They’re called bookmarks in my browser and not favorites, but are their people who don’t still save stuff in their bookmarks or whatever their browser calls them for later reading?
I’ve just looked into this and apparently some people don’t use bookmarks, and instead engage in “tab hoarding”! Probably there is overlap with the people who keep their computers on for months. The Arc browser uses “pinned tabs” instead of bookmarks.
I only use tabs on a short-term basis (minutes or hours) so hadn’t thought of them as serving the same purpose at all. You learn something every day!
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I generally only do a manual reboot following a kernel upgrade(I use Linux) and sometimes have tabs open for days at a time, but at the minimum, I close out every tab and restart Firefox prior to every browser upgrade. and those tabs that stay open at all times are limited to my Gmail inbox and my current batch of AI chats, and the latter mostly because the site I currently use for AI chatsmakes leaving them open less hassle than closing them.
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Yes, I have a friend who used to do this. And she relied on the fact that the browser restored all old tabs when opened.
Once I browsed on her laptop, opened a new browser window and closed the old window. Her tabs were all lost. She had dozens of tabs, articles she still wanted to read, half-finished movies where she wanted to remember the timestamp where she left off, tabs used as reminders to do something.
I inadvertently deleted all that because I would have never guessed that people use tabs like that. She wasn’t even particularly mad, thankfully.
- everybody does it
- Sorry “favourites” is my bad translation from french (it’s translated “favoris” in our browser)
Now we can get back on-topic 
For what its worth, they were called favorites in English versions of Internet Explorer back in the days when Firefox was just getting started and was the only real threat to IE’s browser monopoly under Windows(though, now I’m wondering what browser desktop Linux users were using before Firefox came along as Firefox was already the dominant GUI browser under Linux when I made the switch from Windows to Linux… I believe Konqueror could do browsing as well as file management, but even if it predates Firefox, I don’t imagine many non-KDE users would have been using it. No clue if Microsoft stuck to their choice of wording up to them retiring the Internet Explorer branding or if they carried over to Edge or whatever they call their web browser these days.
Mozilla suite!
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Going way back Mosaic, which was the dominant browser for all platforms for most of the early to mid '90s.
It got displaced by Netscape (specifically Netscape Navigator, but universally called just “Netscape” at the time) in the mid '90s. It eventually was replaced by Netscape Communicator, known generally as “Netscape 4”, in the late '90s, right around the time you were most likely to be bailing on it if you were on linux.
And Firefox’s predecessor was what @paul-donnelly just mentioned, Mozilla, which was technically the Mozilla Navigator and part of the Mozilla Application Suite, but was universally referred to as just “Mozilla”. Mozilla was started by former Netscape people, and it showed up around the time Netscape itself was losing its luster. Netscape 5 was originally planned as a joint development by Netscape and Mozilla (the organization) and I don’t think anything from that project was ever released.
Throughout all of this the ancient, text-only browser Lynx was also pretty common, particularly in the very early days when most of the web was text-only and most of what wasn’t text was just images (as opposed to streaming video and so on, which came later).
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I remember purchasing a boxed version of Mosaic. It was costly and had a clunky, boxy display that resembled the graphics on Apple computers.
I still use lynx. It just works.
Did I mention the use of the gopher protocol. It was the earliest browsing I remember at the university. (I still run a ‘pygopherd’ gopher server on one of my servers.)
Never knew Netscape was cross platform, and feel a bit silly for forgetting Firefox wasn’t Mozilla’s first rodeo in the browser space.
Both Lynx the cat and Links the chain get brought up fairly often on the Blinux Mailing list, though a lot of the time, it’s griping about how much of the modern Internet is actively hostile to simpler browsers.
Yeah so many sites depend on Javascript now.
Mozilla was also developed from Navigator source released by Netscape, so there’s a stronger connection than just the people. Firefox grew out of Mozilla so Firefox can trace its lineage directly back to Netscape’s browser.
And Netscape Communications Corporation, the company that produced Netscape the browser, was originally the Mosaic Communications Corporation and one of the founders was Marc Andreessen (one of those Silicon Valley guys that people not in the industry might have heard of), who was team lead on the original Mosaic browser.
And the original Mosaic wasn’t officially open source because although it was source available it had a non-free license for commercial use. This lead to a bunch of companies licensing it and producing their own rebranded browsers, one of which was Spyglass, which eventually became the basis for the first Internet Explorer.
And that’s just the browser side. Mosaic was made by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (and I still mentally always call Mosaic “NCSA Mosaic”) and the most popular early web server was NCSA HTTPd, which eventually was the basis for Apache (it was “a patch-y” version of NCSA HTTPd).
There’s a lot of that kind of thing in tech.
