Flashes of Panic

If anyone is looking to add a really cool feature to a web browser, here’s something for their consideration. Let’s have bookmarks that work the way real bookmarks work.

The bookmark metaphor is a bit leaky. “Bookmarks” as they are implemented in normal web browsers are essentially saved URLs which allow you to once again find a website which you might otherwise forget. I actually have no such bookmarks, unless you count my del.icio.us bookmarks, which I don’t because they’re not built in to the browser. A “real” bookmark is something you stick in an actual book to keep your place in the book. You know which book you’re reading, and you probably know where it is (otherwise you have problems the bookmark can’t solve.) The bookmark lets you pick up where you stopped last time, and move on. You take it out of the book, read, then put it back in where you next stop.

Everyone I know who spends a lot of time on the web has only one way of marking a page which they’ve stopped reading, but intend to come back to: they leave it open, in its own window or in a new tab. We can have dozens of tabs or windows open at a time indicating these unfinished readings. I’ll skim through NetNewsWire clicking stories I want to read (or, if it’s a full-text feed, entries I want to comment on,) and wind up with a slew of open tabs. Then I go to the browser and work through the tabs. In other cases, I’m reading my way through [an entire site][], or a multi-page NYT or Ars Technica article, and want to keep track of where I left off. I don’t bookmark these pages because I don’t want to remember them for all time; I just want to be able to pick up reading where I stopped. Instead, I wind up keeping browser windows (or tabs) open for days (sometimes weeks) at a time, which is inconvenient when I want to do something like restart the computer.

What if I could place a “bookmark” at a page which would then disappear automatically (maybe with a confirmation prompt) when I returned to the page, in the same way that I remove a physical bookmark from a physical book? Then I could close a few dozen of these tabs. I bet I’d use it more often than the “real” bookmark menu, because I wouldn’t feel like I was cluttering up my collection of lasting bookmarks. It doesn’t seem like it would be terribly hard to do.

Now Playing: The Catfisherman from Kids in Philly by Marah