+twellington who has been doing bookmark work.

I'm all for a better ordering for the bookmarks page but I'm less familiar with how we arrived at today's logic.

Ian and Kibeom implemented most of the bookmarks code and are unfortunately no longer at the company. After reviewing the code and quickly looking at my personal bookmarks, it appears that Android uses the same ordering as desktop. We sort top level folders, but the rest of the bookmarks are displayed in whatever order the backend returns them in. Any change in ordering would (and should) affect all platforms.

It also appears that both Android and desktop add bookmarks the same way (by inserting at the end of the folder's list of children):

https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/bookmarks/browser/bookmark_utils.cc?type=cs&q=bookmark_model.h+addurl&l=518

https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/bookmarks/BookmarkUtils.java?type=cs&q=addbookmark+file:%5Esrc/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/bookmarks/+package:%5Echromium$&l=73

Some more history/background: in the current mobile bookmark manager, we used to have a special "All bookmarks" view, which provided a reverse-chronological sort of all of your bookmarks across all folders. This was the default view shown to users (you had to manually switch to another folder if you wanted to see your regularly-sorted bookmarks; your selection was sticky across impressions of the bookmark manager).

This "All bookmarks" view received heavy negative feedback, both through the in-product feedback tool and the app store reviews for Bling/Clank. People didn't like the reverse chronological ordering, and were confused about how to get back to their regularly sorted bookmarks/folders.

So we decided to remove the "All bookmarks" view based on this user feedback (see Issue 604851). We monitored bookmarks-related metrics, and the effect was basically neutral (slightly fewer bookmarks were opened on a per-user basis, but there were slightly more bookmarks opened per bookmark manager impression).

+Mardini and Pinkerton who experienced a lot of the negative blowback first-hand for iOS.

As Theresa said, the default ordering logic is the same across all platforms: new bookmarks are added to the end of whichever folder they are added to. So if you are just adding new bookmarks and never changing the ordering, you'll likely see things in a chronological order.

Yeah, users were really mad when we changed it away from the natural ordering they were used to (that matches desktop). In fact, on iOS, you could reorder bookmarks like you can on desktop. When we introduced the new bookmark manager, we removed that to align with android, which made iOS users even more angry.

We're in the process of putting the reordering functionality back on iOS. 

We also had reordering on bookmarks semi-implemented on Android at one point, but I don't know if we ever landed it.

I've tried to push for a "Move to top" option in the overflow menu for bookmarks to add a trivial reordering option, but we never made any traction on that.

Circling back - sounds like iOS is moving in the direction of providing reordering. Should we pick this back up for Android as well?

Is there any info on what changes are happening in iOS?

Tracking bug for iOS: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=695749

We are working with amyroberts@ (UX) to come up with an optimal solution for re-ordering on iOS.

Ah OK. That bug seems to be just related to intermingling folders in bookmark items vs. the ability to re-order.

+hannahs who has been working on list unification. I'd be open to something simple like Move to top for bookmarks especially with Chrome Home vs. a more complex re-ordering solution. We can also intermingle folders in bookmark items if we feel that would be better/more consistent.

This seems like it makes sense to me. (I believe a majority of our users don't have a multi-scroll list of bookmarks). +cleer wdyt?

Can you define "multi-scroll list"? Do you mean a long list take takes multiple scroll gestures?

We should answer this based on metrics.

+Kingston
Yes, totally agree. Apologies for the vague terminology - I vaguely remember hearing that most users don't have a lot of bookmarks but cc'ing Kingston who would know for sure.

Looking at Sync.ModelTypeCount.BOOKMARK, it seems like 25% of users (and this is of all Chrome on Android users) have more than 7 bookmarks. I'd say that is pretty high.

We'll think about implementing reordering or sorting, but I don't think this is a high priority. Prior work showed that switching the order for everyone wasn't a good direction.

Yes, though a simple "move to top" option seems like a good initial step to making bookmarks more usable?

Hannah, did you mean to close this?

My mistake! Accidental batch update. Thanks for the catch!