I'm a little surprised that the majority of the answers here are Yes!
I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical people. I guess I was wrong!
Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
My lack of bookmarks fits with the rest of my "online personality". I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage email folders or browsing bookmarks.
Also, the fact that I browse in a "clean" browser instance in SELinux that saves no history from instance to instance probably contributes to my lack of bookmark use.
> Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away.
I can't google NDAed documentation or forum threads. I can't google stuff that's useful to a topic, but that I've forgotten about. Webcomics often have terrible search indexes - and even navigation - so I'll bookmark my place when archive binging exactly as I'd use a physical bookmark. I bookmark-bar things I open so frequently (JIRA views, trello boards, etc.) that I don't even want the overhead of googling / typing in the url. I bookmark difficult to google topics - e.g. I still can't re-locate the win8 user you need to grant read permissions to, to allow Win8 AppX/WinRT programs to bypass the sandbox to read files (so you don't have to pack game assets into each .appx build).
But I don't bookmark things I merely access quite frequently, like HN ;)
> If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
I'd say XKCD is a special case. Considering the "There is always a relevant XKCD" meme, I think google has a pretty decent grasp of what terms relate to what XKCD comic. Not to mention the transcripts and explanations of explainxkcd.com.
Another possible explanation is that Google's search engine is exhibiting, due to the lack of a better term, a form of "transference" [0].
Google engineers are huge fans of XKCD as is evident from Randall Monroe's well attended talk at Google some time back. In my mind, his talk was easily one of the most attended talks, second only to Linus Torvalds talk on Git.
[0] I'm sure there is a standard term for software exhibiting biases held by its authors when making decisions on behalf of users.
All the local archiving in the world won't help me download new SDKs, find updated documentation, new changelogs, see active replies to ongoing queries, maintain our own NDAed documentation, ...
I think this quote of yours summarizes why I still use bookmarks extensively:
"If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever."
I have tons and tons of things that I probably could google/ddg search for, but were really difficult for me to find initially and that I know I would never find again. Some things, sure, no problem, and I search; other things no, I want to bookmark them because I'm not sure I'd find them again. Search engines are really not as perfect as I'd like them to be.
The other reason I have bookmarks is to kind of remind myself "hey remember this thing--you should look into it in more detail later. Like soon."
So I kind of have two sets of bookmarks. One are kind of like "recent things that I need to remember," sort of like a todo list, but or sites or reading, and then will delete quickly, and the others are references that were hard to find initially.
I could email myself things, but to me that's not easier, and it wouldn't help with reminders, because I'd have to go looking for them (if I have to search for it, it's out of sight, out of mind). I don't see the point of something like Pocket, because my browser already syncs across all my devices everywhere. I suppose I could save it to a text file that is synced across devices, or something on a note system, but it doesn't seem better than bookmarks. There was something else I tried that I don't even remember anymore, that in theory would be perfect, but it wouldn't let me organize them in a way that made sense (it insisted that things be sorted alphabetically or something like that).
I do think there could be something better, something that is kind of like synced bookmarks, something like a notes program, something like an RSS reader, but I haven't seen it yet. Ideally what I'd want is something that syncs across devices, allows me to bookmark things for reference or later reading, reminds me of "urgent links," basically acts as a news aggregator/rss feed reader, and gives me useful suggestions for new feeds, and is open source or at least has some sort of open API.
I've noticed recently--as in the last year--I've started using Google Keep kind of like how I use bookmarks, but that often is cumbersome in its own way.
For "todo list", marking something as Read Later works perfectly. Lots of bookmarks app do this and it's most convenient to view them by creation date.
For reminders, Mochimarks lets you set explicit reminders on every bookmark or note. The notifications can be viewed in the app, show up through the extension, and are emailed to you. You can snooze the alerts too.
I have a concept to add a feature to track if something has changed on the site since the last time you visited, but it's not implemented.
Mochimarks has a rest api. It has lots of sorting options too (creation, last visited, total visits, interest, and reminders.) It's made bookmarks a lot more useful for me.
usaa.com is the best case example, it's just 8 characters and very fast to type but news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 is 37, i'd much rather just type new and get the autocompletion of the rest. Also i don't want to remember if it was over?points=100 or points?over=100.
You also get the benefit of not misspelling things, and your bookmark goes straight to the https-site reducing the risk of MITM.
> If I come across a deep link ... I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
> I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders
How on earth do you make this work? I find it hard enough to search successfully for an email that I know exists, let alone something I may have bookmarked years ago with who-knows-what text alongside it. I assumed you at least stored them in a folder to ease the search, but without doing that, I don't know how you ever find what you're looking for. What mail client do you use?
The email thing made me cringe. At very least you should separate mailing lists vs your name appearing in to: or cc:. I never(rarely) manually move emails. But a few rules here and there can make thinngs significantly more manageable.
> I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage email folders.
This. I am not sure if my brain is wired differently or my use case for emails is somehow different to other people, but given all the search capabilities of the email clients (gmail & outlook) I have used during the last few years, I find it difficult to find less productive ways to use my work time than managing emails (either thinking whether an email should be deleted or moved to some folder).
Some big corps automatically prune root inboxes of all items over a legally-determined age ( 90 or 180 days seem common ), in which case folder management is essential for retaining anything of value.
You don't even use bookmarks for short-term shortcuts to to highly-accessed, complex, URLs? For instance, someone in your team shares a google doc with you that has the specification for a feature you're building. It takes weeks to build this feature, and you've got a browser window sitting on that spec doc half the time. You won't bookmark that? You'll load it up from an email search every time?
I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical people. I guess I was wrong!
Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link that's so important that I want to keep it, I email myself the link along with maybe a short description, and it will be searchable forever.
My lack of bookmarks fits with the rest of my "online personality". I have 14,183 threads in my work email inbox and I do not file emails into folders like most of my colleagues. I do not have the desire or the time to manage email folders or browsing bookmarks.
Also, the fact that I browse in a "clean" browser instance in SELinux that saves no history from instance to instance probably contributes to my lack of bookmark use.