Who uses bookmarks anyway?
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Of course for me, they would be "high" priority, as they are integral to my daily routine.
I have about 700 bookmarks or soDid you put your bookmarks in several different folders, or just in one?
Do you think that the folder hierarchy is a good way to find the bookmarks, once you need them?
What do you think about removing the folder hierarchy from any visible human interface, and simply storing them in a sort of small DB you wouldn't manually have access to, that let you find the bookmarks saved with just a search field?newscpq
My bookmarks are in a hierarchical set of folders. On the bookmarks bar there are 23 favicons and five folders. In the five folders is a hierarchy of folders arranged the way my mind is arranged as to where each bookmark should be looked for. "States" has 50 states in it, each state folder has bookmarks to the state offices whose websites I need to visit regularly. A few of the state folders have "county" folders in them, as needed. The ones I use all day every day, on almost each and every case, are the 23 favicons on the bar. If I had to find, say, Marin County Superior Court, there's only one place it could be - States/CA/Marin. Pima County Justice Court - States/AZ/Pima. If I need to pay a bill or do some banking, the links are in the "Business" folder in alphabetical order. As I say, the folders are arranged like my mind, which, by the way, is the SOURCE of the idea for hierarchical folders - the human mind. We remember and refer to things by category, classification, and trait.
This is why there is taxonomy. There is not a huge, flat database with "Yellowjacket Wasp" next to "Yak." Our minds do not organize our known universe that way. We have, instead, Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order Family Genus Species. That is how the "folders" of biological taxonomy are arranged because that is how the "folders" of the mind of man arranged them, 'way before we learned there was a genetic justification for the folders, or even that there was such a thing as "genes."
On the other hand, there is a flat database arranged according to numeric value known as the "periodic table." How many have memorized it and could find anything on it? No, instead the human mind has folders for Gas, liquid, solid, and sub-folders like metallic, rocky, chalky, woody, plastic, etc. There are other subfolders for traits like reactive, inert, stable, volatile, ephemeral, what-have-you.
Long and short of it is if we are going to use our hands, eyes, minds to find something (which is still faster and more efficient for some use cases than a "search" input), we need folders and directories arranged in hierarchy, the same way the memory of the items is stored in our mind.
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I use bookmarks. A LOT. I have many thousands. I am an inventor and researcher and require a means to store myriads of diverse links. Opera 12 bookmarks are as close to the perfect structure as I have found. Bookmarks must be organized in a hierarchical structure to be useful for classification.
If Vivaldi doesn't have good bookmarks it will be useless to me. Please retain the structure you have started with and build on and enhance it.
P.S. Am I stupid? I can't see how to vote in the poll???
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Thank you for your answers: my questions aren't provocative, nor rhetorical.
Did you put your bookmarks in several different folders, or just in one?
23 favicons and five folders. In the five folders is a hierarchy of folders
Do you think that the folder hierarchy is a good way to find the bookmarks, once you need them?
[yes because] the folders are arranged like my mind. This is why there is taxonomy.
What do you think about removing the folder hierarchy from any visible human interface, and simply storing them in a sort of small DB you wouldn't manually have access to, that let you find the bookmarks saved with just a search field?
[roughly, no:] we need folders and directories arranged in hierarchy, the same way the memory of the items is stored in our mind.
A college professor told me that folders usually tend to correspond to the human categories that we create, each time we answer to the question: "What is it?", with the verb: "[it] Is a". So, for instance: "Vivaldi Is a browser" means that Opera belongs to the browser category. Which is, BTW, pretty much the same point for using "categories" like Gas, Fluid, etc… to remember things, instead of just learning the place in the table: those categories all say what the element IS.
That's exactly what I'm saying: I'd rather tell my browser to open a link that I named and tagged with some meaningful keywords (linkname) and words (categories), while I saved it, instead of looking for it in a folder already created for other links.
My point is that fast and powerful machines should provide something that a human usually cannot do, in their own very peculiar way: I don't think it's a good idea to "force" a machine to be as similar as possible to a human brain, while it is a very good idea to use it's calculation speed to do instantly things that we would do in a longer time. So every time a software feature just copies a human behavior, then it's just a terrible idea, because I'll never get the value add that would be coming from an implementation that took advantage of the speed and power of the machine.
If portable GPS applications just showed your position in real time on a map, WITHOUT automatically calculating the route from A to B, nor recalculating it each time you don't follow the suggestion, nor talking to you (that is: pretty much imitating the human process of reading a paper map), then I wouldn't find them useful at all.
