Get the Most From Safari With the Favorites Bar

The Favorites Bar allows you to have links easily accessible right at the top of your Safari window. You can also add folders to pack in even more links. The links and folders have special features if you use the context menus or modifier keys.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to get the most from Safari on your Mac by using the Favorites Bar.
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The Favorites Bar is one of the best parts of Safari yet a lot of people don't even use it. Let me show you some of the ways it can make you more productive when browsing using Safari. So to show the Favorites Bar you can go to View and Show Favorites Bar. The keyboard shortcut is Shift Command B. So if want to quickly bring it up and Hide it again it's important to learn that shortcut. When you bring up the Favorites Bar you get a list of links here at the top. Now these links are actually in your Bookmarks. If you look under Bookmarks you'll see Favorites. The list of favorites here is the same as the list of favorites you see in the Favorites Bar. So the idea is to put your most important websites in the Favorites folder in your Bookmarks. That way they will appear in Bookmarks but also here in the Favorites Bar and other places as well. 
Using it is pretty simple. If you want to go to a website just click the link there and it will load up that webpage in your current browser tab. Adding a page to the Favorites Bar is easy to do as well. When you're at a page you want to add you can drag it from the address field here right into the Favorites Bar. Then it immediately takes you into the Editing mode where you can edit the name. So you want to shorten the name in most cases. You could also just  use Bookmarks, Add Bookmark or the keyboard shortcut Command D. Then when you're adding make sure you set it to add to your Favorites folder in Bookmarks. 
Now you can edit your favorites by going to into Bookmarks and then Edit Bookmarks. This allows you to edit all of your bookmarks including the Favorites folder. So you can click the Reveal arrow here, open it up, and you can see all of your Bookmarks. You can select one. You can hit the Delete key to delete it. You can click to select and then click again to edit the name. Click here to edit the address. You can rearrange these bookmarks by clicking and dragging. So you can do the same thing right in the Bookmarks Bar. You can click and drag down and when you go far enough down and release it will delete it. You can also click and hold and you could rename it. You could rearrange them in the Bookmarks Bar by clicking and dragging left or right. 
Now you could also Control click, or two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a Mouse and you get options here. For instance there's Rename and there's Edit Address. So you can edit the address right here in the Bookmarks Bar. You can also Copy the address or Delete it using the Context Menu. Instead of opening this link in the current tab you can open it in a new tab or open it in a new window. 
Now a very powerful part of the Bookmarks Bar is the fact that you can have folders in it as well. Here we can see I've got a News Folder and a Popular Folder. These are part of the Default Set. So if you click here you could see you get a drop-down menu with several bookmarks in it. So instead of taking up space for each one of these things in the Bookmarks Bar, it's just one little folder and then you choose which link you want to go to. If you go to Edit Bookmarks you could see these folders in here and you could work with them here to move items in or out of them or rearrange the items in them. 
Creating a new folder can be done by selecting Favorites here and then go to Bookmarks, Add Bookmark Folder. Or Control click and New Folder. You can also select a folder and do New Folder and it will create a subfolder inside it. So I can create say a local news folder inside of my News Folder. Now when I click here you could see I've got a subfolder and I can create several levels of bookmarks easily accessible through the Favorites Bar. Also note that when you have folder your can click it and then choose Open In New Tabs. This will open all of the bookmarks inside this folder in separate tabs. Here's a really cool feature. You can Control click and then turn on Automatically Replace Tabs. With that on you get a little square next to the name here. What happens when you click that is it replaces all the tabs you currently have open in this window with tabs for each website in here. So, for instance, say I have these three tabs open here. If now I click this these three tabs will be completely replaced by all the sites that are in this folder. I can turn this off but unchecking it. 
You also have the ability, when you Control click, to Sort By. You can sort all of the items in this folder by name, or address.  
Now you can do a ton of different things with Modifier Keys. How the modifier keys work with these links and folders in the Favorites Bar depends on your settings in Safari Preferences and then Tabs. So here I have it set to Command Click opens a link in a new tab. So normally if I were to click here it would open up this link in the current tab. But if instead I Command Click you can see, just like my setting there, it opens it up in a new tab. If I Shift Command Click it opens up in a new tab and brings that tab to the front. Now if you hold the Shift key down what will happens is it opens up the link in a new window. So Shift Click and you could see I've got a new window here now with that link. Now in addition to Shift clicking opening up a new window it will also obey the rule that's here, in this case Command Option Click opens up in a new window too or Command Option Shift Click opens it up in a new window and brings the new window to the front. So Command Option Click will open this in a new window. You won't see it but now there is a second window behind this first one with that link. If I Shift Command Option and then click it will do the same thing but now that's the front window.  
Option does something very different. It will download the webpage. So by Option Click you could see it quickly downloaded that page and you could see here it's listed in downloads. It will only make sense if there's something in there to download. But let's say you've got a report for work that's a PDF and it's always at the same link. You could add it to your Favorites Bar and then Option Click it and it will automatically download the current version of that file to your Downloads Folder. 
Now if you don't want to set a folder here to always replace all the tabs you could leave it as a normal folder where you can select each individual item. But then Option Click the folder and it will replace all the tabs. Interestingly when you do this if you use the Back button it goes back in all of the tabs. So you go back to where you were. You can also use Command Click on a folder and it will Add all of those webpages to the Tabs while keeping the ones you currently have opened. 
Here's on last tip I want to show you. People often say they want to have the little Icon for the website here in the Favorites Bar. Well, there's no way to bring that up. But you can add emoji. So, for instance, see this News Folder here. I'm going to Control Click on it and Rename it. I'm going to put a little newspaper emoji just before news. So Control Command Space brings up the Emoji and Special Character Viewer. I'll search for news and there are a couple of newspaper icons to choose from. I'll select this one. Put a space there and now I have a little newspaper icon. Maybe for this link to the Apple website I'll Rename that one and add a little apple to it right there. So you can really add some color to your Bookmarks Bar or perhaps you could just use the emojis  if you want. So, for instance, you could take away the text there completely and just have a little emoji for this folder or just an apple for a link to the Apple site. 
So as you can see there's a lot of functionality in the Favorites Bar in Safari. I often tell people who keep a lot of tabs open to use the Bookmarks Bar instead. Put all of your most important sites there and it's easy to be able to click it to open it up in a new tab or replace the current tab with the link that's there. You don't need to keep that website open in a tab because it's so easy to get back to it if you have it in your Favorites Bar. By using folders instead of being limited to maybe a dozen links in the Favorites Bar you could have hundreds inside of folders and subfolders organized and arranged in a way that works best for you.

