Modern browsers improved everything except bookmarks, why?
Some time ago I began noticing how disorganized and chaotic is everything in Safari/Chrome regarding bookmark management.
It feels like these patterns are not being touched for a hundred years. Folders, favorites, tab bars with folders and favorites… I don’t know about you, but for me it’s all just a graveyard of old forgotten links. And when I need to open a specific website I just go to search bar and start typing it.
The only thing that is actually useful is iCloud tabs in Safari, cause I can keep surfing the same flow from different Apple devices.
About keeping bookmarks synced between different browsers, it’s a pure pain. The only way to do it is to export and import, but it’s definitely not how it should look like.
Solution came really easy. One day while coding on my day job I just placed all the bookmarks I constantly need on my personal website and hide it under the subdomain. Took me about an hour (no database, no auth). I’ve basically built the personal bookmark page, and designed it the way I want (been working as a designer for 10 years and coding alongside it for the past 3).
Couple of my friends and colleagues then have seen it and said that it’s really cool, and they would love to have something like that on hand.
So it was no brainer for me, and I’ve began building tinypad, the modern launchpad for web browsing. Minimalist aesthetic, simple feature list, styling customization. All built with my favorite frameworks, that I really enjoy using. Auth with Google account, database with Mongo.
I’ve imported all my bookmarks to tinypad, then set tinypad/mypad as a homepage in all the browsers. Then I reorganized everything, cleaned things up and the problem was solved.
So here I am, a month later with a working product. Those friends and colleagues began to use it and actually enjoy the simplicity and clarity.
The beauty of being a design engineer today is that you can turn any good idea into working product in your free time, and share it with people who need it.
It also shows that if giant tech companies ignore some part of experience they treat as unwanted, there will always be a solution coming from a passionate indie devs like me.
If you are interested in any of that and would like to see or maybe start using tinypad, I’ll happily share more.
Attaching here a screenshot of the main tinypad interface for the reference. Never going back to the browser bookmark folders, really.
Cheers!