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Mac 101: Safari bookmark shortcuts
Once you memorize the patterns, keyboard shortcuts can be huge time savers. Some easy-to-remember keystrokes are available in Safari and give you quick access to your bookmarked URLs. In this Mac 101, we will show you how to organize your bookmarks bar and use the keyboard shortcuts to maximize your workflow. Before you can start using these bookmark shortcuts, you need to spend some time organizing and tidying up your bookmarks bar. You will have to launch Safari, click on "Bookmarks" in the menu bar and then select "Show All Bookmarks." Alternatively, you can type control-option and B. You should see the bookmarks window as shown below. Once Safari opens the bookmarks window, you can click on "Bookmarks Bar" on the left to view your available bookmarks and bookmark folders. Make sure you select "Bookmarks Bar" and not the "Bookmarks Menu," as these shortcuts only work with entries in the bookmarks bar. In general, you use the bookmarks bar for frequently used URLs and the bookmarks menu for seldom used ones. You can remove, rename and reorganize all your bookmarks from this interface. Organizing your bookmarks bar is important as you need individual bookmarks that are not enclosed in folders for the keyboard shortcuts to work. You can move a bookmark in the bookmarks bar by dragging and dropping it into its spot. You should arrange the bookmarks in the order that you want to remember them. In the screenshot above, I placed TUAW at the top because I use that URL the most throughout the day. When organizing your list, keep in mind that the shortcuts correspond to the order in which the bookmarks are organized. As shown below, TUAW is at the top and uses "1" in the shortcut, CNET is second and uses "2", and so on. Though you can have a bunch of bookmarks, only the first nine will work with the shortcuts. Once your bookmarks are organized, you can use the simple keyboard shortcut of command-number to open the associated bookmark. In my example, command-1 opens TUAW, command-2 opens CNET, command-3 opens Apple and so on. You can have 9 bookmarks that are accessible by merely typing command-1 to command-9.
TUAW Tip: Bring favicons to Firefox's bookmarks bar
For a number of reasons, I always keep coming back to settling for (read: compromising on) using Firefox as my main browser. For those who are curious as to why, I offer two reasons to keep things short for now: 1) Many of the Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail that Lifehacker included in their Better Gmail add-on enhance Google's web client beyond my wildest productive dreams, and 2) Blogging add-ons from the likes of Clipmarks and ScribeFire do wonders for my workflow.Nevertheless, one of the things that's always irked me about the Mac version of Firefox is its lack of favicons in the bookmarks bar right out of the box. Pouring salt on the wound, no amount of research through Firefox's help files, Mozilla's forums or even Firefox's own config file (accessible by typing about:config in the address bar) yielded any kind of explanation or workaround. But thankfully, I finally found a solution, so if you're in this same bucket and you want favicons in your Firefox bookmarks bar, listen up: it's all (apparently) about the theme. I don't know how or what exactly these theme authors are doing, but installing some of the themes available from Mozilla's add-ons site will bring favicons to Firefox's toolbar once you enable the theme and restart the browser. I first tried the Blue Ice theme which worked just fine, but finally settled on Mac Favicon which simply edits the default theme to enable the tiny but handy icons. I'm sure more of the themes at Mozilla's site will do the trick, and I would bet that checking their preview screenshots to see if favicons are indeed visible should save you some time when searching for the right solution.I would imagine Mozilla turned off favicons by default to make the browser look and feel a little more like Safari, but they could have made our lives easier by simply offering a menu item, possibly under View. Ultimately, an add-on like the ones I've mentioned are a decent enough solution for now, but I recommend you submit this as feedback to the Firefox team if you've been jonesing for favicons as bad as I have.
