Bookmarks are on the way out
I wrote nearly two years ago about shortcomings with bookmarks and ideas on how to improve them. I’ve awaited Firefox’s “Places” feature with great anticipation, hoping it would reinvent and revitalize bookmarks. Instead, Firefox 3 has virtually eliminated the need for bookmarks forthright.
Bookmarks are history, and vice-versa
History is the new bookmarks. The whole point of bookmarks is to make the browser remember the addresses of your favorite websites so you don’t have to.
But Firefox 3’s history functionality knows how often you visit a page, and knows that page’s title. All you have to do is start typing your favorite site’s title, or key words from a specific page you want to visit, and if you visit that page frequently enough, it will appear at the top of Firefox’s auto-complete list.
It uses similar behavior for pages you bookmark, but really, there isn’t much point. Setting up bookmarks takes time and effort. However, browsing as normal and letting Firefox figure out it, well, doesn’t.
Exceptions to the rule
There are a few cases where bookmarks are necessary, but they are few and far between.
Basically, when a website foolishly omits keywords that users naturally associate with a page’s content, bookmarks give us the power to correct the website’s mistake.
For example, a job board might forget to actually include the word, “job” in the page title. That defeats Firefox’s history feature, and the only way to solve the problem is to bookmark the page.
Which is kind of ironic, because you’re supposed to bookmark a page if you like it. If a page has a really poor title, I don’t want to like it, because its existence hurts the web.