up in the closet, or toss it in the laundry hamper, if it’s too dirty or smelly to wear. The fact that you see your laundry hamper every day is absolutely essential to this system. You could put the laundry hamper into a large closet and put it down a chute, and drop your dirties into that closet without ever seeing it, but that would encourage a certain sort of use: namely, only doing your laundry when you’ve run out of clothes. (Some people do this anyway because the laundromat is a hassle, but that’s a different story. If you have a washing machine it’s always best to just toss your clothes in the machine when the hamper is full.)
January 19, 2010 at 1:35 am
I loved this article.
I think I would like to come back to it in the future.
I am not sure if I should bookmark it or not…
January 21, 2010 at 6:21 pm
I still haven’t bookmarked this page. However, I have checked the “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.” box. That way I’ll get a notice in the event of something changing, the only time I’d want to return anyway.
Automatic reply notices are much more useful than bookmarks.
Also, when I do use bookmarks, I don’t go through the hierarchy of bookmarks I still have from ages ago. I just type in my bookmark/search bar and it appears in the list.
To me, bookmarks are for sites I might/definitely want to look at later and care that it’s that specific site. If I just want a topic, I search. If I want to get back to something immediately/constantly, I just leave the tab open so the browser automatically restores it next time. Also, the few times I bookmark a site, I don’t bother setting its folder anymore.
February 7, 2010 at 2:44 pm
[…] get out of control. Why would anyone want to use bookmarks anymore? In his post titled “Do We Still Need Bookmarks?“, Jono answers this question with these insightful use […]
March 11, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Yes we do.
Who wants to re-do the research to find the topics of interest?
Some content is also behind the ‘members only’ portals so no Google help there.
“Automatic reply …” concept also fails…if no one ever responds on the site owner decides to close the comments…you will never be back until you do the search engine routine and hope it hits it.
Bookmarks and social sharing still beats re-research. Deciding what is worthy is the trick.
March 12, 2010 at 9:30 am
@justintime
If you’re doing research on something, it’s probably better to keep the relevant URLs in your citations page then in your browser.
For the few cases of something being really useful, not easy to find, and not accessed constantly, bookmarking still makes sense. If it’s not useful, why bother? If it’s easy to find, just find it again. If it’s accessed constantly, just keep the tab always open.
As for automatic reply notices, they do not fail. Once I’ve read this blog post, I’m not likely to read it again. The only reason I want to visit this page again is because something has changed, specifically a new comment being added. If I only want to refer to a discussion about bookmarks and how we don’t need them that much, I’ll just Google it.
I wonder if you’re ever going to see this comment, since bookmarking and trying to remember to check back is prone to forgetfulness, while automatic reply notices like the ones I receive are much more reliable. Maybe you just have a much better memory than me. Or you have a lot more free time to manually check if a page has changed.
Saving the link does beat re-research, but you have to weigh that against the odds that you’re ever going to want to go there again. If you have no reason to think you’ll ever need the page again, you might as well just forget about bookmarking it and keep your bookmarks less cluttered. If you decide a week later that it was important after all, that’s what browsing history is for.
Overall, bookmarks have a use, but it’s very limited considering the many alternatives that beat bookmarks in so many situations.
February 18, 2011 at 10:46 am
Do we still need bookmarks?…
Raise your hand if: * Bookmarks are less important to your web use in 2009 than they were in 1999 * Trying to find one bookmark in your bookmark menu is like looking for a needle in a pile of a thousand needles * You do searches for pages you know you …