People have migrated away from bookmarks (in fact I'd argue that non-technical users never embraced them fully in the first place) because there is no longer any trust in that the URL you used yesterday will still be there today. Link rot is now so prevalent that even the concept of a URL as a destination is starting to become less and less important. Look at Google and it's on-going attempt to de-scope the URL bar in Chrome.
I have a personal Web based Bookmarks app, that I have self hosted for years, but even now I hardly revisit it unless I'm really stuck and a Google search can't find the site/page I need. It's got 1,000s of bookmarks in it, and I dread to think how many no longer work.
That experiment was halted because it didn't move the security metrics as much as they wanted. It is therefore very obvious that the conspiracy surrounding the motivation was ridiculous.
Perhaps, but it's one of the safest bets to make that huge multinationals with billions of private interests do things for profit, rather than for "the customers", "to change the world", and so on.
It takes a special kind of naivety to believe something like Google's early "Don't be evil" slogan.
Actions can have multiple independent influences. For example, aggressively doing searches around the URL bar is decent UI and provides valuable data for search engines. It’s such a central part of the interface that a lot of innovation and experimentation occurs around the search bar.
I used to save a whole web page as HTML when I got started experiencing the early web because the page might be gone next week I had experience and afraid to lose the reference. Now a days I just use bookmarks because there's less chance the page will be gone in a few weeks. Hosting was expensive in the old days and now it's so cheap sites don't suddenly disappear anymore.
I used to have a lot of bookmarks and I used them a lot to return to stuff, but after half a decade a significant amount of them went no where. So I migrated to using note apps + web clipping or screenshots.
I have a personal Web based Bookmarks app, that I have self hosted for years, but even now I hardly revisit it unless I'm really stuck and a Google search can't find the site/page I need. It's got 1,000s of bookmarks in it, and I dread to think how many no longer work.