Ask HN: Why isn't bookmarking scroll position a thing?
4 by 12907835202 | 4 comments on Hacker News.
A regular problem I have with the web is that I will find an interesting article and start reading only to later see how tiny the scroll bar is on the page and realise I don't have the time to finish in that moment. Now it seems like my only option is to bookmark the entire page and later scroll up and down trying to find my spot. This seems odd considering how ubiquitous the concept of bookmarks has been for centuries. It is common to be able to store locations in modern formats like video and music and be prompted whether to restore location or restart but not older formats like text. Bulletin boards often track the last page you visited but not which comments you've scrolled past. Although this is different to reading a single large body of text. It's made even worse by the fact that most pages load many trackers, some of which even track user scrolling, but that this isn't utilised for the readers experience. In many cases scroll position is saved such as via the back button in a browser. But this isn't made available for bookmarking. Google Chrome does now let you link to a text fragment. But this becomes quite fiddly to use as a bookmarking tool. The "share" option doesn't have an add to or update bookmark option suggesting this isn't its intended purpose. We're just lucky they've accidentally given us a tool we can also use for bookmarking with a couple of extra steps. Even if it would be difficult for browsers to implement due to shifting screen dimensions, it seems some major text heavy websites like medium, Wikipedia or substack could implement it. It seems like it could even be a feature "do you want to finish reading X?" But as far as I can tell nobody ever has. Is anyone on HN implementing something like this on their site? Or tried in the past?