Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

With a paid feature called an archival account, Pinboard stores an actual copy of each bookmarked article, kind of like your own private Wayback Machine. It provides full text search over these articles.

I frequently save articles that I read so that I can refer to them later. It doesn't happen often, but once in a while I will desire to access an article that I read a few months or years later, and I find Pinboard well worth the value for making it possible for me to actually identify the article and retrieve its content regardless of whether the original link is still around.

I find this especially useful because it is my habit to collect citations for various facts. When I find myself making a claim in conversation, I really want to be able to access the original source where I learned about the fact, and provide the evidence to back it up. Or to review the source to confirm that my memory of it is accurate. Or sometimes I want to share a useful article explaining some topic with a colleague or friend.

I do occasionally use the browser bookmarks a sort of clipboard or working set, for 5-10 links at a time. I use Google Chrome and it syncs bookmarks between my devices.

As far as native bookmarks, I don't like that browsers have kind of black boxed their bookmarks and require individual proprietary cloud sync for these things (I realize Firefox has a self hosted option, but it's kind of outdated and last I checked the documentation was spotty. Even then it's only FF).

I know there's also the Netscape Bookmark Format which is kind of sketch, but at least it's something. I tried writing something that exported on close, I'd sync them myself, then imported on open, but it was pretty hacky (edit: also browsers exports are often very different so there was some normalization there that was fragile). There should be a way to setup an endpoint to natively sync this stuff with an open protocol and then all your bookmarks on all clients look the same. If you don't like that service, export someplace else and change your endpoint. Browsers should just be boxes for structured content.

Also, I used mozbackup, to backup my profile (all of them, including configuration, bookmark, history, etc).

I used firefox for my primary browser.

Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm.

e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it autocomplete from the address bar next time you start to type the URL.

Very handy, and it also protects somewhat against linkrot.

I've tied it to a hotkey to copy any bit that is highlighted to the currently open scrapbook. (shift-ctrl-b) without further notifications or interaction other than the keystroke. Super quick and it doesn't get in the way of continued reading.

[1] http://storage7.static.itmages.com/i/17/0408/h_1491614673_38...

Great minds do think alike! :-)

I also still 'star' interesting links and categorize them into folders. Very handy to have Chrome sync the bookmarks across all of my machines.

I started deleting the names entirely and it was life-changing. Text wastes so much space on the bar and you can memorize the favicons very quickly.

It's very simple, no javascript and just a tiny bit of CSS.

Any time I want to update it, add a link, etc. I just use a text editor.

For personal machines, I've got about 5 machine+OS combinations, with 2-3 browsers on each that I use for various things. I chose not to set up sync accounts in any of the browsers (I've already got too many damn accounts to manage, thank you!). So I sometimes save a bookmark if I'm in the middle of a long series of pages about something, as a sometimes-completely-literal "bookmark".

It's also useful to bookmark in browser because the address bar gives priority to your bookmarks over auto-complete and history.. So it's much easier to access those sites too.

P.S. I organize them by folder, so it's most likely design -> landing pages -> dark -> bookmark or personal -> finance -> bookmark, etc.

My only other use is for groups of pages that I'm referring to or want to come back to as part of a project. I usually delete them after a few weeks.

For long term bookmarks I use pinboard.in

It's bookmarks on steroids, saved for offline, taggable (no assumption of organizing data in a tree), and synced.

Probably the only useful Evernote feature.

I use Bookmark Box to sync with other browsers by way of Dropbox. Its not perfect, but it works.

For the rest of the Bookmarks bar I have my most common links -- a few spreadsheets (in Drive), some web apps, and a folder for forums I frequent. I also have a bookmarket for Pepperplate, which I use on a regular basis.

I mean, Google is usually strong on that from with labels in Gmail, Keep but for some reason they never implemented that in their bookmarks. It would makes more sense than using folders IMO.

What I really wish for is a way to save all the important aspects of a page for future viewing and organise it in a particular way.

If it is an interesting web site with good articles, I subscribe to the RSS feed.

My bookmarks stay synced between my iPhone and Chrome on Windows using Apple's iCloud Chrome plug in. It stays synced between Chrome on different computers using my Chrome account.

I make sure I use a descriptive sentence when I save them.

They're useful to me because the people creating the pages don't know about SEO and Google fucking sucks at giving me the pages I need unless I use weird contorted search phrases or remember the exact name of the document.

I have 12 icons in my bookmark toolbar that I use daily. I have a few that I don't use very often.

Do you mean if a site stores cryptographic information in the url? Or is it the act of syncing with your local machine that introduces surfaces of attack on your local system?

There is an opportunity to do something better than bookmarks, but not likely as a business.

for example: i have a bookmark that shows me every invoice issued in the past 30 days.

It's gone, now, and I've never seen its equivalent.

These days, I use an extension that saves a local copy of the page. As others have mentioned: Linkrot.

But it's not nearly as quick or convenient to return to a page as it was in PowerMarks. Although, the extension I use does have search -- manually triggered, and thereupon taking some time to initially build the index.

But I end up saving more "read later" stuff in it, as opposed to just reference links. So it ends up being a bit noisier, and size means I end up with multiple stores having multiple indexes.