If you have a lot of browser bookmarks, I want you to pick a random sample of them right now, and check how many still work.
Chances are, many of those older than a few years are now rotten. A large bookmark collection is a sad graveyard of dead links.
The problem is, a bookmark is just a URL – Uniform Resource Locator. A resource and its location are two different things1. You want to know what was said, but the bookmark only tells you where it was said, once upon a time. The bookmark is a place, not a fact2.
The idea of the browser bookmark was invented when the web was young, and made sense for that era. Hard drives were small and slow. Links had not had time to rot yet. Search was not ubiquitous. Things are different now, but browser bookmarks have not evolved in any noticeable way.
Beyond the browser are various online services with newer takes on bookmarking. They often add some kind of social or sharing element (e.g. Pinboard). Sure, they have archiving, but I don’t want to depend on a service that might itself go away.
For the last two years, I’ve been saving entire copies of web pages, instead of bookmarking them. I use the SingleFile browser extension. With just one click, I get a complete timestamped copy of the page contents. This is an improvement over bookmarks in practically every way, and more people should be doing it.
So far I’ve accumulated 1,557 saved pages, weighing around 3.2 GB in total, averaging about 2 MB per page. That’s everything on the page, mind you: text, images, video, JS. At this slow rate of growth, storage will never be a limiting factor3.
Obviously, my saved copies don’t rot4. Once I’ve saved it, I know I have it forever, even when I don’t have an internet connection.
I can do fulltext search on all the contents using common tools like (rip)grep5. This has come in handy many times, to track down things I knew I’d read before but couldn’t quite remember where6. You can’t do that with bookmarks; you only have the titles to go on.
I can save the same page many times, in case it changes (often handy for news articles). Bookmarks have no notion of time. It doesn’t make sense to bookmark the same URL twice.
My saved pages are just files. Files are freedom7. I can work with them using whatever program I want. I can back them up, distribute copies, convert them into other formats, and so on. Bookmarks are not files. They are stuck inside your browser where you can only interact with them using the tools the browser developers thought to provide. You can export them, but you won’t.
Churn is eternal, and good things are fleeting. Assume any site you bookmark will be abandoned, or moved, or mutilated. Assume every image host will go the way of Photobucket. Assume every how-to guide will be imprisoned behind a paywall. Assume every news story will be “corrected” to bring it into alignment with present consensus.
Assume your first time seeing something cool is also your last. It’ll be gone tomorrow.
Unless you save it.