Browsers need bookmarks that work like real bookmarks

20 July 2027

425 words

Bookmarks in browsers are nice. You can store a place you frequently go, so you don’t have to constantly re-google things or memorise the URL of your employer’s internal Elasticsearch instance. This is all great, but it’s not what bookmarks are used for in the real world.

In the real world, you have one bookmark per book/magazine/article you’re reading, and you move that bookmark to update how far along you are in the document. Browsers should have that too, so you can store how far you’ve gotten in long blog posts or online books (like this one or that or Worm).

The existing solutions for those cases are kind of bad:

1. You can just leave the tab open and get back to it later. But this is prone to all sorts of accidents. If you resize your browser window, that might mess up your scroll position; if you close the tab or restart your browser, that might mess up your scroll position. And even if your browser syncs your open tabs across devices, it probably won’t sync your scroll position.
2. If you’re reading an online book where each (short) chapter is one page, you could use regular browser bookmarks to save your reading position. But that means you either need to delete your old reading-position bookmark every time you create a new one, or add a date/time to the bookmark name, like “Reading position 2025-03-29”.¹ But this still doesn’t help if you want to read a 20,000 word LessWrong post in more than one sitting.
3. You can use a more sophisticated bookmark manager (I use Raindrop), and place a highlight on the last bit of text that you read, maybe with a special colour to indicate that this is a reading-progress marker rather than an actual highlight of the content. This syncs between devices and works for long documents, but you still need to tidy up after yourself.

What I’d like is to have a special type of bookmark (call it “Place marker” or something) that I can put in a specific place on a page, and the next time I place a marker with the same name, it deletes the old marker. (Basically, what we have now is the equivalent of tags in Git, and I want the equivalent of branches in Git (which, incidentally, is what Mercurial calls “bookmarks”, I think?)). This would be a perfect feature to build into something like Raindrop so it can sync between devices.