Mastering Safari’s bookmarks bar
Written by: Scott Haneda on Thursday February 21st 2008, 1:01 am
Filed under: Applications, OS X 10.5, Safari
All browsers have the ability to bookmark a website. Bookmarks are a simple way have your browser remember a certain website you were on, so you can visit it again later.
Today, we will explore a subset of Safari’s bookmarking feature, the Bookmarks Bar. The bookmarks bar has so much utility to it; I do not know how I managed to get around without it.
Think of the bookmarks bar as an always-visible short list of your most visited places. Rather than digging through a large and unwieldy list of bookmarks, the bookmarks bar affords you quick access to your most frequently visited sites.
Enabling the bookmarks bar
Turning on the bookmarks bar in Safari is relatively simple. Just go to the “View” menu and select “Show Bookmarks Bar”.
Once you have enabled the bookmarks bar, just below the URL bar in Safari, you should see a row of words. Apple has been kind enough to get you started and include bookmarks to some more popular sites. Simply clicking on one of the words will bring you to that website.
I personally do not have much interest in any of the bookmarks that Apple supplies. I suspect you as well will have different sites you visit on a daily basis. The good news is, customizing the bookmarks bar is dead simple.
Customizing the bookmarks bar
Take any of the links in the bookmarks bar that you do not want, click and hold, then drag them off the bar. As you do this, you will see the other bookmarks slide to the left to accommodate the space. Simply release your mouse somewhere away from the bookmarks bar, and in a poof, they will disappear.
Safari will not warn you that this removal is about to happen, so make sure you are removing the bookmark you want to remove. If you accidentally remove one, do not fret, adding it back in is quite simple.
Adding links to your bookmarks bar
There are three ways to add a link to your bookmarks bar. Probably the simplest, is to simply drag any URL out of the URL bar, down to the bookmarks bar, and release the mouse button. As you do this, you will see a small green plus icon to let you know you are adding to the bookmarks bar.
You can add it anywhere you like; Safari will gracefully slide your other bookmarks around to accommodate the new position. As soon as you drop it in place, you are given an opportunity to name it. By default, it will inherit the title of the page. I tend to find this to be a bit long, and make the names of items in my bookmarks bar as short as possible.
The second method for adding an item to your bookmarks bar is via the “Bookmarks” menu. Select “Add Bookmark” or press command-D on your keyboard. Upon making this selection, a window will pop up, give the bookmark a name, and select “Bookmarks Bar” as it’s location.
I find using this method a little less convenient, as I do not have an immediate way to put the bookmark in exactly the location I want. To change the location, you need to go to your bookmark editing area in Safari, which is the third and way to add an item to your bookmarks bar.
Customizing within the bookmark editor
Either select “Show All Bookmarks” from the Bookmarks menu, or click the small icon that looks like an open book. This icon is located to the very left of your bookmarks bar. You will be put into your bookmarks editor, where you can further customize your settings.
Once in the bookmarks editor, you will see a listing of “collections” to the left. For this tutorial, we will only focus on the area labeled “Bookmarks Bar”. By selecting that collection, you should be presented with a list of all items in your bookmarks bar.
It is here that you can click and drag them to a new order, change their title, and also adjust the URL if need be.
Adding a bookmark folder
From within the bookmark editor, you can also enable a nice organizational feature. As you can see in the image above, there are two folders, “News” and “Popular”. Folders can contain more than one URL, which is very nice, as you will quickly run out of room on the main bookmarks toolbar.
To make a new folder, select “Add Bookmark Folder” from the Bookmarks menu. Give the folder a name. Now you can start to group your URL’s into logical categories. Maybe you spend a lot of time in Google groups, Google maps, and Google docs. Creating a folder called “Google” and then adding links into that folder would be one method of organizing these URL’s.
You may have noticed a small checkbox that is labeled “Auto-Click”. This only applies to folders; when selected, you will disable the drop down list of items in your bookmarks bar. Instead, it will be one item, that when clicked on, will open all items in new tabs. I chose to not select this, as you can still manually select “Open in Tabs” from the sub menu of the bookmark bar.
Quick keyboard access to bookmark bar items
Every item in your bookmarks bar is automatically assigned a keyboard shortcut. From left to right, starting at the number one, sequentially up to the total number of items in your list. Bookmark bar folders are ignored.
In the image of the bookmark bar above, pressing command-1 would take you to the Apple bookmark. Command-2 goes to yahoo, command-3 to Google Maps, and so on. If you use Gmail for your email, setting up gmail.com as your first item in the bookmarks menu provides you quick access to Gmail at any time by pressing command-1.
There is a good deal more to cover in regards to bookmarks. I felt this was a good place to start as it has a lot of day to day utility. I find in watching other users that they are quick to add a bookmark, but those bookmarks rarely get used.
Bookmarks tend to become disorganized. Over time, they lose any value as locating a bookmark takes more time than simply searching Google for the site based on what you remember about it.
If you continue to follow along tomorrow, you should be on track for creating bookmarks that are clean, organized, and hold their usefulness over time. Safari has one of my favorite bookmark managers of all browsers, with a little help, navigating and organizing your bookmarks will become second nature.
