Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?
This is probably a bit unorthodox, but I use tab session manager [0] for firefox. I started using it mainly to be able to save an open window to return to a project, and it ended up replacing my bookmarks. My issue with bookmarks was always the friction of managing them, but for whatever reason it fits my mental model to organize by open windows.
It's really nice to open up a window or group of windows related to a project that I haven't touched in a few months and it just be one click. Plus, if I open up new tabs those also get saved for the next time. It also works for easily pulling up my regular work session so I don't need to manually open up the 8 or so tabs I always need in a workday. Something toaybe check out if you already organize open windows by task or project.
I have 2115 bookmarks in my Firefox.. god I love bookmarking. I don't even follow people on social medias, I just bookmark them. I even sort the bookmarks.
Yeah, I bookmark stuff, but just in my browser. No apps or extensions — keeping it simple.
I still bookmark websites. Just in the standard browser, not in Pocket, etc.
I found searching for and finding bookmarks a pain, so made a Chrome extension to natural language search with lunr.js. It works nicely and I open-sourced it.
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bookmark-search/fcj...
I currently am in the bad habit of bookmarking websites and never, ever viewing my bookmarks.
Pinboard (still decent, just don't expect your money back if you pay for the permanently broken PDF export feature) until I can self-host Linkding[1].
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+l...
Occassionally at times yeah, but mostly via google bookmarks. Way more simpler than using a third party service like pinboard, since it's readily easily visible right on your toolbar chain
I still use traditional browser-based bookmarking, and sync with my Firefox account. I don't see the need to share my bookmarks.
In social bookmarking delicious was the perfect platform, pinboard is the spiritual sucessor but apparently it has not the same technical support it used to have https://notes.kateva.org/2024/09/the-end-times-have-come-for...
Tired of relying on other people's servers I'm moving links from google keep and browser to linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
I keep my bookmarks where they belong (usually in browser, with tags). I search interactively in a terminal (with a custom script and alias). It works well to select and open topic-related bookmarks at once.
There are plenty of options still out there (raindrop.io, Instapaper, Safari’s reading list, etc). No need to vibe code your own, unless you want to.
For read-it-later type bookmarking, like Pocket, I gave up. I never actually go back to read things later.
For “social” bookmarking, like delicious, I never really understood it, but I think sites like Reddit ended up filling that niche. My mental framework was always an evolution of forums, not bookmarking.
For most things, I can do a search and get to something faster than going to my bookmaker.
I use my standard browser bookmarks for my own little sites and things I go to multiple times every day. Then I have some others tucked away for cool sites that I think would be hard to find again. I then forget these exist and never visit, but when I remember they exist every 18 months or so, I go through them and they’re cool.
I use the browser's organization. Everything I use daily or is important goes into the toolbar menu. Everything else is in "Other Bookmarks". Sometimes I create folders if I'm saving a bunch of links.
I only bookmark references, not articles, and just use my browser's bookmarks. At most when for example planning a vacation or big purchase I'll make a folder and bookmark a bunch of relevant stuff, then delete the folder afterwards. If I see an article I want to read I'll just open it in another tab and read it. If I don't finish all my articles that day I can leave them open for a while, and then when I come back to it I often find that I don't actually care to read it as much as I thought, so I'll skim it or just close it unread
Self hosting Karakeep[0] for this. I think next step is to carve out time on Sunday morning to go through things and put them in lists of read vs unread.
Yes, especially in work where information is hard to find and when someone sends a URL in an email it's like gold dust. I spent 15 minutes last week trying many permutations of search terms to find our internal job site and in the end gave up and just asked someone else if they had the link.
Less so on the public web because search engines are so effective.
HN itself is a bookmarking tool, BTW
The management and search and annotation options are very weak, but when you submit a link here at HN, you are also making a permanent bookmark that will remain accessible via your account
I used to, and then I found out that I never get back to them again, so I ended up keeping the tabs open, and now I have 1500 tabs on a single browser, and similar numbers across other browsers on different devices!
Yes, heavily.
I use Firefox and so use an extension called Floccus[0] to sync my bookmarks via my own Nextcloud instance.
I also use a self hosted instance of Wallabag[1] to store pages that I bookmark for reading later (as opposed to bookmarking as a utility) so that I never have it happen that the article/blog/etc has disappeared when I finally get to reading it.
Can't say I know, or care, if bookmarking is fashionable. It works well for me, and with this setup I am in control of my links.
[0]: https://floccus.org/
I even store links of even twitter accounts in emacs org file. I then once a week click them all and read them all in one go. So yes.. I absolutely do. Thanks for asking. I am not alone.
Yes. Not interested in putting them in the cloud in the slightest. 99% of what's on my desktop i don't want/need on my phone, work or whatever.
