Browser features that I want #1: Bookmarks that work like bookmarks.

A while ago I switched to del.icio.us for keeping references to web pages that I might want to visit again. This works fine for remembering a reference to something. I the non-internet world, which some of us remember, this is not what is stored with a bookmark. Generally this kind of information would be recorded in a notebook, or perhaps on some 3x5" index cards, held together with the rubber band off of a Sunday Times from a year or two ago.

I realize every so often (and then promptly forget again) that there is just about no good reason to keep this kind of bookmark around. Google does a perfectly fine job of remembering all the web pages, why should I go to any effort to duplicate what they do anyhow? Just dumb, if you ask me.

No, bookmarks serve an entirely different function. They are for reading things that are more than one page long. Generally people have a few of them that last for a longish while. I generally maintain two or three of them, and they last from one to three weeks. Mine are also typically constructed from the receipt that I get at the library when I check out the books.

Admittedly, sometimes people will maintain a much larger number of bookmarks at one time. I myself have never done this, but I have seen books that were actively being used for, say, the writing of a research paper which looked to have ten or fifteen bookmarks in them. One thing I can say for sure about that situation--it was not meant to last. Those bookmarks were gone a week later. And if they weren't, the owner of them surely had no idea what they meant.

Hm, I feel as though I have slipped off my point. Someone yell at me if I do that again, will you?

So how do I think bookmarks should work? Well, something like keeping a window open but minimized in Opera, if you have ever used that browser. But maybe without the memory overhead. Yeah, I know. A lot of you have never used Opera. Well, you should. It's hella better than Firefox. I am pretty sure that it is where Firefox cribbed most of their user interface "innovation" from. Oh, and for the other 90% of you, Firefox is the browser where Microsoft (they don't rate a hyperlink) cribbed most of their user interface "innovation" from.

That point of mine must be really slippery.

So what is my point? I want bookmarks that work like a bookmark. I can "go to" a bookmark and read for a while, changing to the next page in a sequence, or just jumping anywhere I want, and when I close the page, that same bookmark remembers my new place, waiting for me to go back there.

Since this is a new, electronic bookmark (maybe I should call it a iBookmark or something) it seems to me that it could even do a little extra for me. Like remember all of the historic pages that I visited with it. If I make a bookmark for my car shopping, it could keep a list of all the pages that I visited based on that bookmark.

That would actually be kind of handy.