Why the heck are bookmarks in the safari sidebar auto-collapsed and how do I fix it?

[lordhamster]

So I just got my new M1 Max MBP and thus also Monterey. Every time I go to open the sidebar, it seems like the "bookmarks" section is auto-collapsed. Annoyingly I have to re-expand it EVERY time I open the sidebar.

anyway to tweak this annoying behavior?

Forgive me if it is simple, I've just come from a 2019 MacBook Pro (work issued) where this behaves differently.

 

[frou]

I get the impression that the Safari 15 developers consider Tab Groups the best thing since sliced bread and want it to be in your face.

It seems you can go direct to Bookmarks using the Ctrl-Cmd-1 keyboard shortcut at least.

 

[lordhamster]

I get the impression that the Safari 15 developers consider Tab Groups the best thing since sliced bread and want it to be in your face.

It seems you can go direct to Bookmarks using the Ctrl-Cmd-1 keyboard shortcut at least.

I'm a one or two tab at a time kind of person... so having a million tabs open at a given tab has always been antithetical to the way I work... maybe it is time I change?

 

[Tagbert]

I'm a one or two tab at a time kind of person... so having a million tabs open at a given tab has always been antithetical to the way I work... maybe it is time I change?

I haven't used tab groups but they look good. on my work laptop I use Firefox and a plugin that does something similar. for the 4-5 projects that I am working on, I keep a tab group. in that group are 5-15 pages open that pertain to the project that I use almost every day. with that plugin, I can switch between projects and the browser window switches to only show the pages for that project. It's much easier to manage than having separate windows or having to reload the various users as I switch between projects, sometimes within a few minutes of each other. If Safari tab groups work like that I might find it useful for my needs.

 

[Tagbert]

So I just got my new M1 Max MBP and thus also Monterey. Every time I go to open the sidebar, it seems like the "bookmarks" section is auto-collapsed. Annoyingly I have to re-expand it EVERY time I open the sidebar.

anyway to tweak this annoying behavior?

Forgive me if it is simple, I've just come from a 2019 MacBook Pro (work issued) where this behaves differently.

View attachment 1879752

Yes, I can see that happening. Seems like a bug. certainly a bad user experience.

I have seen worse in the iPAD OS safari sidebar. When you open the sidebar and drill down into bookmarks, especially if you open subfolders in bookmarks, then when you open a bookmark, you can't close the sidebar without clicking back out step by step to the top level panel. only then can you close the sidebar. If you then need to open another bookmark that might have been right next to the first one, you have to navigate back down, open the bookmark and then navigate back up again. It's really stupid. they seem to have merged the function that did the show/hide the panel with the folder navigation on bookmarks. it is painful to use. I think there is a keyboard shortcut to show and hide the panel but I'm not always using a keyboard.

 

[owidhh]

I started using Tab Groups and was starting to grok it, not entirely yet sure how to best organize my workflow. Two things drove me back to Firefox:

1- links from other applications open in the "default" tab group, so if you have only tab group windows showing up on the current Space, and a regular window on another Space, the tab will open to the other Space and of course you will be taken to that Space as well.

2- I closed Safari and re-opened it, all my tab groups DISaPPEARED

nevermind that syncing was ver hit-and-miss...

 

[Daverich4]

Yes, I can see that happening. Seems like a bug. certainly a bad user experience.

I have seen worse in the iPAD OS safari sidebar. When you open the sidebar and drill down into bookmarks, especially if you open subfolders in bookmarks, then when you open a bookmark, you can't close the sidebar without clicking back out step by step to the top level panel. only then can you close the sidebar. If you then need to open another bookmark that might have been right next to the first one, you have to navigate back down, open the bookmark and then navigate back up again. It's really stupid. they seem to have merged the function that did the show/hide the panel with the folder navigation on bookmarks. it is painful to use. I think there is a keyboard shortcut to show and hide the panel but I'm not always using a keyboard.

iPad OS 15.1 fixed that nonsense for me.

 

[Tagbert]

iPad OS 15.1 fixed that nonsense for me.

Ah, you're right! Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[GlenK]

I was really reluctant to use Tabs but now that I'm getting it I started really liking it. Now have different Tabs for Sports, Finance, General, and Forums. It's actually very convenient specially the finance Tab.

 

[tim0409]

The bookmark situation on iOS 15 is bad enough, but the menu continually collapsing on Monterey is really annoying. I don't want to use tabs, I just want bookmarks to stay open like they always have done.....!

 

[Tagbert]

The bookmark situation on iOS 15 is bad enough, but the menu continually collapsing on Monterey is really annoying. I don't want to use tabs, I just want bookmarks to stay open like they always have done.....!

I suspect that the product manager for Safari doesn't actually use bookmarks and assumes no one else does either.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I suspect that the product manager for Safari doesn't actually use bookmarks and assumes no one else does either.

And now I don't either. The sidebar used to be worth leaving open to accomplish everything it needed to do with a single click. Now it's an function-obscured waste of space that might as well stay closed. So long, reading list feature.

 

[JWreck]

OK I was about to make a new thread and then saw this one. I have a dual use Mac - so my 'personal' stuff is primarily on the Favorites section which is easy. Anything I need to use for work is in a folder under bookmarks called "Work" and I AM DYING at the auto collapse bug/feature/oversight. I am so frustrated I'm pretty much switching over to Chrome because this has ruined Safari for me.

I used to open Safari, it would auto open the tab sidebar and I could select from there immediately. Now I have to hit the bookmark button, expand bookmarks, expand work and then select....for every. damn. tab.

