Of Bookmarks and Safari

My browser of choice is Safari. It's clean, simple, and quite fast. Firefox, on the other hand is clunky, feature-bloated, and decidedly un-mac-like (even though it tries to fit in). Sure, from a technical standpoint, it's a great browser, but it reeks of that lack of polish that plagues too many open source apps.

I do have one major gripe with Safari, however, and that regards its infernal bookmark management system. Instead of having one central repository for bookmarks that is easily accessible from the bookmarks menu, it divides them into three distinct groups: "Bookmarks Bar", "Bookmarks Menu", and simply "Bookmarks." So, if you want to see a bookmark in the bookmarks menu, it must be moved out of one group and into the other—it can't exist in both. The same rule applies to the bookmarks bar. Instead of functioning like a dock for your favorite links, it requires that a bookmark be moved to its group before it appears there.

This would be like an application disappearing from the Applications folder whenever you moved it to the dock, and appearing in a folder titled "dock items." This may seem like a minor gripe, but it makes bookmark management seem like a chore.

In a future release, I hope Apple does away with these three groups. Any bookmark in any group would automatically appear in the bookmarks menu, and any bookmark or group that was dragged to the bookmarks bar would remain in its original location. These changes would make Safari an even more enjoyable browsing experience than it already is.