The outcome of my Horse ride was that I switched to Vivaldi as my research browser. I've used it on and off for a long time, and I've tweaked my settings to give me the best approximation of trails. The times I switch away are usually because I hit problems with one or two sites or that I get irritated by some aspect of its default behaviour (and tweaking its settings is always a deep dive).
But given my frequent focus on note-taking, why wasn't its notes feature a stronger draw before?
A question I needed to ponder.
I
think there were a number of factors.
- Vivaldi is a browser with notes; it makes no attempt to incorporate PKM features - which means it can be a starting place for notes but not the final home. And there are many ways of taking notes on websites.
- The organisation it does have is with folders, which don't map on to my preferred system.
- There's no automatic link between the website and note; a link can be put into the note, but that's true for any system.
- Vivaldi notes aren't especially good for annotating a website; my interest is often in making a few comments rather than developing a complete note.
- The one program advantage relies on a screen large enough to accommodate both site and note.
- I hadn't thought of the trails idea for deep, iterative research..
- The advantage of taking the notes in Vivaldi, doesn't really extend beyond that particular methodology; it's perfectly okay for other notes, but no better than many other methods.
- And it's browser dependent, which means there would have been a different workflow depending on which browser I was using at the time.
