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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if there have been any real studies about this, but I certainly hear about a ton of people with a million open tabs and very few who productively use bookmarks in any significant way.

My theory is that bookmarks are a failed concept, putting something out of sight but not in a useful system, so it's guaranteed to be forgotten. If I really need to save an important link, it goes in a notebook which is far more flexible.

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I love bookmarks, they are simple and just work. I have a few pinned tabs I want always open, and 5-15 tabs for current things. And the way browsers are designed, this works very well, so I rarely have reasons to write about it.

But the people who don’t like bookmarks and want tabs for organization have to work against the browser, so they are far more likely to write about their issues.

I use the bookmark bar a lot, for sites that I want to open new instances of, somewhat regularly. Like this one. I use "tabs as bookmarks" for things that are relatively time limited: My current PR, a dozen bug reports, etc, get piled into a tab tree that lives for as long as that PR does. Then on any given day I'll have a bunch of tabs I open for random nonsense, which I'll clean up periodically.

Non-bar bookmarks only get used for sites that I want to find again some day but I know I won't remember.

I like bookmarks, but you're right about the retrieval problem. I think this is one of the actual problems LMs (not even LLMs) could help resolve. Semantic tagging and generating auto-tags can really help in the retrieval process. Because I do pull things back up but even the placing in the correct place to "live" task isn't straight forward. Because to actually be organized, your bookmarks need depth in their categories. Not to mention the whole issue of selecting a URL, dragging it over the toolbar, holding it over a folder, and then battling dragging it into the next frame that's showing the contents of that folder and all the menu disappearing because I went 0.5 pixels out of bounds (god, who designs these? Same people who design window edges? You really want me to grab a 1 pixel line on a 4k monitor?!)

The reason I end up tab hoarding is because these are temporary bookmarks. Things I might want to but don't know yet if I want to long term store (because the bigger your bookmark library is, the more difficult it is to find things! Major flaw). Or things I'm concurrently working on (tab groups help here). A classic example of the latter is when debugging I might be tracing down an error and do not yet know if I can leave a SO post or doc closed because I haven't resolved the issue yet and there's a good chance I come back. So I can easily solve a bug and that frees up 10+ tabs. Maybe I'm doing it wrong

I'd agree with that theory - a big part of why I leave tabs open is that I'm not deliberately stashing them until later, I just get pulled into (or sometimes distracted by) something else and will, eventually, make my way back by virtue of closing tabs I'm done with. Its a fun surprise for later, and lets me entirely skip the mental friction of deciding whether something is important enough to bookmark and how I'd categorize that bookmark etc.

I look at Bookmarks vs Tabs in the same way I look at Google+'s Circles vs Instagram's "everyone vs close friends". One is far more powerful, the other forces far fewer decisions and is seemingly good enough for just about everyone.

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