And this is why I find folder hierarchy totally useless, in a machine.
newscpq
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When your system can take me to a page I have to visit repeatedly during a day with eye movement and a click or at most two, without having to physically input any terms with the keyboard, it will win. As long as I have to remember 700 nicknames or meaningful keywords and input them in a search field to retrieve a bookmark, it will lose. It's ergonomics. It's efficiency. Your way has to not just be newer. It has to be, for the human user, BETTER. So far, in a vast number of use cases, it is not better.
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That's exactly what I'm saying: I'd rather tell my browser to open a link that I named and tagged with some meaningful keywords (linkname) and words (categories), while I saved it, instead of looking for it in a folder already created for other links.
The point of a bookmark is you don't have to remember the thing you want to find later. You can file it in a location and forget about it. Later when you want to find that specific item you can drill down through the hierarchy and find it. The human mind can/does forget even after naming a link. The file system doesn't. That is also the strength of the computer.
If you are going to search through your bookmarks why not skip them in the first pace and just search the web each time?
Bookmarks are about organizing and seeing what we have organized. And that is why so many of us love Opera 12 bookmarks and are happy to see the direction Vivaldi is taking.
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No one should need more than a few dozen bookmarks for in truth, most become outdated and/or irrelevant. Those few dozen bookmarks can easily be marked via a good Speed Dial. Extensions that allow you to "read later" (i.e. Reading List) provide for more updated bookmarking. And with today's incredible search engines, we have more up-to-date information that is in all probability far more relevant than bookmarked sites numbering into the thousands on some machines. In my opinion, this is more a mark of inefficiency and inability to prioritize. I would not hire someone who depended upon such a hierarchy of bookmarks.
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Heh, heh. So you would not hire someone who, like me, can do the work faster and better than anyone else in the field. I fear your fixed ideas are an impediment to your ability to be flexible and competitive.
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The point of a bookmark is you don't have to remember the thing you want to find later. You can file it in a location and forget about it. Later when you want to find that specific item you can drill down through the hierarchy and find it
This is the most convincing reason to love folders, but I don't usually store things to forget them…
If you are going to search through your bookmarks why not skip them in the first pace and just search the web each time?
This is exactly what i usually do, but I save some pages that are very meaningful to me for their topic, this is why I love TAGs
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If you are going to search through your bookmarks why not skip them in the first pace and just search the web each time?
This is exactly what i usually do, but I save some pages that are very meaningful to me for their topic, this is why I love TAGs
And this was part of the brilliance of Stash which hopefully will make a re-appearance. We currently use a program called Reading List (MS Store). Search engines today provide the most relevant and quickest means of finding the best answers as opposed to archived material on older, bookmarked sites.
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… but I don't usually store things to forget them...
That's silly. Obviously we know we want to retrieve the information at some point in the future. But at the time we just want to forget about being forced to keep it's name or nickname in our active memory. If you can remember the name of everything you put in a vault with it's only access being a search box you are obviously smarter than the majority of humanity. Or you have very few things you are storing in the vault.
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… but I don't usually store things to forget them...
That's silly
That silly part was a quip, in my intention.
Everything else was serious (and I'm glad you accepted it).
Pis&Lo -
No one should need more than a few dozen bookmarks
No.
No one should tell me what I need and what I don't need. And, what's more important, no one should build their software in a way that prevents it from being flexible.
Old Opera and (to some extent) Vivaldi are just that - flexible. You need two bookmarks? Go ahead, have them. You need 2000? Also, no problem.
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I have bookmarks going back to Opera 2. Many are to research sites on EDU university sites and are still applicable today.
I use speed dial a lot, but after filling a couple screens full, I can't decide what should go on the speed dial and it has become a visual mess. (so I haven't even setup Vivaldi with speed dials yet)One thing I find myself using more and more is searching bookmarks and also using auto complete in address bar to search bookmarks.
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We all use bookmarks in our own way, of course, which is why bookmarks should lend itself to a broad array of use cases.
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I use speed dial a lot, but after filling a couple screens full, I can't decide what should go on the speed dial and it has become a visual mess.
That's why the SD folders, in Opium, are more than welcome. I hope folders will land in vivaldi too, and I hope in more than one nesting level
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Vivaldi has nestable folders in speed dial. Boom.
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Vivaldi has nestable folders in speed dial. Boom.
I know.
I mean easily manageable nested folders. For now I don't mind to arrange them other than the first level.
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Ah.
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Absolutely, actually I have to admit that Opera's study is flawed when they think people do not use bookmarks anymore.
For me it was exactly the opposite. When I first started decades ago using the Internet I never used bookmarks. Then I started to use some, but it was a mess. Then I switched browsers, started with bookmarks again. The reason why some people don't use bookmarks anymore in some browsers is not because they don't like bookmarks. No! Its because bookmarks management sucks in those new browsers. No nested folders, and no way to organize them correctly when you have a lot of them.