People misusing tabs for bookmarks need to get their head checked. Surely the only way you find anything is in the address bar anyway, an there they are equivalent.
I use are.na to store links in appropriate channels. I have their chrome extension mapped to a keyboard shortcut on my desktop. On mobile I use a separate shortcut. I save links many times throughout the day, trying to curate content that I think is useful or interesting. I’m building several tools derived from this practice.
My are.na bookmarks: https://www.are.na/ya-1sec/bookmarks-1ntdk32bur0
An app i made that surfaces a random page harvested from a few interesting channels: https://moonjump.app/
A few a week on my browser (Brave). A few a day on Pinboard.
I use a self hosted book manager. To be honest it is effectively write only memory. I assume it is still being written to the DB, but browsing them has been broken for a long time. I assume that I can fix this if I really need to find a bookmark, but so far it has been a few years. Yet, if I don't bookmark it, I just have a terrible time letting go of tabs that I think I'd like to follow up on some month/year in the future.
The solution I use is a script that periodically updates a simple URL database by filtering the TLS/HTTPS proxy log. The proxy software is configured to record the full URL for every HTTP request in a response header. Thus the log contains all URLs that have been accessed. Generally, I do not use a "modern" browser. I send HTTP requests using a variety of software. The log captures all HTTP requests from all software.
This allows me to quickly search for past URLs, irrespective of what software was used to send the corresponding HTTP request.
The proxy is bound to a localhost address.
I bookmark things in Firefox. No addons or online services. I only browse the web from a Linux mini-PC that is dedicated to HN. I periodically export them as a date-named json and html file and that gets backed up to a dozen external devices.
Yes, but I can never find what I'm looking for again because I don't organize them myself and Firefox mobile's bookmark search is bordering on unusable. Sorting by date doesn't seem to work at all and I can't find anything I've bookmarked in the past year.
I want a separate, local-only, bookmark application that saves the bookmark, takes a full snapshot of that page, and lets me grep through all the snapshots for whatever I'm searching for. So many of my bookmarks right now are suffering from link rot, a really cool feature would be to take bookmarks in your browser, and, if dead, search on waybackmachine and snapshot it.
Yes I heavily use bookmarks. I got back into it a few years ago when I quit going to large forums like Reddit and needed a way to remember important URLs I knew I'd want later.
I keep them in an HTML file in git along with all my dot files.
I only bookmark sites that I go to regularly and end up on my shortcut bar, but I do use "Add to reading list" pretty often. I couldn't tell you the practical difference since I still have stuff on there from years ago, but it feels less permanent. Sometimes I just goofing around before bed and see something I want to check out in the morning.
From Firefox the *.sqlite db gets backuped daily into Syncthing. Sometimes, just in case, I'll export and backup them manually as json as well.
Plus, FF account
After years of jumping between different platforms and systems I've landed on linkhut [0]. I like that it's social by default and chronological-oriented, with flexible but really basic options for organization (tags and 'read later' flag). It makes it so that bookmarking neat things actually feels like it has a point, even if I don't always organize them in a way I can easily find later.
I kinda do.
I keep a tab open if it’s something I want to look at later. I have like a bajillion opent tabs. Literal southands (plural). Once in a while I go through those and close a lot of them. Like hundreds at a time.
And I keep a web archive of a page in DEVONthink if already read it and I want to keep it for reference. Southands of pages spanning more than a decade back. Quite a few of them ar not on the web any more. Some are not on the Internet Archive either.
I bookmark stuff I refer to frequently, but not really stuff that I want to "read later." I figure if I want to read it later I'll search for it then.
But I don't use browser bookmarks. I have a `~/home.html' that is my default home page and I organize it in a way that works for me. Any links I use regularly go in there, and I pretty quickly develop a memory for where they are on that page.
I use bookmarks to make websites show up in the addressbar.
I use floccus to sync my bookmarks to my nextcloud. Especially on the phone its useful, since accessing my bookmarks in firefox for android is a hassle.
Yes, I still bookmark page just in case we forget the most important thing, ai is cool but cant replace everything
Yes, I have a lot of bookmarks. When I bookmark a page, I add some keywords to the bookmark's title so I can easily find it in the future. It's not strictly tagging, I just try thinking of words the future me could use when searching for a particular bookmark.
However, I've never used any bookmarking service. It makes sense if you want to share your bookmarks, but I prefer to keep them private.
I still bookmark using my browser. Periodically I back them up.
Additionally, if the content is of long term interest, I post the link to archive.org, ensuring its continual availability. (As a college professor, I have found too many great resources vanish with nothing as good replacing them. When that happens I just change the URL to the Internet Archive version.)
My bookmark manager lightweight for organizing, storing, and managing your bookmarks with an intuitive user interface.
