Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

> Frequent usage should just percolate autocomplete suggestions to the top. This design doesn't really need them, and tbh I've barely used bookmarks in any browser in a long time.

BECAUSE address bars autocomplete sites I frequently go to, the bookmarks end up being a way to store sites that I go to /infrequently/ and use for reference or only check up on every few months.

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That's the same way I use bookmarks. I won't bookmark, say, Hacker News, but I will bookmark a recipe site that I know I'll want to refer to for ideas sometime down the road.

That's one of my biggest use cases: bookmarking individual recipes. That's a perfect example of something I'm not going to be looking at every day but do want a list of to browse occasionally, or to find specific ones.

You may already be aware of this but a fellow HNer operates a service I use frequently for this exact use case called historio.us. I use the chrome extension to add stuff that I might want to revisit and, when I do need to, I have historio.us as a "search engine" in the chrome omnibar.

Think of it as your own private search engine.

Recipes are static text, you could just save the page (as HTML) on your device. (URLs change all the time, and website vanish) Later, the file can be found with Windows search / Spotlight.

I bookmark more dynamic pages, e.g. news articles with comments that will be around for some longer period.

A simpler UI (easy as or easier than bookmarks) for saving a page for offline viewing might help with this.

Like Reader Mode¹ in Firefox for Android? It's also planned² for the desktop version.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-use-reader-mode

2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558882

I bookmark & tag any site that I think I will visit again.. and then search using the address bar by typing the site name or tags and the "*" character to search only bookmarks (I clear my history often and bookmark are still remembered, and I can easily make a backup of my bookmarks)

Which kind of highlights that a stripped-down "core only" browser really doesn't need it. If browsers were invented today, bookmarks would be an extension and not a core feature.

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