I don't see a big difference with having them in a HTML page, vs. the side bar. You get a full list of your bookmarks with icons in a vertical-sorted way, including search. What difference does it make?
It makes a big difference to me. I use what you say sparingly for organizing, but once it's sorted, there are several shortcomings: limited horizontal space, the fixed presentation (it would be nice to add notes or images, change sizes, etc.) and in general the fact that it's an internal format that I can't manipulate.
To summarize: I don't want just a way to launch the bookmarked pages, but to create a page based on a list of bookmarks that can contain more than the bookmarks themselves.
A related feature (related for me anyway) is backing up pages. I use the extension SingleFile, but I would love to have a system integrating bookmarking, authoring and local backup.
I guess you'd understand me better knowing my workflow when I'm collecting information for some new topic: searches, visiting a dozen of pages, following links, selecting what's useful... the bits of information are spread across pages. I need to keep the links for reference (better with both the bookmark and a local backup), but often it's much more convenient to make a page with text snippets, maybe including images.
Okay I get your usecase, but adding images and notes to bookmarks seems to be a very rare/custom/fringe feature request (not even Opera had this), so I wouldn't see firefox or chrome here neglecting their users. Sounds like something for an external tool or extension.