/end rant

 

[Tagbert]

OK I was about to make a new thread and then saw this one. I have a dual use Mac - so my 'personal' stuff is primarily on the Favorites section which is easy. Anything I need to use for work is in a folder under bookmarks called "Work" and I AM DYING at the auto collapse bug/feature/oversight. I am so frustrated I'm pretty much switching over to Chrome because this has ruined Safari for me.

I used to open Safari, it would auto open the tab sidebar and I could select from there immediately. Now I have to hit the bookmark button, expand bookmarks, expand work and then select....for every. damn. tab.

/end rant

Some product managers believe that no one uses bookmarks anymore. It looks like one of those people has some influence on the Safari team.

 

[gank41]

It's my understanding that, due to Apple's own HIG, Safari wasn't compliant and had to change the positioning of the SideBar. Apple's HIG require ALL apps that provide a SideBar, to have that SideBar run up to the very top of the app. At the time Big Sur was released, the version of Safari initially still had the SideBar that ONLY ran up to the Favorites bar. You could open it on the Start Page and leave it. You could click on any link from the SideBar or the main body of the Safari Start page, and then it'd just navigate there and the SideBar wouldn't be open anymore. And when you'd go back to a new tab or open Safari again, that same Start Page would reflect how you last left it, SideBar positioning and all. It was glorious. And then at some point they had to correct it, or be in compliance with their own Human Interface Guidelines, and force the SideBar in Safari to run up to the top of the app as opposed to staying in the frame of the page itself. I've gone on many rants in other posts about this, I've submitted Apple Feedback, and I've even asked WHY to the WebKit folks on Twitter. That's how I found out about the HIG requirement changes. And, it turns out that the SideBar now just doesn't retain any location or positioning at all. I regularly need to get at links saved to my Reading List from maybe 3 to 4 months ago, and want them all open in different tabs. It used to be so easy to do a quick search. Now it's convoluted and requires more clicks. More clicks = no good.

 

[tim0409]

I'm finally giving up on Apple fixing this (if indeed they see it as an issue); it's so annoying having your bookmarks collapse every time you open and close the sidebar. Any recommendations of an alternative browser I can use across my Mac/iPad/iPhone?

 

[Wolf1701]

Same problem with the reading list (that I used to use a lot). For bookmarks... I check the option to show them in an horizontal bar.

 

[Remington Steel]

I thought I was the only one who found this annoying...smh

 

[Pskordilis]

stop using safari, trust me.

 

[harriska2]

My guess is Apple wants to stop supporting and upgrading Safari so they are making it horrible to use, causing people to jump ship.

 

[yyl]

Looks like this bug is on its way of getting fixed. The Safari Technology Preview (at least in Release 146 that I am testing right now) remembers the collapsed/expanded state of the sidebar. If you expand "Bookmarks" and quit the browser, it will re-expand Bookmarks automatically the next time you launch the browser. Same with "Reading List". It simply remembers your choice.

The biggest design flaw of Safari's sidebar that led to everyone's complaint is not really about whether it promotes tab groups or not, but that it does not remember user's preference (or the last known state). By fixing this "amnesia", now whether you love tab groups or bookmarks or reading list, you will be pleased.

 

[gilby101]

Looks like this bug is on its way of getting fixed. The Safari Technology Preview (at least in Release 146 that I am testing right now) remembers the collapsed/expanded state of the sidebar.

With current release of Safari, Control-Command-1 remembers how the bookmarks were expanded last time used.

 

[gank41]

Looks like this bug is on its way of getting fixed. The Safari Technology Preview (at least in Release 146 that I am testing right now) remembers the collapsed/expanded state of the sidebar. If you expand "Bookmarks" and quit the browser, it will re-expand Bookmarks automatically the next time you launch the browser. Same with "Reading List". It simply remembers your choice.

The biggest design flaw of Safari's sidebar that led to everyone's complaint is not really about whether it promotes tab groups or not, but that it does not remember user's preference (or the last known state). By fixing this "amnesia", now whether you love tab groups or bookmarks or reading list, you will be pleased.

Although I'm also seeing that the Safari Tech Preview seems to remember my position now, let's wait and hold off on any accolades just yet. There's been a few times where STP reflected some kind of fix like this, and then it wasn't in the actual Safari release. At one point there was even an option in STP Settings to close the SideBar after selecting a link, or basically like how it's been for years (7?) up until whatever version released in the middle of the Big Sur cycle that borked it all.

 

[Jim Lahey]

The bookmark amnesia problems seem kind of fixed on both Mac and iPad at the moment. What isn’t fixed is the auto open/close behaviour of the whole sidebar. This saga is easily in the top five greatest ever UI blunders of all time. The sort of thing that makes you wonder how they earn a living. Absolutely shocking that this kind of behaviour ever made it into production code. It worked perfectly and then they deliberately killed it.

 

[gank41]

The bookmark amnesia problems seem kind of fixed on both Mac and iPad at the moment. What isn’t fixed is the auto open/close behaviour of the whole sidebar. This saga is easily in the top five greatest ever UI blunders of all time. The sort of thing that makes you wonder how they earn a living. Absolutely shocking that this kind of behaviour ever made it into production code. It worked perfectly and then they deliberately killed it.

I whole-heartedly agree with this 1000%. Very shortly after Apple introduced the Reading List functionality and incorporated it into the SideBar along with Bookmarks, it remained a very stable and reliable experience for years. I'm not exactly sure how long, but I think something like 7 or 8 years! And to remove some major functionalities & behaviors in the MIDDLE of a release cycle (during Big Sur) and not like, during a beta testing process for a new release? And then to claim they're "just now updating to comply with Apple's HIG"?

To make a change this drastic, to me, means that someone was in charge for a while and then left and now someone else made a decision, regardless of the pushback, and is being stubborn. This kind of thing happens OFTEN in work environments, regardless of the industry. This is all beating a dead horse.