Bookmarking services have their uses, as do specific bookmarking/favoriting features on specific sites, but you can also save a link to any page as a bookmark locally in your browser.
There are a few ways to then draw upon that pool of bookmarks:
- There's typically a bookmarks page or window where you can organize your bookmarks into folders, for when one long list gets too unmanageable and begins to warrant categorization.
- Most browsers have a Bookmarks or Favorites menu in the menu bar. This lists everything you have bookmarked. Folders will appear as items with submenus.
- There's often an option to show a bookmarks bar underneath the address bar/omnibar, providing easy access to your first dozen or so bookmarks. (Emoji have made this feature potentially much more useful as you can pack a lot more items into the bar with shorter, iconographic titles.) Similarly to the bookmarks menu, folders show up as items with pop-up menus. The bookmarks menu might draw on a specific folder within your bookmarks, so you can assign things to the bar specifically.
- Most browsers today have some sort of dynamically-populated home page for new tabs, like Safari's “top sites”, that includes a section for bookmarks.
- Typing into the address bar/omnibar will generally autocomplete items from your bookmarks. You might already use this feature for sites in history, but if you've ever had a page fall out of history because you hadn't been to it in too long, you know the fragility of that. If you bookmark it, it will never fall out unless you remove it specifically.
Address-bar search in particular can greatly accelerate your ability to recall sites you use intermittently or occasionally. People sometimes marvel at how fast I'm able to pull something up during a conversation, and address-bar search is usually how. If I've been there before, or I have it bookmarked, and as long as I can remember part of its title. it'll come right up in seconds.
Note that some browsers have an option to save bookmarks to the cloud and share them across machines logged into the same account. Safari has this with iCloud, and Chrome has something similar if you log it into your Google Account. This can be useful, but it's something you may want to beware of if you're concerned about your bookmarks being snooped or leaked.