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 instance, I didn’t realize how important the bookmark-all-in-folder / open-folder-in-tabs feature was to so many of you.)
Now I have a follow-up question for you readers. I’m trying to understand how bookmark usage patterns differ on mobile web browsing platforms. This issue has serious implications for the design of the bookmark UI in Fennec. It also affects the design of Weave. What should be the default Weave behavior when syncing bookmarks between desktop and mobile clients? The current behavior is to simply merge the two lists, so you have the same bookmarks in both places. But if there is a big difference between the bookmarks you want on one side and the bookmarks you want on the other side, then maybe pushing everything into one big pile isn’t the best approach.
I must admit that I very rarely do any mobile web-browsing. I have an old, crummy cell phone that I barely use. I take my laptop everywhere and do my web browsing on that. (I know, I’m behind the times.) In fact, the browsing I’ve done on my Nokia N810 in order to develop and test Weave on Fennec is about the most that I’ve done. That means that I have not developed the personal experience or intuition to guide design decisions about mobile browsing. Instead, I have to rely on data, input, and stories from others who do use the mobile web.
That’s why, if you are a mobile web user, I am especially interested in your answers to the following questions:
- Do you use bookmarks when browsing on a cell phone or other mobile device?
- If so, how does your bookmark use on mobile differ from your bookmark use on a desktop or laptop machine?
- If you don’t use bookmarks in mobile browsing, why not? Is it because of a poor interface, because your needs are different, or some other reason?
- Finally, is there a difference between the set of bookmarks you commonly use on the desktop, and the set of bookmarks you commonly use (or think you would use) on a mobile gadget? Do you think there’s a case for keeping these two lists of bookmarks separate?
Thanks very much for your feedback!
Not The User's Fault 
April 28, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I’m using bookmarks more intensely on my N810 device than on my desktop, actually. The reason for this is twofold:
For one, I’m not randomly surfing around on the mobile device, I’m doing very focused lookups of very specific infos, often just getting updates on what’s going on and visiting the same sites/pages all over again.
For the other, I like to avoid typing on the mobile device as much as I can, as the mobile keyboard isn’t nearly as fast to use as the large desktop keyboard.
With those two things in mind, a reasonably small hierarchy of bookmarks (folders by major topics, small number of bookmarks underneath) combined with the bookmarks menu being available from both the main desktop and the browser UI with a single click makes it a very useful feature there – even more than on the desktop, where I’m doing more random browsing and have a easier-to-use keyboard.
April 28, 2009 at 7:06 pm
1. No
2. N/A
3. Mobile browsing for me is used primarily to rapidly access content that my native apps can not. That basically means “googling it”. (Google and wikipedia representing 95-98% of my mobile browsing)
4. N/A
I use bookmarks on the desktop to remember a site. Either to “file for later visit” or ‘this is a favourite site” (such as all the webcomics i read on a daily basis). Browsing on the phone is fundamentally different. I use it to get information about X _now_.
Sure, I delve into the occasional semi-recursive procrastination surf on the mobile, but I usually feel no need to bookmark anything while doing that.
Oh, and for twittering, facebooking and what-not:ing, then there’s always a good, possibly free, downloadable application for that.
I use the browser for search. 🙂
April 28, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I am using bookmarks on my mobile device and the usage differs vastly from what I have on my laptop.
On the laptop, I keep about 1500 bookmarks organized in folders; most of them to-read items, but also to access important sites fast via the AwesomeBar. I have some bookmarks only represented by their favicon that open in the sidebar, like dictionaries.
With my mobile device I only need to access the bare minimum: Google Reader, Wikipedia, Amazon, Dropbox, online bookmarks, public transportation schedule, dictionary and some important social networks. Mail, Calendar and Twitter are integrated via applications.
Until recently I also had bookmarks for Digg’s and Delicious’ popular posts. But the inability to sync my Firefox environment with that on the mobile device is a major drawback.
I would love to see Fennec & Weave coming to Android.
