4 Tricks for Using Bookmarks Folders in Safari

If you’re using Safari’s Favorites Bar (which can be revealed by choosing View > Show Favorites Bar from the program’s menus at the top), there are a few neat things you can do with folders full of bookmarks. In my screenshot below, everything except the “TMO” bookmark all the way to the left is a folder; you can tell because of those tiny downward-caret-arrow things to the right of each one.

And yes, by the way, “tiny downward-caret-arrow things” is the technical term.

Anyway, if you’ve got folders set up for your bookmarks the way I do, then you should know that you can do a couple of cool things with them. First, if you click on one, you’ll note the “Open in New Tabs” option.

Choose that, and obviously the bookmarks within that folder will open in their own tabs, which is a fast way to launch a whole bunch of sites at once. If, however, you hold down Option before you click there, “Open in New Tabs” will switch to “Replace Tabs.” This’ll mean that any tabs you had in your existing Safari window will vanish and be replaced by the ones in the folder you chose. Neat! And for an even faster way to do either of those things, use the Command key or the Option key. If you hold down Command and click on any toolbar bookmarks folder, it’ll open the sites within in new tabs; hold down Option and click one, and Safari will replace your existing tabs like we just discussed.

You can set your folders to automatically replace existing ones with just a click, too. To configure that, right- or Control-click on the folder and pick “Automatically Replace Tabs” from the contextual menu.

That’ll add a little square next to the folder in your toolbar…

…which’ll mean that a single click will replace all of your existing tabs with the ones in that folder. (But, you know, be careful about doing that accidentally. If that happens, there are ways to recover your lost tabs.)

Finally, know too that some of this functionality is available from the bookmarks sidebar if you prefer that view. For example, you can right- or Control-click on folders from there to pick “Open in New Tabs.”

Holding down the Option key will switch that to “Replace Tabs,” as it does in the toolbar. This is awesome, all right, but my favorite thing from this tip is holding down Command or Option and just clicking on folders in my Favorites Bar. But then sometimes I get them switched up in my head and replace my existing tabs rather than opening new ones. I’m a doofus like that.