HOW TO...Manage your bookmarks better with Raindrop
By Nik Rawlinson
What you need: Raindrop account Time required: 30 minutes
Browser bookmarks have been around for more than 30 years. The world’s first browser was called WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus). It was built by Tim Berners-Lee, who also came up with the concept of the web that we use today, and released for free in 1990 for anyone to download and use. You can see a screenshot of it at www.snipca.com/56457.
It didn’t have bookmarks as we know them, but did store a system of home pages, which the user edited within the browser itself and to which they could add links they needed to remember. You could create several such home pages, in the same way you might create multiple folders to organise the bookmarks you save to your browser.
The first iterations of WorldWideWeb couldn’t display text and images side by side (images opened in a separate window). However, NCSA Mosaic, which appeared in 1993, overcame this, and it became one of the most popular browsers of the early internet.
It also had a feature called hotlists, which is closer to what we’d recognise as today’s bookmarks. The following year, Netscape Navigator introduced a similar feature, called ‘bookmarks’. Most of us still use that term today.
But those early bookmarks always had one shortcoming: they were stored on your computer. So, if you were away from home or simply using a different computer on the same network, they were out of reach.
That changed in 2009, when Google Chrome introduced bookmark synchronisation, letting you access bookmarks across multiple versions of Chrome as long as you were signed into the same account. This even worked across platforms, so bookmarks saved to Chrome on a PC would be accessible to the same user, logged into the same account, using Chrome on their Apple or Android device.