April 28, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I don’t have an internet-capable phone, so my answers are somewhat speculative. But if I did, my main use cases would be to check email (gmail), or to search for some piece of information (google). The list of sites I’d be interested in is much smaller than when operating on a desktop.
April 28, 2009 at 9:48 pm
1. Yes. I have about 15 bookmarks.
2. On my desktop I bookmark things that I find that I might one day want to look up again but probably wouldn’t remember how I got there. For example a recipe. An interesting paper.
On my phone I bookmark the things I frequently visit. Mostly to have typing. Its terribly difficult to type on a phone. On transit. With one hand.
3. n/a
4. I would like a separate list. It would be nice to sync my desktop history to my phone.
April 28, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Mobile web browsing seems to be very different depending on what device/browser/platform you are using. I use the web service on my Motorola Razr a few times a week, and my bookmarks there are an entirely separate set of bookmarks from my home web browser. 99% of my mobile web use originates from bookmarks to the mobile versions of three sites – gmail, yelp, and the Ann Arbor bus tracker. I pay for web use by the kb, so bookmarks get me there faster with lower data use, plus typing things in with the number pad is annoying.
When I mobile browse on my iPod Touch, I also use bookmarks extensively, and they are a different but larger set of bookmarks. Googling also isn’t as big a deal due to the keyboard sucking a bit less. Basically, I think the more fully featured your mobile browsing device is, the more your bookmarks will resemble your regular browser bookmarks.
April 28, 2009 at 10:52 pm
I use Safari on my iPhone for mobile access, and I tend to use bookmarks for pretty much every start point. My mobile access is (conversely to the above comments) generally there for browsing in an unfocused manner rather than retrieving specific information. These include news aggregators (Reddit, Hacker News), news sites themselves (BBC News generally) and ‘fun’ sites (The Daily WTF, etc).
For more specific information retrieval I have a set of site-specific apps that streamline the interface. For example it’s much nicer to use Facebook through the facebook app, eBay through the eBay app and Twitter through Twitterfon. These native applications generally give me access to the information I want quicker that the mobile web interfaces.
On my desktop machine typing is so much faster that it’s quicker for me to type the address I want than to search through the list of bookmarks. Also, with the advent of awesome bar my bookmarking activity has tailed right off. Much of what I was bookmarking was a ‘save this for next week’ style of page, and now that page retrieval through the URL bar is so much easier I’ve given up specifically bookmarking sites for the most part.
Having said that, even if awesome bar made it to Fennec (or mobile Safari) I think I’d still use bookmarks. I can be at the site I want in 2 clicks (and a possible swipe) rather than the minimum of 4 clicks it’d take to retrieve a site from history using the URL bar.
Regarding your point #4 I personally at least don’t have a shared set of bookmarks between mobile and desktop.
April 28, 2009 at 11:33 pm
My phone (a Samsung Armani) isn’t a smartphone, but it does run Java apps. I therefore use Opera Mini as the browser on it (it comes with a browser, NetForward, but using that makes me want to harm myself, so I don’t use it.)
Anyway, I use Opera Mini on the phone for two purposes:
1. Looking at random web pages when I need to and I’m on the road (this obviously doesn’t involve bookmarks)
2. Checking sites that I want to look at a lot when I’m away from my desk; this is Gmail, Twitter, Google Reader, traintimes.org.uk.
The sites mentioned in part (2) are bookmarked in Opera Mini. Each of the bookmarks is the mobile version of that website; these are sites I only use on my mobile and do not use on my desktop (I use the proper versions on my desktop), so my set of mobile bookmarks and my set of ordinary bookmarks are completely disjoint.
Opera, the desktop browser, has a “synchronisation” feature where bookmarks in Opera on my desktop appear as bookmarks in Opera Mini on my phone. I keep Opera around precisely so I can add bookmarks to my phone from my desktop (and for testing web pages in; I use Firefox as my normal desktop browser).
April 29, 2009 at 12:22 am
1. Yes
2. and 4.
I have fewer bookmarks, because I don’t do as much on the phone, and I bookmark things I wouldn’t bother to bookmark on the computer, because clicking a bookmark is much faster than typing.
