Habits the browser taught you · habit 04 of 40

Keeping it on the bookmark bar

Fifty six characters is too many to type and far too many to type accurately. A bookmark solves that in one keystroke, which is why almost everybody makes one.

The habit

You bookmark it and drag it onto the bar, so it is always one click away and never has to be typed.

Why it is automatic

This habit predates almost everything else in the section. Bookmarks arrived with the first browsers people used at home, have worked the same way ever since, and are one of the few parts of the interface never redesigned into something unfamiliar. Decades of the same gesture producing the same result is a very strong reflex.

The bar version is stronger still, because it removes the last step. An entry in a folder needs a menu opened and a name read. An entry on the bar is a position, and positions are remembered by the hand. People click the third item on their bar without reading it, correctly, every day.

The alternative here is also genuinely bad. An onion address is long, has no words in it, and cannot be checked by eye in any reliable way. Anyone who has tried to retype one understands why a saved copy is the sensible answer, and this site does not argue with that.

What it actually does here

The label is the first thing worth looking at. A bookmark takes its name from the page title at the moment of saving, so it arrives written by the site rather than by you. Whatever the market called its own page is now spelled out in a strip near the top of the window, in a font chosen for legibility, in the one part of the interface that never scrolls away.

That strip is also the part of the screen people forget is included in things. A screenshot of a spreadsheet includes it. A meeting share includes it. A photograph of a laptop includes it. Nobody hides the bookmark bar before sharing a window, because in ordinary use there has never been a reason to.

Sync applies exactly as it does elsewhere in this section. Bookmarks were one of the first things browsers learned to copy between devices, and the copying is silent by design. An entry made on a desktop is on the phone before anyone has thought about whether it should be, and a phone gets handed to people.

Then there is the ageing. A bookmark stores one string and goes on pointing at it. It has no way to know whether that string is still among the addresses published for the market, and no way to say so if it is not. This site publishes no availability information of any kind, so the only comparison available is between what a bookmark holds and what is printed on the list of addresses.

The label writes itself

It is a small detail with a large effect. Every other record in this section is a string in a database that nobody looks at. A bookmark is a string with a human readable caption attached, rendered permanently, at readable size, in the top few pixels of the window. It is the only one of these habits that produces something legible from across a room.

Renaming it is the whole of that fix and it takes one right click. A neutral label costs nothing and changes what a passing glance sees. It does not change what the entry points at, which is why the rest of this page still applies afterwards.

A bookmark ages differently here

On the ordinary web an old bookmark is self correcting. Domains persist, redirects usually carry you somewhere sensible, and a search for the name finds the site in a second. None of that machinery exists for an onion address. There is no redirect from an old string to a new one and no way for the address itself to tell you it is out of date.

So a mars market link saved once and never revisited is a copy of one moment, kept indefinitely, with full confidence. That is worth a periodic comparison against the published set rather than a periodic act of faith, and the shape of that comparison is the subject of coming back later.

What to do instead

Not bookmarking is bad advice, because the alternative is retyping and retyping is worse. The adjustments are to the label, the location and the copies.

1. Rename the entry to something flat straight after saving it, since the default label was written by the page and not by you.
2. Keep it in a folder rather than on the bar, so it is two clicks away instead of permanently rendered.
3. Turn off bookmark sync here, and look at what other devices already hold rather than assuming the switch works backwards.
4. Keep a written copy of the address offline, so the bookmark is a convenience and not the only record you have.
5. Before a screen share, hide the bar with the keyboard shortcut, which is faster than remembering to check afterwards.
6. Compare what the bookmark holds against the published set from time to time instead of assuming it is still current.

How to notice you did it anyway

This is the easiest habit on the site to audit, because unlike the rest of them it is sitting in plain sight.

• Read your own bookmark bar as a stranger would, one label at a time, including the ones that have been there so long they are invisible.
• Open the bookmark manager and check the other bookmarks folder, where entries land when nobody chooses a location.
• Look at the bookmark list on your phone and on any second machine signed into the same account.
• Search old screenshots on your disk for the bar, since it appears in captures taken for unrelated reasons.
• Check whether the label is still the one the page supplied, which is usually obvious from its wording.

What readers ask about this habit