I bookmark a lot with raindrop. But I'm planning to migrate to (or create) some self-hosted solution because it's too much data about me. It takes a while for me to migrate as I really like raindrop's UI. I don't come back to most of the bookmarks tho.
I have a self hosting Karakeep instance. Is working really well, no maintenance and the AI tags is an useful feature for me.
I use the browser's own bookmarks tool.
At least for work, if I'd lose my bookmarks my productivity would plummet until I could get them back. (Fortunately?) I don't remember how to even start looking for all the Jira links I have saved.
I'm using linkding: https://linkding.link/.
It works great. It has a minimal set of features and can be self-hosted.
I'm paying pikapods to host it for me, but if I needed to, I can switch to doing it on my own.
Anyone knows an extension for firefox that creates a slideshow out of your bookmarks and changes the link every 2 seconds? would be real nice to have something like this on an empty new tab
I tried using Instapaper and Raindrop to save links, but found that I never went back and read them. Now I use Chrome's built-in reading list and don't read those either!
Honestly, since the first day I switched to Firefox I'm just saving to it's own bookmarks. Whenever I wanna check those websites I just open it either from my desktop or my laptop(s), since it's syncing in between my devices.
I don't know if there's much people using bookmarking tools, but to help you see another perspective, as a person who finds bookmarking tools not necessary I'd say it wouldn't worth your time to vibe code one. Also just for "vibe coding", be really really careful if you're gonna make it a "product" because you'll definitely face rough situations through it.
I don’t do this regularly but to “transfer” open tabs from one computer to another I save them to bookmarks file then import them on the new computer
Yes, extensively. Mostly stuff that HN helps me find, that I then curate further for myself, stuff that I know will be helpful for some project later on and can then go back and read through to refresh my memory.
Sure do. I use Buku and the firefox extension. I have a command line alias that shows me all my bookmarks so can grep for certain keywords and cms-click to open them. It works a treat!
Prior to that, I used pinboard (rip).
I just use the browser feature where history fails. No need for a middleman to share, links all the way down
Yes I still use bookmarks, though it's tempting to have chatgpt5 build me a memex so I can save whole pages and sites and mark them up to save in a journal instead.
Still use pinboard which seems more than enough for me. But I would happily pay for a pinboard that has better search and more responsive customer service.
Yeah, otherwise I'd end up with 9000 tabs. I use firefox and make use of the tagging system there, it's nice.
Of course - even if the site get pulled the title and URL are usually enough to find it or similar again
Yes, honestly I still do that! I know it's old school. But it works. easy to use, fast access and free, lool!
I do, and never used any of those tools, what the browsers provide out of the box is enough.
I bookmark stuff in my browser.
Another shot at a bookmark manager is welcome.
The usual story is "I bookmarked 20,000 web pages over 3 years and then I realized I never looked at any of them!"
I built an "image sorter" which used to ingest image galleries using a bookmarklet which would queue the galleries to get crawled with a web crawler, I would then classify and rank the image galleries in an HTMX-based UI. I really do look at the images every day so it is successful in that sense. The web crawler started running into Cloudflare problems so now I save the whole page with the browser and have a Python script harvest the pages out of my Downloads folder.
This post makes me realise I do, both in terms of browser bookmarks and in a more elaborate way in a similar read-it-later sense that other commenters have mentioned. I've not even thought of it as bookmarking until now though.
First, I use regular bookmarks in Safari for pages I might visit "often," i.e. more than once. This makes them immediately searchable in Alfred and really fast to open.
Secondly, I use a multipronged Emacs system which allows me to easily file and sort links that I browse on a given day into an org-roam journal file. First, anything from Elfeed (rss reader) that I open or engage with gets logged. Second, I can save the currently open browser tab's URL with a keyboard shortcut. I've also mapped a 4 finger trackpad press to this which makes it super automatic and easy to do. I try doing this for everything I read and/or engage with, since I often find myself thinking "what was that one thing," and this has helped me find it on multiple occasions now. Third, there's a dedicated way to capture the URL with a PROCESS todo state tag. All of these show up in my org agenda buffer which means I see them all the time and go through them every once in a while. Fourth, a dedicated shortcut (and trackpad 4 finger force press) both logs the page and sends it to Wallabag, which is a sort of self-hosted pocket alternative. This is synced with my Kobo ereader (with the Koreader operating system) and I tend to read through the interesting articles at a pace only slightly slower than they accumulate, so it tends to be manageable.
For videos, I also have a quick docker service that allows me to yt-dlp a video, save it as mp3, and add it to an RSS feed for a podcast I host for myself, so I can listen to them on the go.