April 29, 2009 at 4:23 am
I’ve been doing mobile browsing on my Treo for years. I’ve got about 30 bookmarks saved in the quick list in Blazer for mobile-optimized sites. I also have several sites that I’ve mapped to “hold-a-key” actions in the phone application, so if I hold “G”, I go to the Google search page, if I hold “B”, I go to Newsgator Mobile, and holding “W” brings up my weather page for Brooklyn. I tend to find it much easier to pick a bookmark, especially using the five-way navigator, than to enter a URL using the keyboard.
My bookmark use differs from the desktop — I tend to have different sites marked for reading on the two devices. However, I have used the mobile version of Read It Later to look at sites I’ve marked on the desktop.
April 29, 2009 at 5:29 am
My “frequently visited sites” list is different between my laptop and my iPhone
On my desktop, my bookmarks toolbar has five links I visit multiple times a day: Gmail, Reader, New Bugs, Pushlog, and Tinderbox. Most of these are too big to load quickly (or at all) on my phone, and also too complicated to deal with on my phone. I’m also reluctant to log into my Gmail account from my iPhone, although it’s hard to say why.
On my iPhone, I have a couple of time killers such as news sites and Wikipedia lists, and a couple of time-sensitive sites like train schedules. On my laptop, I have better ways to kill time and access to train schedules isn’t quite as time-sensitive.
April 29, 2009 at 11:55 am
I don’t use bookmarks much on my computer these days. If I want, say Twitter, I’ll just do cmd+L, type twi and usually that’s enough.
On my mobile, since typing is a pain, I rely on bookmarks for my regularly used sites. The number of bookmarks need to be kept to a minimum so that I can get to them with the minimum of fuss (this means no directories). They tend to be sites like TV guide, train times, traffic etc. Also, some of these bookmarks are for mobile-specific sites. For these reasons I never sync with my PC.
The bookmarks on my PC these days tend to be a huge list of sites I would like to be able to find again later by typing random words into the address bar. If these were on my phone hidden in a directory where they didn’t annoy me then that would be okay.
For these reasons, for me at least, I think there’s a strong case for having two separate lists.
April 29, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I mostly use google reader when waiting somewhere and some webapp to retrieve data in the field like phone book or transporting system hours.
All of them, I know the url my heart, so I don’t really use the bookmark. Url completion is useful here.
1. Only for TODO bookmarks when I get an interesting page from the feeds I want to read on my desktop (bookmarks are synched)
2. One the desktop, I open the TODO. Usually, I only use the bookmark bar (but it gets a bit out of hand because it’s too full)
3. I don’t for other reasons than TODO. It’s because I don’t browse as much sites with it.
4. Already answered, but here is an idea : you can see bookmarks as local google engines with personalized ranking. On google, the ranking is also determined by the number of visits, but of all users. Here it would be only of you. Put both together, so that it can fallback on google when no local data is available.
For my usages, I would have a common TODO system but separate “local search engine”.
Cheers,
zimbatm
Since the engine is local, I believe it should be different between the desktop and
April 29, 2009 at 2:50 pm
1. Do you use bookmarks when browsing on a cell phone or other mobile device?
YES
2. If so, how does your bookmark use on mobile differ from your bookmark use on a desktop or laptop machine?
99% of the time I use an existing bookmark. I sync bookmarks between computers with xmarks – both mac and PC and both Firefox and Safari, then sync everything to the iPhone. Rarely do I actually feel the need to bookmark something that I found while browsing mobile, when I do I usually make a note of it, or clip to evernote.
3. If you don’t use bookmarks in mobile browsing, why not? Is it because of a poor interface, because your needs are different, or some other reason?
Interface for navigating could be better.
4. Finally, is there a difference between the set of bookmarks you commonly use on the desktop, and the set of bookmarks you commonly use (or think you would use) on a mobile gadget? Do you think there’s a case for keeping these two lists of bookmarks separate?
I would say so – this question has raised the issue – the vast majority of my bookmarks will never be touched from my iPhone. Separate? more like as a subset, like the way xmarks allows me to manage profiles – syncing only some bookmarks depending on the profile for that machine.