The University of Illinois is incredibly proud of Mosaic. We have all sorts of plaques and displays about it around the CS department.
For some reason, we’re a lot less proud of JavaScript…
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Yeah, Microsoft really tried to screw Spyglass there. Microsoft avoided paying a percentage of revenue on all browser sales by giving IE away for free with Windows. Spyglass did eventually get a legal settlement out of Microsoft for that.
I used to keep bookmarks in the browser, but they basically went there to die. Plus, the bookmark manager in Firefox is piss-poor. Lost an entire folder once due to pressing the wrong key (luckily it was nothing important).
So one day I made myself a special SSG and turned them into a linklog on my old site. Then even that became too much work to maintain (even though a flat-file database works much better than maintaining web pages by hand). Since then I’ve been trying some experiments, with varying degrees of success. But curating large link collections remains a hard problem.
As for browsers: I used Netscape (later Mozilla Suite, now Seamonkey) before moving to Firefox when it came out. Went through an Opera stage too – twice. Got to stick with relatively mainstream browsers for the most part, because yeah: an appalling number of sites balk if your browser is the least bit unusual. And by that I mean Android browsers using the system webview, never mind something like NetSurf. Ironically, text-based browsers often work better, which is one reason why I keep Lynx and Links 2 installed.
I bookmark far too many pages to ever read them all – instead I use them mostly for reference.
For a while there was Mozilla Pocket, which was meant specifically for saving pages in reading mode. It was shut down this year.
For long articles that do plan to read, I use Obsidian, which lets me save web pages to my disk as markdown. Then I convert the markdown files to mobi/epub format for Kindle.
Admittedly, I have plenty of bookmarks I rarely, if ever open(Most of the stuff in my Consumerism folder that isn’t Walmart.com or stuff in the Consumerism/Finances folder, most of what’s in the Entertainment and Information folders, the millions of words of bookmarked fanfiction I haven’t gotten around to reading)… but I also have over a hundred I open on a daily or near daily basis… granted the largest of the latter are bookmarked youTube channels because I don’t trust the algorithm to not screw me out of new videos from creators I like(honestly, I probably have at least 150 YouTube channels bookmarked across a dozen folders under the YouTube folder in my bookmarks, and the only reason its only 12 is some of the folders I can’t think of a good way to break them up without having multiple folders with the same first letter(e.g. I’d like to seperate the music channels under YouTube/Entertainment from the Movie and Television stuff, but I already have a Maths folder and being able to press alt+b, y, m, o to open all the channels bookmarked in Youtube/Maths is really convenient… Similarly, there is probbly enough channels in YouTube/Video Games dedicated to Sega for a Sega folder(I already have a Nintendo Folder and a Pokemon folder, and a few Video Game channels more about the technical aspects are in Technology, and Video Games still has more channels under it than any other folder… Yeah, I probably need to rethink my YouTube folder’s organization some, especially since its the reason I disabled Firefox’s Opening to many tabs at once can slow firefox down warning when I previously treated it as a sign I should consider dividing a folder… I suppose dividing YouTube channels alphabetically is one solution, but I kind of like having them clustered by category when I do my daily check for new uploads.
I do like that most of the stuff I access regularly, I have thing’s setup so it’s mostly alt+B to open my bookmarks folder then at most three keys to open a specific bookmark or open all in tabs on a specific folder.
As for browser, I mostly use Firefox, though I did switch to Seamonkey for a few months a couple of years back. Liked it well enough and liked that SeaMonkey is smaller than Firefox even with it being a full web suite and not just a browser, but then something changed in Orca that completely broke accessibility in SeaMonkey, forcing me back to Firefox… I do occassionally install Chromium for dealing with pages that just won’t work in Firefox and which dealing with another browser is less undesirable than just not dealing with that page… I’ve tried text browsers and really wish I could find one that would serve my needs as a web browser is pretty much the only thing keeping me from ditching the GUI entirely and living in the Linux console 24/7, but I’m just too used to Firefox’s keyboard shortcuts and Orca’s navigational hotkeys are just so darn useful I have to wonder how sighted past me got by without them, and I’m pretty sure the difference in how GUIversus console screen readers works means a text browser would have to implement navigational hotkeys in-browser instead of the screen reader doing that via information the browser exposes through accessibility toolkits.
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Introducing a new idea here. I haven’t yet counted the number of words in your post but my bet is that it exceeds the amount of text in most mainstream web pages on display these days.
Putting it a different way, perhaps there is more value now in bookmarks that dig deeply into a specific local topic, and not simply the top level global URLs which were what we collected together a few years ago.
I’m not sure how I’d function without bookmarks.
Next you’d want me to stop using my RSS reader. Both are foundational to using my computer.
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