Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Bookmarks
Raised as a usability problem by 34 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 33 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 35 complaints
- People can't find anything in their rigid bookmark folder structures2026-09-22
- Bookmarks take too much effort to use, so the commenter stopped using them2025-05-09
- Bookmarking constantly breaks flow with uncertainty over whether and where to save pages2025-04-29
- Bookmarks and history are clunky to use compared to open tabs2024-08-22
- Bookmarks require active effort to find, so saved pages are never revisited2023-06-02
- Bookmarking and tagging tooling is annoying enough that the commenter keeps tabs open instead2022-08-01
- Bookmarks make it impossible to find new content on infrequently updated sites2022-07-07
- Nested bookmark folders are hard to use in Firefox, so categories stay too broad to be useful2022-05-02
- Cannot search across all bookmarks, highlights and notes at once2021-11-14
- Bookmarks are too static and hard to maintain for temporary research links2021-10-05
- Users forget to delete bookmarks after reading, so they reread the same junk articles2021-01-20
- Classifying and tagging saved references is tedious overhead for users2020-01-23
- Tiles shift order or need visual searching, and are slower than typing on desktop2019-09-27
- Bookmarks UI is a separate area with no quick cycling, so keeping throwaway pages there is more effort2019-03-28
- Saved links open in a new tab, forcing extra steps to close the old tab2019-03-19
- Hard to find or delete bookmarks among similarly named unorganized entries2017-07-26
- Clicking a bookmark folder just closes the menu instead of opening it2017-04-08
- Bookmarks have a terrible user experience in all browsers2016-09-06
- Bookmarks lose page state and reloading is slow, and deciding what to bookmark is burdensome2016-05-12
- Bookmarks require too much manual management to keep organized2016-01-19
- Bookmarks are hidden in a separate window, so users must remember to go there2014-08-08
- Bookmark interface is terrible to use2013-10-13
- Forces repeated clicks to advance one or two sentences, with no progress indicator2013-10-01
- Bookmark interfaces are so poor that people use tabs instead2013-05-15
- Hard to discover how to open bookmarks without a double-click convention2013-04-01
- Selecting a single item requires dragging a select box, which took a minute to discover2013-03-24
- Bookmarks became so full they were literally unusable, then RSS favorites became a bloated mess2013-03-11
- Author couldn't keep visual order in the bookmarks toolbar after constantly adding items2012-11-20
- Other browsers don't let users tag bookmarks, so finding pages by content is hard2012-10-30
- Accidental Ctrl+D presses create unwanted bookmarks because the shortcut sits near other common keys2012-10-29
- Opening a bookmark needs more steps and waiting than searching the App Store directly2011-11-10
- Adding a bookmark is impossible on a phone or iPad2011-11-10
- Bookmark list is archaic and doesn't bring web apps together as an interface2011-02-03
- Can't tell where a bookmark or tab leads without a favicon2010-03-19
- Too many bookmarked sites make it hard to find apps later2008-12-01