Now that you have learned this, click, hold, and drag this link: OS X Help, into your bookmarks bar.
I meant to say~I used them in the bookmarks manager but didn’t know I could have them on the bar…you are right, bookmarks get unorganized.
…I osxhelp is already on the bar;) thx
Comment by JimB 02.21.08 @ 3:53 pm@JimB
Yes, bookmarks are near useless, as they get in a state of mess, and totally lose their value. About all I can do in a future post is suggest methods of organization and hope people follow them.
Safari having the ability to search bookmarks does indeed help though. In a day or so, I will show a few organizational tactics to get people in the habit of keeping bookmarks organized.
P.S. Jim, any chance you can pop in a real valid email address when you post a comment? They are not shown on the website, and not even stored anywhere, but I do get a copy of your comment via email, and when I try to reply to you, it bounces back as invalid.
Comment by Scott Haneda 02.21.08 @ 3:58 pm@Scott,
email address fixed/I crossed my two different emails; tough gettin’ old 
Great website and information for the new Mac user! I was wondering what the process is to increase the font size in the bookmarks area of Safari. I understand how to increase the font size for web pages, but the default font size for the listing of saved bookmarks in Safari is pretty small. Thanks!
Comment by JohnH 02.22.08 @ 8:30 pmi cannot find a way to add a folder in the fly, what i meant by that, if i’m about to add a new bookmark and found out that there is no appropriate folder for this new bookmark, i have to cancel the addition and creat the new folder first and then add the new bookmark. This should be a basic of a pattern to add something into a container: if i don’t have the container, then let me create that one.
Comment by wahy 02.25.08 @ 12:41 pm@JohnH, Font sizes on OS X is something that troubles me as well. As it is now, unless the application developer makes efforts to allow font size changes, you are more or less stuck.
Office allows you to increase the “view percentage”, Photoshop allows you to alter some of the menu font sizes.
I find it hard to read the text on tabs at times, since 10.5 at least, the drop shadow is a bit blurry for me.
There are smatterings of data on how Apple is working on something called resolution independence. The Developer Tools package even comes with an application to test it out. When that sees common use, you will be able to adjust the display of all items in OS X. In the mean time, it is something you have to live with.
Comment by Scott Haneda 02.25.08 @ 4:31 pm@wahy, Next Safari post will talk about this deficiency, and how to best deal with it. It is not perfect, but we will do our best to teach you some ways to make the process a bit cleaner.
Check back in a few days and see how we do.
Comment by Scott Haneda 02.25.08 @ 5:43 pmThe president of our user group sent your website to all the members. I really appreciate all your help! We all need to go over the basics and then some. Always learning something new or to refresh our memory!
Thanks again for all the time you put into this!
Eleanor
Comment by Eleanor 02.26.08 @ 11:49 amStill a virgin at this computer game,find I am having to re-read every thing, over and over, not your fault it’s my age.
I keep dragging a book mark off the bar, it sometimes comes and sometimes it will not move.When it does come off the bar it appears on the desk top in a different form, but the original has remained on the bar, but I now have something on the desktop as well; that i am dragging into the trash to get rid of.I’m trying to remove a bookmark but can’t seem to do it?
@mike, you seem to be dragging to the wrong area. Dragging near anything out of Safari, to the Desktop, will make a “link” or “shortcut” to it. Drag an image, and it will make a copy of that image.
You need to be just a bit more accurate with the bookmarks bar. Drag it right into the page in Safari, and it should “poof” away.
This of course only applies to those items in the bookmarks bar, not those in your bookmarks manager, those you just delete with the delete key on your keyboard.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.10.08 @ 9:13 amHi there!
I just accidentally deleted my “News” folder on the bookmarks bar! You know the one that’s already provided with Safari with all the RSS stuff in it?
I right clicked on it and pressed delete, thinking it would delete the (382) RSS links, but it deleted the whole folder itself. Shame on my newbie ways!
Please help me get it back!
Comment by Shella 04.04.08 @ 4:46 am@Shella, ouch, so you deleted the news bookmark bar item. You can get it back a few ways, once would be to totally reset Safari, which means digging into some prefs files and deleting them, less than ideal.
Another is to create a new account, login to that account, and Safari will have the “news” items there, you can go into your bookmark manager, and copy them out, and move them into your other account.
For the above, if you look our our post on how to alphabetize your bookmarks, that will tell you in indirectan way, what you need to move out of the new account into the main account:
http://osxhelp.com/mastering-safari-learning-now-to-manage-and-tame-your-bookmarks/
Probably the simplest way, would be to download this archive I made for you, and unzip it, then just drag it to your bookmarks bar.
Comment by Scott Haneda 04.05.08 @ 5:36 pm
What annoys me is that I can’t drag individual bookmarks within bookmark bar folders. anyone know a hack?
Comment by kerry 04.08.08 @ 9:10 pm@Jeff M, at this time, OS X does not allow enlarging of UI elements. In the future, something called resolution independence will help with this.
Even with that, I doubt you will be able to enlarge one specific portion of an application.
Comment by Scott Haneda 05.14.08 @ 2:59 pm@kenzie, see the comment above to mike, that should explain it.
Comment by Scott Haneda 05.15.08 @ 6:06 pm
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