How to block Safari from asking to open a bookmark file every time it launches

If you launch Safari and see a message asking about a bookmark, there’s a simple solution that may have eluded you—it’s obscure.

Some readers see “Confirm the file you want to load for bookmark ‘file name’” when they launch Safari. It recurs every few seconds unless they use Open with Safari from a Sharing menu or Control-click/right-click a link in Safari and choose Open Link in New Tab.

The trick to stopping this? It’s a side effect of a choice in preferences. Go to Safari > Preferences > General. Change “New windows open with” from “Tabs for Favorites” to anything else, like Empty Page.

The Favorites Bar contains all the items in your Bookmarks > Favorites list. If you have a missing or corrupted bookmarks file or one of the Favorites entries has soured in some fashion, Safari is baffled. It wants you to find the missing file, typically one that ends in .xml, the format used for the bookmarks file. You can also remove the offending entry in the Favorites list, though that may not fix a corruption issue.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Karen.

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