Does that mean users don't want bookmarks anymore? No, they moved to things which can manage bookmarks better. We all know services like Xmarks and how popular they are, there are so many bookmarks services and plugins, and all of them see to have some success. So yes, people do use bookmarks, but because some of these services provide better management vs standard browsers they moved to those services. Actually things like Read it Later or Pocket are nothing more than glorified bookmarks. In the past people send temporary websites they wished to read later to their bookmarks.
I find it very sad that browsers started to offer such horrible features to manage information. The logical way where bookmarks should be and have to be is of course in your browser, a click away, not in some remote service or another software. Bookmarks in a browser make sense.
Google is partially to blame for this. They offered awful bookmark features with Chrome but we know why. They want google.com to be the place where people find websites, not bookmarks. Its their intention to bring users to their search services, not let them manage data on their own browsers. It would not surprise me if Google removed that feature all together as they want everything to live in their cloud. (read here their cloud, not the clouds).
So, yes, absolutely. People still use bookmarks. I use the speedial for those things that I need to access every single day or several times every hour. Consider speedial like the most important bookmarks you need to access. This are very visible and big so you can almost click them while sleeping.
But then I have several things I need to access which probably cannot even remember. Example are internal websites which are composed by IP's like try to remember http://192.11.358.25/control/url/admin-site-4
Yeah that is right, try to remember 100 like those urls and good luck because you cannot search them on Google either. With a correct bookmark manager, you can put them in folders and organize things into context. Then I can click on a folder and open all of them at once, without having to type or remember anything.
Then there is needs like hobbies, I do gardening, mostly vegetables and there are some very nice websites about all type of plants I want to keep information. I then have them sorted by plant names, and other categories. Some are videos, some are blogs, some are videos, but they are all related to one context.
I think the more people use the Internet and more they have the need to actually use bookmarks, this is why it was a shocker for power users to see them gone in the new Opera. If you are the average dummy guy, all you visit is Facebook and you probably think Google is the Internet, but as with every thing, they grow, and eventually they have bigger needs. Just see how the kids today use iPads and computers, kids are power users of the future. Lets see how this kids use the Internet in 10 years, they are all powers users when they become adults already. And more and more people are using things related to websites, for their daily needs, so more people will need a way to organize all those nice websites they use and visit.
The only thing which I could really use is to have the same data in my phone, on the go, be able to push a link to my browser or from the browser to the phone. I know Vivaldi will probably not have a mobile version anytime if ever at all, but there are great mobile browsers already, example in Android there is Dolphin and they have probably the best sync feature right now. All other browsers sync only to their own mobile version alone so I think this is a great way for Vivaldi to be more open. Maybe you can partner with them or let users actually decide to which mobile browsers they want to sync.
I was using Opera in my phone but lately even the Opera for phones, which always a market leader is completely falling behind, it seems Dolphin is the new Opera in mobile (talking about features and innovation) and Opera Mobile is actually following the same path their desktop version is following. I don't see anymore people using Opera in their phones, they are using Chrome in Android or the stock browser, the reason is Opera is just the same of more, nothing special. In the past Opera Mobile was the best, and I mean it killed every other mobile browser. I remember even back as Windows Mobile Opera was the only one displaying websites better than the rest until the iPhone came of course. Safari was the first thing I saw on phones displaying and rendering full desktop websites and I was shocked you could browse the Internet on such a little device. That was innovation !!!
If someone builds a great browser with great features, it will create a market all by its own. Saying we don't need bookmarks is like saying we don't need a contact list on our phones or we don't need a calendar or agenda. Tons of websites is not something anyone will remember, so we need a way to organize them in some database, and that only places it makes sense is the browser a click a way.
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Safari was the first thing I saw on phones displaying and rendering full desktop websites and I was shocked you could browse the Internet on such a little device. That was innovation !!!
Actually it was Opera on the p800 the first browser to render a desktop version of a website on a proper smarphone.
And was FIVE years before the iphone release.
Those were innovations (both the first real smarphone an the browser).
Then we cannot forget Opera Mini. That was not innovation that was a REVOLUTION, altough the idea itself was not new (some crappy compressed browsers were available on PalmOS before the opera Mini arrival) operamini was the first practical browser usable on almost any phone. Even if underpowered, even if old, even if tiny.
I remember when once my P800 ran out of battery (was 2003 or so) an d I used the Siemens SL55 of my mom to book a train, while traveling in another train, thanks to Operamini
For younger people who haven seen it, the SL55 was a minuscule phone (one of the smallest ever) with a stamp sized display and a GPRS connection.