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Posting comments seems to be broken there for me (though I bet that's Ghostery's fault) so instead I'll post it here:

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.



"My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they force them into a tree structure."

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.


Bookmarks from the Firefox URL bar are very handy.

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.


Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?

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.


"Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?"

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.


Or try to auto-guess tags you've used previously?


The tag field is focused if I ctrl+d in Firefox. Which is very handy indeed.


Firefox has tag auto-complete as well.


> Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them completely.

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.


If you have 10000 bookmarks you need a search engine.

That's what "automated tags" are... they don't need inventing.


Essentially you could make hierarchical tags, so your folder could be emulated by a tag.

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.


The ability to bookmark the same webpage in different folders of the tree structure would already be a huge improvement.


no ghostery here, but comments broken for me too.

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.




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