Different Bookmarks for Different Safari Profiles

[rayward]

Is it possible to have a different sets of bookmarks in different Safari profiles?

Even though you can designate a specific set of "Favorites" for each profile, they all come from the same bookmarks list.

 

[chrfr]

Is it possible to have a different sets of bookmarks in different Safari profiles?

Even though you can designate a specific set of "Favorites" for each profile, they all come from the same bookmarks list.

This is the biggest obstacle to being able to use Safari profiles for me. As far as I can tell, there's no way to separate profiles completely.

 

[MacGizmo]

Huh. And here I thought I clearly just didn't understand the Profiles and how to use them. This basically makes Safari's Profiles feature useless (for me anyway).

 

[Slartibart]

Of course you can individual favourites per profile. You just have to setup/select a favourites folder for each profile.

 

[smithrh]

Favorites/bookmarks per profile are not - as far as I can tell - propagated to your other devices.

They seem to be local changes only.

I'm still testing but if this is the case, it's a major drawback if not a showstopper.

Apple: the whole configuration per profile needs to be propagated!

Edited to add - specifically referring to Favorites. Should be able to have Favorites separated out by profile. My work, school and personal profiles will have (surprise!) different Favorites that I should be able to directly go to by clicking on them in the window.

 

[chrfr]

Of course you can individual favourites per profile. You just have to setup/select a favourites folder for each profile.

But the favorites/bookmarks are just a subfolder in the overall lists of favorites, so they're accessible to every profile, in contrast to how profiles work in other browsers.

 

[smithrh]

One note: part of the issue I'm having is a weird bookmark syncing issue where changes made on one device are not propagated, but changes on other devices are.

Weird. Should be fun to troubleshoot...

Back to profiles, the way I would have thought this would have worked would be to have completely separate bookmarks and favorites per each profile, not just a subfolder, as chrfr states above. This feels like Apple went a bit light on the changes to keep iCloud bookmark syncing the same as before.

Another note: clearly the profiles update between all devices (and I have a lot), but the bookmarks are problematic. So they created a new syncing mechanism for profiles but not bookmarks.

Hey Apple, how about throwing up a warning if something isn't syncing, would you?

 

[smithrh]

After literally hours of troubleshooting, resets, reboots, quits, turning iCloud off and back on again...

Finally have Safari bookmarks syncing again. Now I can take a look at profiles.

This is a bit beyond the pale for a "it just works" company.

 

[MacGizmo]

Of course you can individual favourites per profile. You just have to setup/select a favourites folder for each profile.

Thank you! All manner of messing around and I never uncovered that. So now I just have to figure out how to make a Tab Group open when a new Safari window opens on a per profile basis. Got any insight on that?

 

[Slartibart]

Thank you! All manner of messing around and I never uncovered that. So now I just have to figure out how to make a Tab Group open when a new Safari window opens on a per profile basis. Got any insight on that?

Mmh, iPadOS 17 offers a command “Open Tab Group” in Safari, I am away from my Mac and can’t check, but my guess would be that it's there in Sonoma too (?). Maybe Apple extended even the Applescript commands to do this (without GUI scripting) in Sonoma? Anyway I would start from there.

 

[smithrh]

After literally hours of troubleshooting, resets, reboots, quits, turning iCloud off and back on again...

Finally have Safari bookmarks syncing again. Now I can take a look at profiles.

This is a bit beyond the pale for a "it just works" company.

I take this back... now I have a ton of mis-filed bookmarks that somehow got appended to the end of all of my favorites.

Great.

However, I can see how to make this work with profiles, I put together one for work and it works as expected, I only see work favorites.

Going forward, I'll try out making profiles for YouTube content types and see if that makes their recommendations work any better or not. I have 5-6 main things I watch YouTube for, and feeding the algorithm cleaner/clearer data may be helpful.

Overall, I'd still rather have favorites & bookmarks per profile but perhaps down the road - although I suspect profiles will never get truly widespread use and therefore they won't put in the work needed to do that.

Also, I hear of battery life/overheating when using profiles on iPhone, anyone else experience this?

 

[smithrh]

OK, after getting my bookmarks fixed and syncing correctly (an issue in its own right), I really like how this works. It's not perfect and hopefully it will get some tweaks going forward, but it's pretty good stuff.

You may find that you'll want to re-organize your bookmarks into folders differently; doing so helps a lot with this feature.

That is, I used to have somewhat related Favorite folders, but they really weren't organized as sharply as they could have been. Now they're organized more distinctly by my browsing activity - shopping, travel, hobby 1, hobby 2, side hustle business, corporate business and so on.

Overall, I've mapped Favorite bookmark sub-folders to functions which now fit into a profile, as above: shopping, travel, hobby 1, hobby 2, side hustle, corporate business...

I also re-named the overall profile as "Base" from "Personal" - this reminds me that everything is in that profile. It's a more descriptive name and reminds me to get bookmarks moved into the right profile subfolder.

Then, I never use Base as a window - I'm in one of the profiles all the time, or at least I mean to be. So my Hobby 1 profile favorites are right there in the menu bar. Yes, you can set up completely separate bookmarks/favorites for a profile but re-creating them (especially in bulk) seemed to be too much work.

At this point I'm happy to let iCloud bookmark syncing do its thing, and the iCloud profile syncing seems to be working well.

I like that the profile management will send extensions you have turned on for that profile to devices that don't already have that extension - that's a nice touch.

You can also manage cookies and such by profile, which is pretty much expected as that's how this feature works - but still nice to have that ability.

Bottom line, profiles works pretty well and you get the favorites for the profile you're in, as long as you're willing to tweak your bookmarks appropriately.

One tweak I'd like to see is that if I happen to navigate to a site that's in a profile that it uses that profile to open the site, but I could see some issues with doing so (session cookies being one). But having the option would be great. Heck, I'd even like to specify which VPN or network connection to use on each profile (ideally, every bookmark but that's likely too much).

Also letting me know if I have duplicate bookmarks in more than one profile would be nice.

 

[acousticbiker]

Thank you! All manner of messing around and I never uncovered that. So now I just have to figure out how to make a Tab Group open when a new Safari window opens on a per profile basis. Got any insight on that?

Related question is how to restore tabs for a particular profile. I accidentally closed my Personal profile window and when I re-opened it, the 'Reopen All Windows from Last Session' is in gray and History seems to show all history, not just Personal (I just have one other profile called Work and it shows history from that profile when I'm in a Personal window)