Mavericks tried to Repack my Favorites Bar

Got a little surprise today after upgrading to the public release of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which we hadn’t noticed in Apple’s beta builds.

BookMacster is configured on my Mac account to sync several browsers including Safari.  After a few minutes, possibly triggered by my responding affirmatively to take the Mavericks Tour, BookMacster squawked that syncing had been stopped because too many changes were coming in from Safari.  Taking a look, I found that, by golly, there were a couple dozen new bookmarks and two folders named News and Popular in Safari’s Favorites Bar (formerly called the Bookmarks Bar).  There were bookmarks to Apple, iCloud, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Apparently what happened is that Apple decided to repack my Favorites Bar with Safari's default bookmarks.  These are bookmarks that I don’t want.  (If I’d wanted them, I would already have them.)  Then, BookMacster’s Safe Sync Limit stepped in and duly did the right thing.  BookMacster saw all of these new bookmarks trying to come in, stopped, and told me that something was suspicious.  

To resolve the situation, that is, remove the unwanted new bookmarks, after you View the error in BookMacster, you should not Import from Safari, but instead Export (your old bookmarks) to Safari.  To do that, and make sure everything is back in sync, click in the menu: File > Export to all [Note 1].  If BookMacster asks whether it’s OK to modify a few items and delete 24 or so in Safari, click Export Anyhow and it will delete the new bookmarks.

This happened on my Mac because I have the Safe Sync Limits set at the default value of 25, and the total changes caused by Apple were a few more than that.

If your Safe Sync Limit is 28 or more, BookMacster would have judged this change as acceptable.  In that case, you’ll need to delete them manually.  The easiest way to do that is to use the Versions Browser to browse to an version of your Bookmarkshelf document which is prior to the appearance of the new bookmarks.  (Unfortunately, Apple has not updated that document for Mavericks as of today.  Browse All Versions is no longer available in the title bar of the window.  Instead, click in the menu: File > Revert to >.  Note [2]) 

If that doesn’t work for some reason and you need to find them manually, I've listed Safaris default bookmarks in this public Google Docs spreadsheet.

[1] If you’ve not updated to BookMacster 1.19.1 yet, it's Bookmarkshelf > Export.
[2]  Apple Bug ID 15294637.

Thank you, and thank you to BookMacster 😃

Jerry Krinock