Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks?
hackwrench writes: Most reviews of so-called bookmark managers focus on the fact that they can share bookmarks across browsers and devices and whether or not they can make your bookmarks public or not. Sometimes they mention that you can annotate bookmarks. Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on archive.org. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list of features that would be good to have. What bookmarks managers do you use and why, and what features would you like to see in a bookmark manager?
Lets me set bookmark profiles for different devices/environments, so I have my "Work" bookmarks distinct from my home use ones. Automatically synchronizes between all major browsers and devices. I mainly only keep smart bookmarks and daily-use ones, so I don't ever need dead link checking or any frills like that. Covers my needs.
I use the github issues database. It allows me to quickly tag each bookmark and add descriptions. Works good. The side benefit is that it pretty useful for lots of other things too.
If you use Windows .URL files, you gain several critical abilities: browser-independent storage, cross-browser utility, and searching and filtering driectly from Windows Explorer. The browsers I have used all support the ability to drag URLs directly from the browser address bar into Explorer or the Desktop to create these shortcuts. Not sure if you could then create methods and tools to support your other desired features like browser-exclusive shortcuts, but completely detaching URLs from any application-specific database is a good place to start.
My other bookmark manager is Google.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
1. Sometimes I have to rename the bookmark to something more meaningful than what's in the tags.
2. Use tags. Firefox has them and it makes my life so much easier. It beats sorting them into folders.
I'm not sure what to do about dead links. It happens. If you really, really need to save something forever, I assume it is something for reference, then save it to PDF and upload it to a cloud service.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
To be honest, doesn't need much management.
Are the features I want, but to say that the reviews said little about such features may be generous, because they actually said nothing at all about it.
One thing that is totally brain dead about any bookmark sync features I've tried with browsers is that if you delete a bookmark on one device, it will not delete it for all devices. That to me is just stupid. Its like they only half-sync: only added bookmarks, not deleted ones.
Worse, they can go, "Oh, I see that the browser you deleted a bookmark from is missing it. Let me add it back into your browser.
FireFox bookmark tagging is very good, but what really rounds it out is TagSieve, a fantastic FireFox extension that really should be added to FireFox itself:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1092878
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve/#reviews
I've bookmarked a thousand web pages and haven't clicked on a single one of them. Let them go, people. Just let them go.
To check if a current site you are on is on archive.org have the following as a bookmark
javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href;
It would have helped if you read the frgging summary. Can you name one that synchronizes across all your devices (and perhaps a shared section with appropriate auth system), and allows customizations on a per device basis? No? Yeah. You should read the summary next time.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'd settle for "do anything". Something that's a dumb storage device isn't "management". Maybe that's why so many slashdotters hate managers and management, they don't know what the word means.
Learn to love Alaska
I haven't seen an announcement about systemd doing it yet, but there are a few hours left in this week's release cycle. And i'm sure it will be incompatible with all other bookmark managers and, in fact, all browsers.
Yes. I was a long-time Opera user; used to pay for it on Windows (version 3?) and then, when it came out, I paid for the Linux version. I loved the bookmark system in the 12 and below versions. Like you, I had themes: folders and subfolders for certain topics. For example, a programming folder with different language/platform subfolders. Nearly everything was possible with just the mouse. To bookmark a page, you simply moused down to the desired sub-sub-folder, for instance, and clicked the bookmark-current-page-here entry. Ditto for locating and visiting a bookmarked page. I very rarely had to type anything: very rarely to search for a bookmark and just occasionally to rename the title of a page I was bookmarking.
I stayed on Opera 11.64 (there was some annoyance in 12) until about 6 months ago, when, because of an increasing number of page-rendering problems, I began trying out various browsers (including Vivaldi and Otter), and finally settled on Pale Moon (on Windows and Linux). I imported my Opera bookmarks and I can get close to the Opera bookmarking experience, but it's still not as smooth as the old Opera was.
I use Xmarks (paid customer for it and LastPass, do they even have a free version?) but it definitely has its flaws and I don't get the impression that the company puts ANY resources into it beyond basic maintenance and support. I've had times where bookmarks simply disappeared (e.g. 80% of a folder of links to client sites), and there's no reasonable way to go back and track down when or why.
In my case I assume it was a sync issue between browsers on multiple systems, but since it was a folder of sites I only needed to access every few months it left me with a big window for when the loss occurred. I could have downloaded all of the bookmark sets to be able to search (or otherwise track changes) but that's a one-at-a-time process through a clunky web interface. Last time I looked there was no way to search through the old bookmark sets, nor is there any kind of automated changelog or indication of what changed - not even a count of number of bookmarks in each saved backup. Even having a count of the # of bookmarks would have helped, because I could have looked for spots where the total number declined since I'm bad about doing cleanup.
Overall I'd call Xmarks "just good enough to keep me from actually deciding to try to roll my own solution" which is really a pretty low bar since I have some idea of the development scope I'd be facing.
fencepost
just a little off
Accidentally posted this as AC. Seriously, tagging, descriptions, nice layouts, themes, well maintained, easy addition of links, I could go on. It's nice having my own bookmarks and not having them mined by every company out there.
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