In my opinion, there are 3 types of useful bookmarks when surfing the web.

Unfortunately, web browsers only competently support the temporary kind. It’s silly to cram all 3 use cases into this one solution. Luckily, people have created a number of tools to fill in the gaps.

These are the bookmarking tools I use and when.

Temporary

“I’ll need this in the next 1-3 days”

This is the most common for me. I use Firefox’s standard bookmarking feature for this. Ctrl+D and done.

Long-Term + Archival

“I might need this someday”

I collect some links because they’re useful, or cool, or just something else entirely. I want to hold onto them where I know I can find them later, but don’t want to crowd my “short term memory” of temporary links.

For this, I use Linkace. It submits each link to the archive.org wayback machine for backup if the linked site ever disappears. Tags, lists, and sorting all make this a better option that browser bookmarks.

Plus, you can export your hundreds of links as a browser-compatible .html file anyway.

Startpage + Frequently Visited

“I visit these 3+ times per day”

These I want to have on hand quickly. Think Reddit, HN, YouTube, etc.

I also lump local server tools like Proxmox, analytics dashboards, and self-hosted services into this one.

These links are too permanent to be in the “Temporary” bookmarks bar, but also too general to be filed into a link collection. For this I use my custom startpage: Salient Startpage. This page is a list of links that I load on every new browser tab to quickly access my favorite sites.