A common functionality across web browsers is the ability bookmark websites and webpages so that you can view them later. This "save for later" function is very simple: it simply saves the title of the webpage and its URL so you can revisit it later. This is very useful if you found something interesting that you want to read later.
How to Bookmark Webpages in a Web Browser
We'll start learning about how to do in Chrome, as it's the most popular web browser, and then we'll see how to do it in other web browsers. The process is essentially the same.
How to Bookmark Webpages in Chrome
To bookmark a webpage in Chrome, follow the following steps:
1: go to the webpage that you want to bookmark.
2: click on the star icon in the address bar. A popup panel will appear saying the bookmark has been added where you can edit the title and the "folder" of the bookmark.
This panel has no OK/Cancel button pair. Instead, there is a Done/Remove button pair. In other words, the bookmark is already added simply by clicking on the star, and you can undo a bookmark if you bookmarked something by mistake by clicking the Remove button.
You can also bookmark a page through the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+D.
How to View Your Bookmarks in Chrome
To view your bookmarks after you added them, follow the following steps:
1: click on the three dots button on the top-right corner of the window, at the right of the address bar. Chrome's main menu will appear.
2: click on Bookmarks and lists -> Show all bookmarks. This will make a side pane appear where you can search and edit your bookmarks.
Go to the bookmarked webpage, simply click on the bookmark.
To edit a bookmark, click on the three dots button on the bookmark.
If you don't like this side pane view, click on Bookmarks and lists -> Bookmark manager to open a tab where you can search for and edit your bookmarks.
Where are Bookmarks Stored?
In web browsers that support multiple user profiles, like Google Chrome and Vivaldi, the bookmarks are saved to the profile, so two different profiles will have different bookmarks.
Many web browsers, like Google Chrome, have a "sync" feature that automatically uploads your bookmarks to your Google Account on the Internet. This can be a privacy issue if you lose your Google Account or respective account for the browser. Thanks to this feature, it's possible to bookmark something in Chrome on your PC, and then open Chrome in your smartphone and access the same bookmarks you had on the PC.
Bookmarking Tips
As you bookmark webpages, it will quickly become difficult to find your bookmarks if you don't organize them. There are methods you can use in this case.
One option is using the folders feature if you have many bookmarks that fit in some category. For example, if, for some reason, you want to keep a list of portfolios of photographers you found around the web, you can create a folder for them and place all their webpages in that folder.
Another option is to change the name of the bookmark. By default, web browsers will use the title of the webpage as the name of the bookmark. In some cases, this title can be very vague and ambiguous. For example, it could say "John's portfolio," without telling you who is this John or why did you bookmark that page. It's good idea to a comment as a a prefix or postfix to the bookmark, e.g. "John's Portfolio [Photographer]." This way, if you search for "photographer" in the bookmark list, you can find this bookmark even without using a folder. You can use this just like tags.
Warning: Extensions for Bookmarking
There are some extensions (addons, plugins, etc.) that let you bookmark pages in a separate way from how the web browser normally stores bookmarks. I have never used one personally, but it seems that this sort of extension can lead to data loss.
You could have thousands of bookmarks bookmarked through an extension, and then one day the extension updates, or the web browser updates, and all your bookmarks could be gone.
If you use this sort of extension, make sure that you can export your extensions to a readable format like JSON, and that you can import them back and that it works. This will test that you can backup your bookmarks yourself. Make backups of your bookmarks periodically or you may regret it if you lose them all.
Bookmarking Applications
There are applications for keeping track of webpages or URLs independent of web browser if you need something more powerful than a simple bookmark list.
A free one is Zotero (www.zotero.org), which is actually tracking references (citations), but can be used for bookmarks in general as well.
How to Favorite a Webpage in Edge
In Microsoft Edge, the process to bookmark a webpage is the same as Chrome, but Edge uses the term "favorite" instead of "bookmark."
1: go to the webpage that you want to bookmark (favorite).
2: click on the star icon on the address bar.
To view your bookmarks, click on the three dots button on the top-right corner and click on "Favorites."
How to Add a Bookmark in Firefox
To add a bookmark in Firefox, the process is identical to doing it in Chrome:
1: go to the webpage that you want to bookmark.
2: click on the star icon on the address bar.
Observation: Firefox version 128 shows a panel with Save/Cancel buttons, but the star button works like Chrome so the bookmark is actually already saved by this point. If you click outside the panel, it should cancel, but it doesn't because "cancel" actually should say "remove."
To view your bookmarks, the process is also similar, but this time the option in the three dot menu is just Bookmarks.
How to Add a Bookmark in Vivaldi
In Vivaldi, there is no star icon on the address bar. It's a bookmark icon this time, and it does exactly the same thing as the other ones. The main different is that when you click on it, it doesn't show a panel but instead changes the icon to the phrase "added bookmark." If you click on this phrase the panel appears.
To view the bookmarks you click on the top-left button instead of the top-right, but the rest of the process is identical to Chrome.