In general I'm trying to separate the act of seeing a piece of media to engage with and consuming said piece of media. One notable benefit is that something that might have seemed interesting later turns out not to be. On the other hand, logging most things I engage with comes in handy a lot when I'm talking to someone and something I barely paid any mind to in the past comes up!
In the future, I intend to expand the system with logging of the content as well as the URL, and adding embedding support with a vector database to allow for both full-text and semantic search. Retrievability is the biggest pain point right now (though ripgrep is already perfect for 80% of the usecases).
Since it's all integrated with org-roam, I can also quickly "promote" links to full nodes, link them to other concepts, etc. This comes in super handy with quickly going through a lot of literature by following arXiv feeds via RSS. Having it all in one system is super handy.
My bookmarks on mobile is just opening a new tab to read later … at 120 tabs right now ……
Bookmarks... This is a rabbit hole I dive down at least once a year. And always come up disappointed.
The problem with discussing bookmarks is that everyone has different needs. Some people want a system that takes snapshots, generates pdfs, allows for offline viewing, creates AI summaries, lets you share with other users, (supports other users), archives everything into a database, and more. Other folks just want a simple, literal bookmark system that only manages links to websites.
If you're in the latter category (like I am), the perfect system already exists. It's called xBrowserSync and it's wonderful. It's open source. You can self-host the sync server. Data is encrypted before leaving the client. It has browser extensions. It has an Android app. And it uses tags / search instead of endlessly nested folders.
But there's one huge problem: The project has been abandoned for years. The public sync servers are still up and running. But the Chrome extension has fallen into disrepair. I use Firefox, so I'm still good, but for how long?
And so every year I go on this quest to gauge the state of bookmark managers. It seems everyone is trying to build the 1st kind of system. I get it. You're not gonna convert users to subscriptions with a simple link database. But that's not the system I want.
So if you're just looking to sync web links between devices, in a private, browser agnostic way, organized with search tags instead of folders, and without having to manage a huge tech stack. Your current options are: xBrwoserSync, Linkding, Shaarli, and LinkAce.
Of course. I bookmark them using bookmarks in my browser. I have about 15k bookmarks now. I also save my session files so I have tabs with history too. For both bookmarks and tab session files I have perl scripts to process/search them.
I have browser bookmarks for things I go to frequently, but occasionally need to prune them due to actual disuse. For everything else, I used to use Pocket, but then switched to a self-hosted Wallabag interface. The UI could use a little tweaking, but it works for my purposes. There’re browser extensions to save stuff and even a decent iOS app.
That being said, I have the common problem of forgetting to actually read any of it later. I’ll have sessions where I go through it once or twice a month, cleaning out the “inbox”, but I have so many starred links I’ll probably never go back to, so I have to wonder sometimes: what’s the point?
Raindrop.io and yes I do that extensively
Everyday. I use raindrop.io to do it.
Not really, I have some bookmarks in my toolbar from decades ago that still see the odd click, but mostly I just rely on history, ie "dev 461" gets me to our JIRA board with my usual filters, "github PROJECT" / "github PROJECT pulls" get me to the project or the pull requests.
In fact I've been using Shortcuts instead of bookmarks lately, as those will open on any Apple device in the default browser for the device, not limited to whatever browser you happened to bookmark them in.
CTRL+D it's that easy.
I use tabs, and lots of them...
Yep, with Inoreader!
Yes I bookmark sites. Just in my normal browser.
If it's important or often used it gets a spot in the browser bar. Otherwise gets filed away in some folder in my bookmarks.
It's a solved problem: in the browser. For read-it-later, I just use the Reading List in Safari. Sometimes, I paste them in a .txt file -- and use Cmd+Click to open.
Extensively
I rarely bookmark anything. If anything, my browser's history is adequate to find anything I need to pull back up, I can start typing in the address bad and it'll get suggested.
I've been using Shaarli[1] for the past 15 years, and I'm very happy with it. The code base is small and stable enough (the official version hasn't got a single update over the past 12 years, even though the author is still using it daily[2]) you can easily tweak it to your tastes.
I use an ever expanding text file, plus bookmarks. The textfile is #1 for me, and can live on various drives.
I sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content". I reflexively share to Instapaper not to read it later, but to absolve guilt for not reading it at all. It is one of my weirdest web habits, on reflection.
OTOH, back when del.icio.us was good, I used it for roughly the same purpose.
These days, I still send links to Instapaper when they are essays or articles. I send links to Raindrop.io when they are anything else, basically anything the Instapaper text extractor would fail on. Things like repos, interactive charts/graphs, photographs, videos, etc.
I still think it is behaving roughly as /dev/null. I do sometimes think that, at least nowadays, you can ask an LLM to visit your bookmarked links and do some semantic search over them. But I guess the best use case is just saving it for later/never rather than wasting time on it now.