Strange Safari Bookmark behavior

[MacInWin]

Today, for no reason I can find, Safari sorted all of my bookmarks alphabetically. Normally I have them in the order I like to visit various sites, so I can just go down the list. But when I opened my bookmarks today, they were all alphabetically sorted.

I opened Bookmarks/Edit Bookmarks and moved them back into the order I wanted. I did some surfing, then closed Safari and went off to do something else. Came back to the Mac, opened Safari and all my bookmarks were back in alphabetic order.

I went through Preferences, but see no setting for bookmark order. I looked under Bookmarks on the top bar, but nothing there about sorting. I ran DetectX Swift, found nothing. I looked at my Safari Extensions, nothing new that should affect that. And I've added nothing recently, nor changed any settings recently.

I did a quick search and there are lots of articles on how to sort alphabetically, but none for how to stop it sorting.

Anybody have any idea what to do to stop this crazy behavior?

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Let me guess... Catalina?

I'm wondering if maybe you accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut that did it for you, but I don't see one here. If I open up Safari's bookmark manager (OPT-CMD-B), then right-click on "Bookmarks Menu", I have the option to sort by name or address, but there is no keyboard command to execute that for me. But it may be possible to set one somehow. I didn't have any luck using the App Shortcuts option in the Keyboard preferences pane to make one here, but maybe there's another way. Do you see a keyboard shortcut if you access that context menu as above?

 

[MacInWin]

Nothing there. I can open the Bookmark Editor and right clicking on any folder or subfolder offers two options to sort by--name and adress, but neither is checked on any of the sorted folders. Also, the topmost level isn't sorted, just the bookmarks in folders. And EVERY folder/subfolder is sorted except the one I put back that I suspect will sort again on next launch of Safari. It's like a default got set somewhere to sort folders alphabetically.

Yes, it's Catalina, but I upgraded back in November and this problem appeared today. So I don't think it's related to the Catalina upgrade, unless there was a two month fuse on it...

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Hmmmm. Well as near as I can tell, there is no native way for this to automatically happen. So it almost certainly is a 3rd party app doing it. What that is, I have no idea. I suggest closing out everything you can on your system, especially anything running in the menubar. Then manually re-sort a handful of bookmarks; close Safari; then re-open Safari and see if they got sorted by name again. Maybe do this in Safe Mode.

 

[MacInWin]

LIAB, I have no software to manipulate bookmarks other than Safari itself. I've added no new software, deleted none, changed none in the past week. Nothing updated, nothing in Safari reconfigured. No pets to walk across the keys. Basically, no reasonable or unreasonable reason for this to have happened. I'll give Safe mode a try, but I'll be surprised if the one folder I've put into the order I want stays that way.

 

[MacInWin]

OK, I'm here in Safe mode and the folder did NOT sort, so that's good. Now I'll go back to regular mode to see what happens.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

LIAB, I have no software to manipulate bookmarks other than Safari itself. I've added no new software, deleted none, changed none in the past week. Nothing updated, nothing in Safari reconfigured. No pets to walk across the keys. Basically, no reasonable or unreasonable reason for this to have happened. I'll give Safe mode a try, but I'll be surprised if the one folder I've put into the order I want stays that way.

Regardless of all that, "something" has happened. Think about it. If there's no keyboard shortcut to accidentally trigger it, and there's otherwise no easily accessible way to do it, then you've effectively eliminated user error. So either there's some weird bug in Catalina or another piece of software is causing it. "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

 

[MacInWin]

OK, I'm back in normal mode and the folder is in the order I wanted, so it did not re-sort.

The challenge is not that I'm resisting the improbable cause, it's that I cannot think of any cause, improbable or not. A bug in Catalina is theoretically possible, but the fact that it did not manifest until today, and now is not manifesting, sort of makes that not just improbable, but really close to impossible. I worked in IT for 40 years and bugs don't appear and disappear like that. Bits can flip in systems, which can cause crashing, so it's possible a bit flipped from "don't sort" to "sort" and the reboots have restored the "don't sort," but, wow, is that a long shot! Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket?

But for now, I'm chalking this one up to a cosmic ray zapping a bit somewhere to trigger sorting.

 

[Lifeisabeach]

Some combination of factors may have triggered it. Who knows. I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, my wife's user password mysteriously changed on her Mac mini earlier this week and I have no explanation for it at all, short of some bizarre Catalina bug. It was a new SSD with a cloned backup on it and the password was working several times including over a reboot or two before the password stopped working out of the blue. Maybe a cosmic ray hit it and flipped a bit specific to where the password was stored. /shrug

 

[toMACsh]

Glad you got it all sorted.