You often advise that many bookmarks may be unnecessary, and I agree. However, I am a retired college professor, and have about 150 folders most of which contain links to valuable sources for research.
Now that I am retired, and no longer feel pressure to publish, I wonder about keeping all or most of these resource folders. Looking over them, I realize that many are outdated, while others are no longer relevant.
If keep them, how will that affect the performance of Safari? Thanks in advance for your response.
My primary concern is that keeping all these Safari bookmark folders negatively affects the performance of the browser.
—–
Leo Parascondola
It shouldn't affect the performance of Safari much, if it all. I've never heard of a lot of bookmarks affecting Safari performance. I suppose it is possible that when you type a URL or search, and it looks to see if you have bookmarks that match the search, that it could take longer if you have more bookmarks. But I don't know if that would be noticeable. You're in a better position to judge that than me since I don't have that many bookmarks.
On the other hand, having a lot of bookmarks may affect your ability to use bookmarks effectively as if there are so many of them, then finding something or organizing them may be difficult. But I'm guessing you have that under control.
One thing you can do is to simply export them. Choose File, Export, Bookmarks. This gives you an HTML file with all of your bookmarks. You can open this file at any time in Safari or another browser and click on any bookmark. This could be a good option for you if you just don't want these bookmarks anymore, but also want to have an archive of them you can access if you need it.
Before you decide whether this is a good option for you, just try the export. Save this bookmarks file to your Documents folder or somewhere similar. Then open it and see what it is like to use it. Exporting doesn't affect the bookmarks so there is no harm in trying that. It can even be handy as a backup "snapshot" of your bookmarks as they are right now, even if you don't decide to clean house.