Purging bookmarks is fine when it comes to 'sites you visit regularly', I suppose. Slows things down a bit. But it's a terrible idea for bookmarked references that you might only look at rarely, because now you have to fall back to google and pray you remember enough details to get back to the same place. Just a few days ago I spent twenty minutes finding <a href="http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own" rel="nofollow">http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its...</a> because I'd neglected to save the url anywhere.<p>I'll go ahead and give support for getting rid of the bookmarks <i>bar</i>, but that's not what the actual article is about.
I have a collection of bookmarks, that I haven't quite gotten around to organising! And they span about three machines and many web browsers. In their current state they aren't brilliantly useful for me.<p>I've always thought that bookmarks are a great idea. It's the bookmark interface in the browser that sucks. I think people use tabs a substitute for bookmarks for that reason. A tab is more in your face than a buried bookmark. It's a visual reminder.<p>Turning off the bookmark bar might be a good idea, if it's full of links that you barely touch. Would it not be a better idea to use that space for your most visited sites, or to list your recent history, or a filtered history?<p>The one time the browser bookmark bar was invaluable for me was when the keyboard broke on my computer. I could still surf the web quite well up to a point.<p>It's all very well saying abandon bookmarks. But free searching requires you knowing what you want to search for. Bookmarks can be mnemonics.<p>Sometimes we need prompting and/or signposting.<p>If I read something on the web, like a tutorial, and I think it has value. What chance do I have of remembering every domain/url, or even the magic keywords that got me to the article in the first place? That's when I find bookmarking useful. Recalling that bookmark is the tricky bit.<p>As I see it, browser's are focusing on rendering and javascript performance, and neglecting the actual user interface.
Unused clothing consumes a valuable resource that's often in short supply: closet space.<p>Unused bookmarks consume virtually no resources at all, relatively speaking, even if you have tens of thousands of them. I don't see the point of spending even this much effort "tidying them up" or whatever. I'm not sure I agree that developing a "philosophy of bookmarking" (or whatever you'd call this) is making your life <i>simpler</i> at all.
I love the idea. I'd have to turn off auto-complete, too since hitting CTRL-L then typing "n" <return> would take me right to Hacker News. Muscle memory. I totally check sites out of obligation/procrastination.
I've long since forgotten bookmarks and just learnt to trust Chrome's address bar. Even if I can only remember part of a title it'll manage to surface a page I've visited before.