Bookmarks have become a surprisingly complex concept on the internet, primarily because they’re poorly implemented.

In the beginning, with the Mosaic browser in 1993, bookmarks were a way for users to create a list of their favorite links to go back to easily. This was initially called a “hotlist,” gaining the “bookmark” label with 1994’s Netscape Navigator — which also added in folders — and this original style remains the default on browsers.

However, since then, the internet has become far more varied, and bookmarks have expanded to capture the different kinds of information people want to save. For images, mood board style bookmarks are best, through places like Pinterest; and RSS readers like Inoreader are best for saving articles you want to read later; or perhaps you wish to group links per platform, so use the site-specific bookmarking on X, Instagram, the New York Times, and more.

Traditional browser bookmarks can’t sort for this, and that’s where Raindrop comes in. Launched in 2013 and developed extensively for the 12 years since, Raindrop works on every platform and device, syncs your information between them instantly, and has all the features and extras you could use.

You can set reminders, permanently save pages — like a private version of Internet Archive — and upload offline data like photos, videos, and PDFs.

The most important part of it, however, is that it doesn’t expect you to treat features alike. You can choose the layout you prefer per folder; such as a grid with links to films in a “watchlist,” a mood-board layout of potential clothes to buy in a fashion “wishlist,” and then classic bookmarks, opening into a built-in reading mode for your “read later” list. If you use their browser extension, you can also put highlights over lines in articles, which will pop up when you visit that article again.

You can also sort by tags, adding a level of granularity — for example, tagging #twitter for everything saved from that platform — but if you don’t want to do so, Raindrop has a sophisticated internal search to pull out what you’re looking for.  

You can start using it for free, with unlimited bookmarks, but you have to pay a $28 annual subscription for all the features, which is more than worth it. I’ve been paying for it for more than five years, and my only regret is that I don’t use it to save more.