Nice to see a fellow user of all 3 operating systems. Our ranks grow stronger by the day.
Me, I don’t really use bookmarks much. When I have a website that I particularly get the sense that there is information on it that I will want to revisit, I do manually create a bookmark in whichever browser i happen to be in at the time, which will be either Chrome or Safari, and I do use the browser sync features, which will serve to make them accessible on my other devices, however I definitely use the browser sync much more often to pull up open tabs or history from other devices.
The problem with bookmarks in my mind is that it’s a kind of outmoded workflow where if you don’t consciously think to save something at the time, it’s not going to exist for you to retrieve later. History fixes that, but the problem with history is the needle-in-haystack aspect. However that’s merely a UI/software problem and can be addressed, whereas the premeditated workflow requirement drawback of bookmarks is a fundamental conceptual limitation.
I have done further thinking and research on this to consider what the ideal solution would be. It led me to another realization which is that both bookmarks and history have a further drawback which is that the only record being preserved is a hyperlink, which has no bearing on the actual content. The usual issue here is that sites inevitably go dead, so that ten or even five years from now your painstakingly collected bookmarks will be something like 30% dead links that each one will require you to expend some effort just to find out if the URL simply needed updating or if the information you tried to save is actually really gone.
So as you can imagine that doesn’t sit well with me when it comes to being an ideal solution. That looks something like the SingleFile browser extension, which very elegantly exports web pages as they have been loaded and as you view them into a single HTML file with all image resources and such things encoded inline as data urls. This is nice if for no other reason than that it is much easier to deal with and archive.
This is still totally falling short of my needs currently. I would prefer to automatically save every page I navigate to, on all my devices, and back up all of my browsing history, but it is not clear how to make that work on devices like my iPad and iPhone, and even if it were to be possible to get this running in a Safari Extension on those devices, the extra workload would put an unacceptable battery drain penalty on web browsing. Thus the approach would need to be to still have an extension present on all devices which can export and push any updated cookies from the browser to a server in my house, and the server can re-request the webpage and do the work of exporting and archiving it.
At present time the cost of researching and implementing such a scheme has not been justified yet. But hopefully one day I can get to seeing if this is possible. I think I need to focus first on proving out whether shipping cookies and rendering it on a server is even remotely possible. I expect that at minimum, it would not play nice with certain websites that do browser fingerprinting to check if something fishy is going on because this would definitely look fishy.