April 30, 2009 at 1:05 am
I browse on my iPhone pretty frequently, but I never use bookmarks. I tend to leave a few tabs open, like Google Reader, so I just flip to that tab when I want it. Most of my other browsing is looking things up on Wikipedia via Google, so I just use the search bar for that.
I don’t actually use bookmarks much on the desktop either, except as a way to pin results in the awesomebar.
May 1, 2009 at 12:11 pm
The awesomebar has replaced most of my bookmarks on my desktop, but on my phone (Nokia N95) typing is more effort on the numeric keypad so bookmarks become much more useful for quickly loading sites.
May 6, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Quite interesting debate.
I’m not a fan of mobile bookmarks indeed, but maybe Fennec will have the good points to revolutionize them..Maybe.
I’ve posted many thought here: http://www.macstories.net/
Federico Viticci
May 28, 2009 at 8:40 pm
1. Do you use bookmarks when browsing on a cell phone or other mobile device?
Yes, most of my browsing, research and bookmarking is done on a phone not a desktop. I use PIE, Opera Mobile and Skyfire on a range of pocketpc’s (HTC Wizard, Universal and Touch Pro). I can rack up anything from 20-60 bookmarks in a day.Because of a lack of desktop synching, I have to manually upload and sort the mobile ‘marks into firefox each evening or at the end of the week.
2. If so, how does your bookmark use on mobile differ from your bookmark use on a desktop or laptop machine?
Not much, maybe I will reserve only the deepest of research for the desktop, only because I’m afraid of having to integrate too many links manually if I used my phone. I also cannot import desktop bookmarks over to the phone because I have tens of thousands and I’m worried the mobile browser would crash under the strain!
3. If you don’t use bookmarks in mobile browsing, why not? Is it because of a poor interface, because your needs are different, or some other reason? N/A
4. Finally, is there a difference between the set of bookmarks you commonly use on the desktop, and the set of bookmarks you commonly use (or think you would use) on a mobile gadget? Do you think there’s a case for keeping these two lists of bookmarks separate?
Only in terms of privacy. There will be some research I do at home that is more personal, that I wouldn’t want work colleagues, certain friends etc. to see. Becuase my phone is more public I might not bookmark these on the phone since other people regularly use my phone to make calls or even surf the net!
This is a shame, because a lot of the great sites one can find can be completely by chance; maybe when I’m on the bus or in a cafe. These sites are usually lost forever because i don’t want the link to hang around on my phone’s history and other people seeing it.
A great Fennec facility would be the ability log into online bookmark accounts synched to the desktop (‘Weave’?), or access different bookmarks/entire fennec history/account profiles locally on the phone with a password. That way, one’s privacy would be in-tact when using one’s phone at work or in public. Having different bookmark/history profiles for phone and desktop would further help with privacy matters.
The password option would help the significant amount of people who only want to synch bookmarks locally between desktop and phone because once one’s links are uploaded to foxmarks/delicious etc, there enters a risk of one’s privacy becoming out of one’s own control and becoming compromised.
July 1, 2009 at 10:02 am
Having just started with weave as well as mobile browsing, I clearly would like to have two sets of bookmarks – at least that is.
A) For mobile browsing I’d only need a subset of my private desktop bookmarks as I am less inklined to do ‘deep’ reserach on the mobile. This tag-specific syncing is possibly best achieved by a tag of some sort rather than by a dedicated (sub)folder.
b) I mentioned “at least” two sets because I’d also like to have my private bookmarks available at work. Here I would prefer my private desktop list to be treated as an independed set from my work list. The private list would ideally be placed in a dedicated folder in one of the bars (preferrably task, but why not include menu or status options…)
December 1, 2010 at 8:00 am
Awesome post, if anyone wants a bit more info, or something to link their clients to, I just finished a lengthy post on the subject:
http://www.kintek.com.au/web-design-blog/why-do-you-need-a-mobile-website-web-apps-vs-native-apps/