Comments: 7 Responses to “Get the Most From Safari With the Favorites Bar”

Bob R

3 years ago

Excellent, Gary! I make extensive use of Favorites all day every day. And I also make use of Bookmarks, mainly to remember websites. But there's even more than I knew. You showed me a LOT of things about Favorites that I did not know. Keep up the fine work!

Matthew Brooks

This 'replace tabs' tip is a godsend - a thousand thanks Gary.
It's time I began experimenting with option/click, as there seems to be a wealth of goodies hiding behind that combo.

Dan C.

Great video. However, when I try to add Emoji by using control, command, space, all of my open windows just spread out on the desk top. This key short cut does not work for me. I am running BigSur and up to date. Any idea why control, command, space does not get me to the viewer.

Gary Rosenzweig

Dan: It sounds like at some point you re-assigned this key to something else, perhaps something in System Preferences, Keyboard, Shortcuts, Mission Control. Check there and reset that shortcut to get the default functionality for Control+Command+Space back. It is also possible you installed some other windows manager or something that took over that shortcut, though I don't imagine they would use this combo as it would create problems for a lot of people.

James Anthony Theiler

Maybe a good follow-up video might be how to configure your browser, like trying to remember your browser. It never seems to work for me.

Jim Thompson

I replaced bookmark names with emoji but they also showed up on my wife's iPad, which she doesn't want. How do I keep that from happening? Thanks!

Jim: It sounds like you are both using the same Apple ID/iCloud Account. Therefore, the system is treating you like you are the same person. You should both have different Apple IDs and be logged into those different accounts on your devices.

Comments Closed.

Get the Most From Safari With the Favorites Bar

Comments: 7 Responses to “Get the Most From Safari With the Favorites Bar”

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