RSSFirefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 2: Are bookmarks outmoded?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 30, 2009, 4:48 PM
(continued from previous page)
At this point, Google might answer that users will probably prefer to search for long, lost bookmarks through Chrome's address bar. That particular tool does show some "real" capabilities, beginning with asking the user whether she wants to search for what she's typing (which obviously doesn't begin with http://) using her default search engine. Maybe real/ is a directory entry, and that shows up as possibility #2. Then three selections from the bookmarks database comes up, and these are plainly marked with gold stars, to distinguish them from sites you may never have seen before. Follow that up with a likely partial URL match, then a menu entry that takes you to a history page. That page is quite impressive, including pages recently buffered whose contents (not just their titles or URLs) contain the search item in question.
What would make Chrome's address bar perfect for this task is some more breadth in the bookmarks department. As we now know, there are at least 12 entries from bookmarks that Chrome can pull up, but it chose these three. There's no obvious reason why it chose (with apologies to Comcast) the first item with a gold star as the #1 entry, when it could also have pulled up the memorial page to Los Angeles disk jockey The Real Don Steele -- a page where "real" appears earlier in both the title and the URL.
When we try the same test with Firefox 3.5's "Awesome Bar" (a name which sounds more like a confection than a tool), the browser returns a scrollable list (ah, there's that missing element!) with all 13 of its bookmark entries. Now, it didn't offer to search Google for you first, but Firefox's tool isn't designed to be merged with its search box. For me, that's not a minus for Firefox, though others will appreciate Google's merger of the two functions and reclamation of screen space. It also didn't provide partial matches from URLs, which is a nice Chrome feature. And there's no link to history, but if you click the down-arrow to the very right in the address bar (not an obvious feature, I'll grant you), the list will switch from a bookmarks search to a history search, in place.
Usually in a showdown like this, I have to search for those little features and nuances that make one contestant better than the other by just a hair. In this particular instance, Google Chrome didn't even really come to the table with its game face on. If a software company is going to offer a feature, then it needs to be a complete feature, or else it should omit it altogether. Here, Chrome needs to decide whether its purpose is to direct users back to the search engine, or to help users with the functionality they expect to find in a browser, even though bookmarks, I'm told, are oh-so-'90s.
For this heat, score one very decisive round in favor of Firefox, which makes our running score suddenly lopsided: Firefox 3.5 (2), Chrome 3 (0).
KEEP SCORE ALONG WITH BETANEWS:
- Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?: Firefox 3.5 (1), Chrome 3 (0) after 1 heat
Bookmarks were outmoded, useless dinosaurs the day Favorites were created.
End of story.
I mean, a HTML document to store your links with no file system / OS ntegration?
How bloody arcane and archaic.
Score: 0
|bleh, did that on firefox anyway. Opera's bookmarks far better.
Score: -1
|In Windows it is not required for ListView headers to sort. If there is no "pressed" animation when you click a header you should assume it correctly does nothing! But if there is a "pressed" animation usually that's when the dev should make it do something. It seems it was either an omission or was pushed back in lieu of more important features (I want them to fix the Downloads and History pages right-click!)
In addition it is difficult to say what the user wants to do. Do they want to sort the bookmarks themselves, or just the VIEW? The latter is not persistent, the former is. If the latter, then you cannot use the view to reorder bookmarks since the order does not reflect the permanent bookmark order.
However in Windows, traiditionally it's only the VIEW that is sorted (IE: sorting the view in Windows Explorer does not reorder the files in the Master File Table), although the view sort state itself is often persistent.
"To recap: In less time than it takes an entire corporation, using what is purported to be an open programming process, to re-insert a feature that has been an historical component of a competitive browser (which, by the way, is actually produced by some of the very same people, so they would have intimate knowledge of that component), a theology student in Monmouth, in his spare time in-between running a youth Bible study group and building motorsports racing simulations, comes up with a plug-in that, at least for some users, fills that feature gap. What is wrong with this picture?"
What I see wrong is that he has not become a contributor to the Chromium repository and merged his code with the source tree! And is there a bug filed for this particular omission? The devs can't fix something when you don't tell them about it!
Score: 0
|Sorry, but Firefox + Read It later = win, in my opinion. :/ Chrome cuts down too much on its normal functions...
Score: 0
|I'll continue to use my bookmarks and use tags to quickly gather similar URLs. Firefox makes it quick and easy to query your bookmarks without making every visit to a web site a visit to a search engine. The only drawback is the setup and that's not so difficult, especially when you're adding the bookmark.
Score: 0
|People might ignore bookmarks when they want something as simple as "Betanews.com" or something you can access with 2 or 3 clicks.
But for an URL of 200 characters, or a site i spent 15 minutes looking for in Google, we still use bookmarks.
The point is, regular people who usually don't make complicated searches disregard bookmarks with good enough reason. They don't need them.
Score: 1
|Not using bookmarks is for the lazy. Also except for main pages, I really can't see searching for each page being very productive even with Awesome bar help. You still need to have it search history (if you haven't cleared it) and book marks if you actually use them.
I find something like Speed dial as an extension helps a lot more for the most common pages and bookmarks for the less common ones.
Score: 0
|"Not using bookmarks is for the lazy."
Well then...
I expect you to commit ever URL you visit frequently to memory and delete your bookmarks as anything else would be lazy.
;)
Score: 2
|Don't tell me you've never visited a site, and then later came back to it by searching your history or using Google? 'Cause that's what not using bookmarks is.
Score: 0
|> Two of the search phrases that land
> Google users on Betanews most often
> are "beta news" and "Betanews."
It's as pathetic as typing "google" in the built-in search engine of your web browser.
I'll keep my bookmarks, thank you.
Score: 2
|i've seen that happen. makes you wanna smash your head against the wall.
Score: 0
|