However, to get them as Chrome has done can’t be done natively. I would be willing to bet there is a Safar extension that allows for the change in behavior. There’s thousands of them now that dons wide range of cosmetic alterations to Safari.

I have found that with font characters and single letters I can get quite a few bookmarks in my bookmarks bar and I memorize them pretty quick. The first 5 I don’t even worry about since those can be activated by the command -1-5 keyboard sequence.

Many of the rest I end up not going to as often as I thought so I get rid of them, or put more than one bookmark in the item to make a category I can open many at once.

Try searching for a Safari extension to modify Safari’s native behavior. Aside from that, you may have to resort to some of the trickery I have to get closer.

If much has changed since your last backup, I would save a copy of the current ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist file, restore the old one, drag the target restore folder you want to your desktop temporarily, and then return back to your pre-backup ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist file. Then, import the temporary backup you made on your Desktop.

This should get you back to where you were before this happened, keeping things the same as they are right now, with the addition of the old files bookmarks being returned,

Specifically, you will be looking for /Users/your-useranme/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

Make sure that Safari is quit before moving the file. The next time you open Safari, a new “Bookmarks.plist” file will be made, and Safari will have the default set of bookmarks it did on the first day you used it.

However, any bookmarks that you created on your own, will now be lost, and held within the “Bookmarks.plist” that you moved out of the way.

If you want to get your old bookmarks back, I would perform a two step process.

Now that you are using Safari and it has your News and Popular bookmarks back, open your Bookmark sidebar, and drag and drop the bookmarks to a folder on your desktop. You should now have a folder that contains .webloc files of each of the links that were originally in Safari.

Quit Safari, put back the original “Bookmarks.plist” file that you moved out of the way. You will either replace the one currently there, or you will delete that file and move your backup in place.

Next, launch Safari, which will bring you back to your old bookmark set that is missing the news and popular items you want. Create bookmark bar folders to represent those, and drag and drop in the .webloc files that we saved out to your desktop. Alternatively, you could open the .webloc files and make new bookmarks, saving them where you want to mimic the Apple original setup.

It’s a bit of a process, but is the only way I know to merge your current bookmark set with the default set that came with Safari. Make sure to backup “Bookmarks.plist” somewhere safe, as this can get a bit confusing. If things do go wrong, you run the risk of losing all your bookmarks. As long as you have a backup of “Bookmarks.plist” you will be safe.

Thanks for the additional info – appreciate your help!

Apple has started putting out guidelines for developers on resolution independence. However, I would not expect it until 10.7, but more than likely, 10.8.

One thing you can do, is that every item in your bookmarks bar is automatically assigned a keyboard command. So the first item is command-1, second is command-2 and so on up to command-9. Of course, these can’t be folders, or if they are, you will have to set the “auto click” checkbox in the bookmark manager. This will open all items in the folder at once, by keyboard command as well.

So if you can’t read the text, if you can remember the items, you can get to them via the keyboard.

Sorry there are no better answers.