How to Bookmark Websites
It's generally not possible to bookmark entire websites. Instead, you can only bookmark its homepage, which is a single webpage. For example, if you want to bookmark the website Newgrounds, you bookmark its homepage at the URL https://www.newgrounds.com/.
How to Bookmark a Post in Social Media
Many social media websites allow you to bookmark posts while you're logged in. If you do this, the bookmark is stored in your account in the website, so if you lose your account, you will lose your bookmarks.
Note that many social media also allow you to "like" posts, and some social media even feature a public or private list of liked posts, which sounds like a bookmark list.
How to Bookmark a Post or Comment in Reddit
To bookmark a post or comment in Reddit, follow the following steps:
1: click on the three dots button next to the post or comment. A popup menu will appear.
2: click the Save option in the menu.
To view your saved posts, go to your Reddit profile and click the "Saved" tab.
How to Bookmark a Tweet on Twitter
To bookmark a tweet on Twitter, click the bookmark icon on the tweet.
You can view your bookmarked by clicking on Bookmarks in the sidebar.
You can also "bookmark users" by creating lists of users, by the way.
How to Bookmark a Video on Youtube
To bookmark a video on Youtube, you add it to a private playlist. To do so, follow the following steps:
1: click on the three dots button below the video. A popup menu will appear.
2: click on "Save." A dialog will appear so you can select which playlist to save the video to.
3: create a private playlist and save the video there.
Note that if you create a public playlist instead and add your bookmarks there anyone can see what you bookmarked by looking at your profile page on Youtube.
To view your bookmarks, simply view your playlists in your Youtube channel profile page.
How to Bookmark a Post on Tumblr
To bookmark a post on Tumblr, follow the following steps:
1: on the sidebar, click on Account to display your blogs, then on blogs, click +New button to create a new blog.
2: create a secondary blog just for your bookmarks. If you wish to make your bookmarks private, make the blog password-protected. I'm not very sure how private this will be, to be honest, so make sure to give it a random gibberish name instead of something that sounds similar to your main blog.
3: click the reblog button on the post you want to bookmark. This will display the reblogging dialog.
4: on the top-left corner of the dialog, you will see your main blog name as a dropdown list button. Click on it and select your secondary blog.
5: click the reblog button to reblog.
Note that you must switch back to your main blog if you want to reblog things to your main blog.
This also means that if you found several posts that you want to bookmark, you don't need to keep switching to the bookmarking blog every time, you can just switch once, reblog everything, and switch back later.
To view your bookmarks, just access your bookmarking blog in your account.
There is no limit to how many secondary blogs you can create on Tumblr, so if you want to organize yourself and you don't like tags for some reason, just create multiple separate secondary blogs and use them as folders.
How to Bookmark a Pin on Pinterest
To bookmark a pin on Pinterest, you just click the big red Save button that is on every single pin. That is the whole point of Pinterest, bookmarking (pinning) things. Its website category is even called "social bookmarking website" on Wikipedia. The pins are the bookmarks! It's all bookmarks!!!
You can create boards to organize your pins. Pinterest seems to be very good at categorizing pins, so if you pin a lot of things of one category, Pinterest's algorithm will keep showing you more things to pin that belong to that category. If you have multiple boards and pin multiple sorts of things, Pinterest will show you diverse things that can interest you based on your bookmarks and automatically deduct which category you want to save the posts to, which I think is pretty neat.
How to Bookmark a Post on Mastodon
To bookmark something on Mastodon, take a screenshot of it.
To elaborate, on Mastodon, there is no "like" or "reblog" button. There is a boost button, a favorite button (star icon), and a bookmark button (bookmark icon). The boost button works like a reblog or retweet button. The favorite button is a public like button and sends a notification over the federated social media that you liked something, while the bookmark button is private.
Due to the nature of federated social media, it's not really feasible to "bookmark" posts at all.
The first problem is the content retention policy. Mastodon is designed to be run as small servers with little budget. It's more like Discord than like Twitter. Part of its design is the idea that old posts get automatically deleted1. This varies from server to server. One server could have a six month policy, so any post older than six months is deleted. While another server could have a 2 year policy, or even an unlimited policy.
This means if you bookmark a post that comes from another server, your server would need to keep a copy of the post, or else the bookmark would be gone the instant the origin felt it was too old to keep hosting it. It would be like saving the URL of a website that closed down. You have the URL, but the content isn't online anymore. You can try to use the Internet Wayback Machine (archive.org) to retrieve it, but that will depend on your luck, and I don't think you'll be very successful retrieving Mastodon posts.
Another problem is that if you bookmarked a post so you can read the whole thread later, that means the replies will need to be online as well when you revisit the bookmark. Each reply can come from a different server with a different retention policy. Entire servers could disappear in the near future. If you need to pay a monthly fee to keep the server running, every month a server could go unpaid and just shut down.
With this in consideration, your options are taking a screenshot of the post.
It's worth noting that all of these things I mentioned can happen to other websites or bookmarks as well. The best bookmark is saving it locally.
References
- https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/19260 (accessed 2024-07-29) ↩︎
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