Favorites vs Bookmarks in Safari (mac)

I feel like this may be the dumbest question. I just googled it and still didn’t come up with an answer that made much sense.

What’s the difference between a Favorite and a Bookmark? Are bookmarks a subset of Favorites?

It seems in the View menu, I can show a Favorites bar but not a Bookmark bar. The Bookmark bar can be found by using the Sidebar. I don’t want to have to click on a button to access bookmarks so I think I would just use Favorites and keep that shown.

Favorites are the folders where you store bookmarks. Behind the scenes, bookmarks are XML text files (.webloc) that contain instructions like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>URL</key>
	<string>https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/favorites-vs-bookmarks-in-safari-mac/11914</string>
	<key>urlName</key>
	<string>Favorites vs Bookmarks in Safari (mac) - Tech Support - MPU Talk</string>
</dict>
</plist>

The “Favorites” concept is used in lots of apps. Lists in app sidebars of “favorite” documents, for example.

Hope that tidies up the answer, for you :smile:

Thanks for the reply. I honestly think I’m carrying some sort of baggage from decades of using bookmarks.

If favorites are just folders and bookmarks are stored there, it seems confusing to use both terms.

I was explaining favorites and bookmarks to someone the other day and I clearly gave them a wrong answer. For beginners, it’s confusing. If other apps/companies use favorites, then just use that terminology. I see Chrome uses bookmarks (and not favorites).

Ok, end of my ignorant rant.

As I said, it could easily be that I’m carrying baggage from years ago where you had bookmarks and you could put bookmarks in folders. My confusion may be my own (which is not uncommon).