When the first browsers arrived - if you remember Netscape - we got bookmarks.
Then came Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and the web grew into something none of us could have imagined.
Soon Google entered the picture, and even today it still feels a little like magic. You search for something, and most of the time, what you're looking for is right there in the first few results.
And along with this gift of technology came bookmarks - or Favorites, as Internet Explorer called them.
Saving something felt almost like winning a prize.
I found this thing. Now it's mine. I'll always be able to find it again.
Except that, over time, we discovered something wasn't working.
We forgot what we had saved. And even when we remembered, finding one thing inside a growing pile of bookmarks became too difficult and too time-consuming.
Eventually, many of us discovered that it was simply faster to search Google again.
And that became the answer:
I'll just Google it again.
But does that actually make sense?
You already searched for something. You already found it. Maybe you spent ten minutes, half an hour, or even longer finding exactly the right thing.
And now, when you need it again, you're expected to repeat the whole search?
Does that make sense in 2026?
Should we really have to perform another Google search - or even start a conversation with an AI - just to retrieve a piece of information we've already spent time finding?
I don't think so.
Over time, many of us simply gave up.
We stopped saving links for the long term.
Instead, we started dragging things into the bookmarks bar and telling ourselves: if I need this soon, it'll be here.
And that's basically what the bookmarks bar became - a place for short-term links.
Something I need today.
Something I'll probably need tomorrow.
Maybe something I'll need next week.
But long-term links? Things we might need months or years from now?
Those largely disappeared from our system.
Not because they aren't useful.