Hey,
Can we get a good discussion going on about this maybe? So far there’s been:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225916 - 2 year old bug with the main part of the discussion on this, though apparently “not the place” for discussion of what to actually do or not to do and why etc.
WebExtensions - Bookmarks Annotations - 0 replies on this post from 2016, a bit sad.
Here’s my few cents:
The Firefox Add-ons Ecosystem
The main argument against doing anything on this seems to be that only a “tiny” amount of users are using this feature. However, a simple search will show many add-ons with many hundreds of thousands of users most likely using this feature: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search/?q=bookmarks+tags&sort=users (some of these are proprietary so it is not entirely clear, but if you look at their features and see things like “smart organisation” that are Firefox only then it is pretty obvious).
This is from an open-source developer who has worked on many add-ons, some of which also take advantage of bookmarks tags I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), whose add-ons also total in the hundreds of thousands of users: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama
Hopefully this gives some insight into “the masses” - these are add-on consumers, not developers. These users are never going to post on the Bugzilla or on this Discourse. I am only here posting because I’ve been looking at developing an extension which would use this feature. In fact, this feature is what brought me back to Firefox recently; prior to this need I was using Chromium; upon realising that Firefox supported tags for bookmarks, I promptly imported my bookmarks into it, tagged them all and began using it again (only to then realise that I can’t access these through the WebExtensions API, d’oh).
Continued below (limit on number of links I can post as a new user)