I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten

[Dormouse]

I've just come across a browser designed for research, that solves my biggest problems in some areas and will be using it forthwith.

It's relatively new, still immature, has limited features and some points of friction; and isn't cheap ($60 a year atm). No tabs. What it does have is "trails" showing all the websites and notes made in lines of research; these can be exported to markdown (and later reimported if wanted). The searched sites can be opened from the links in notes programs that understand markdown.

It's particularly useful for recording unsuccessful searches since they tend to be left out during normal note-taking and it's easy to find yourself going in circles over ground you have covered before (you=me). This browser solves that problem. It doesn't have many other features, but those it does have are very useful (dark reader, ad blocking, focus mode); it's very comfortable to work in.

I'd say that it's particularly suitable for research where you try multiple searches trying to answer one question (such as genealogy/shopping research etc) but mightn't be particularly advantageous if you are doing wide searches for many different things. It's also more effective if you are already using a notes program that understands markdown links.

https://gethorse.com/

 https://www.youtube..../watch?v=7gvxrieLvII

I've written A review of my experience with Horse. Suffice it to say, that it didn't go according to plan.

[Dormouse]

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.