Bookmarks suck – Extrensions are great – Extensions inhibit progress

Sounds provocative?
Fine. It was planned to sound like that.

While we all go conform that it is impossible to cover every  need of a user with one software alone and that we therefore need a way to extend it, sometimes extensions can be a blocking stone for other development.

Example:
Take a close look at the notes as they are in Vivaldi right now.
Yes, they are notes – some text, maybe some added images or even the occasional files. Nice and not too fancy. Solid things.  OK, basically that is what notes are. Move on, nothing to see here – or move a little bit closer.
What else do you see?

There is one more thing: Notes can include an URL!
Still not impressed?

Now imagine 3 other fields, Title, Shortcut and Description added to a note.
What do you see now?

A bookmark on steroids. Or a note on steroids – depending on your point of view.

A short digression: What is the basic, boiled down use of Bookmarks or Notes?

Those are made to help us poor humans with our poor brains to remember things that didn’t exist when our ancestors climbed from the trees and therefore our poor brains are not built to remember it well – that’s why we invented writing and all of those little tools like notebooks (Both, the ones made of dead trees and those made of dead microorganisms and some inorganic stuff)

Back to topic

Now imagine you could share selected entries of those Notes and Bookmarks hybrid on Steroids with your friends and co-workers so that all can work with them – maybe to develop new ideas, maybe just to share some images of cats. Add some kind of versioning to it and maybe a calendar, nothing too fancy, and you are ready to cover most of the sharing (not necessarily meaning file sharing!) and collaboration needs – and that is only the starting point of the development …

… but what would happen if someone would merge bookmarks with notes?

Right, there would be a loud howl of the user base because all bookmark(s) extensions would break as soon as the underlying bookmarking mechanism evolves to something better.

Conclusion: Extensions inhibit progress. 😉

 

What is your opinion on that?

4 replies on “Bookmarks suck – Extrensions are great – Extensions inhibit progress”

  1. Bookmarks in Vivaldi are a mess. Folders cannot be created during the bookmarking process, unless I am missing something.

    1. True if you use Ctrl+D, the page context menu or the bookmark popup in the addressbar.

      I don’t use those but the panel (you can associate a shortcut for opening the panel too)

      There you can create folders and subfolders by clicking on an existing folder or on the root to make it active and hit the folder Icon next to the search bar in the panel.
      Then you can right-click on one of those and choose “Bookmark active page” and the bookmark will land in that folder.

      1. “There you can create folders and subfolders by clicking on an existing folder or on the root to make it active and hit the folder Icon next to the search bar in the panel.
        Then you can right-click on one of those and choose “Bookmark active page” and the bookmark will land in that folder.”

        Nifty! Thanks!

        1. Even better: You can do it in the popup if you use the snapshot builds.
          Make sure you click on the bookmark icon in the popup if you want to access other folders than the only the speed dial folders.
          It will be in 3.8 Stable too 🙂

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