The reason why bookmarks suck is the same as why a significant percentage of web users struggle with tab overload.
The mainstream vendors became extremely conservative about introducing bigger UI changes and generally innovating on user experience (because of the sheer number and diversity of users as well as classic enterprise internal MO).
That’s why we’re still stuck in the 90’s paradigm of browsing web documents where today the browser is also proto-OS running web applications and a data pre-processor (used to retreve+download from Net into local apps or to upload+classify from local apps to Net).
Even though it’s technically possible to save multiple tabs as bookmarks and reopen multiple bookmarks as tabs (with a single action), very few people do.
My theory is that they became obsolete because:
1. The bookmarks bar is very limited with active real estate and quickly becomes crammed, and thus useless for long-term use which begets large quantities of data
2. To search bookmarks you need to open Bookmarks Manager which is too cumbersome even for occasional searches (most users probably don’t even know about it)
3. Editing and maintaining them is also cumbersome due to a lack of proper tools (batch operations, quick preview, etc)
4. The older the links, the harder it is to remember names and keywords, and our visual memory is often the most reliable point of reference
5. Even if the person is willing to put in the effort to deal with #3 and #4, once saved links tend to become forgotten about because #1 and #2 and the vicious cycle of deprecation is complete
That’s why most people use the bookmarks bar as a quick launcher pad for frequently used bookmarks.
The Read Later services and native features are great for articles but not for general bookmarks that are not long-form reading. Equally, full-text carbon copy clippers such as Notion, Raindrops, Evernote, etc. are not ideal for bookmarks for the same reason. Not to mention such solutions can only save pages one-by-one (instead of in batch), and can’t open multiple links at the same time — both needed to easily and quickly switch between different tasks/contexts.
Without being able to easily save and organise large quantities of (useful) links, people resort to leaving them open until they are able to process them, contributing to a pervasive issue of tab-hoarding.
Without being able to (auto)save sessions/tabs, people end up losing a lot of valuable references. The browser is the only (major) app in a modern stack that doesn’t save work and doesn’t enable you to reopen previous work.
You can only undo recently closed tabs and recover the last state of the browser if it crashes. But you can’t save and close an online shopping session in the middle, only to reopen and pick up where you left off several days later. Why not?
Shameless plug… this is precisely why we’ve developed Tablerone: https://tabler.one/
