If you are like me, you have lots of bookmarks that are old, unused and no longer needed. I may have had a couple thousand bookmarks in Safari up until a couple days ago. The problem was that I did not need most of them and wanted to start over. My first thought was to just delete them. Select all and delete. Nope. In the bookmarks manager you can not select all easily.

Here is the video I shared to Apple that basically shows what I did –  http://screencast.com/t/FIBJZkC7g5

Here is what my bookmarks look like. Everything under the Bookmarks area has to be selected one at a time and deleted. And if you have iCloud on, that means a sync, and that was taking 10 seconds and up per deletion. I was not in the mood to delete several thousand bookmarks (and I think that iCloud somehow duplicated everything).

I called Apple and that was not immediately helpful. But then, while trying to figure out how to write an Automator script to delete bookmarks from Safari, I had a thought. If I could somehow get all the bookmarks on the left to the right, I could select all and delete. Then I realized if you type in a search it would actually show all the content that matched from the left side on the right.

Once the test idea worked, I did a search for “.” as in blablablaDOTcom. I searched for a period. That worked! Everything moved to the right. To the area where I could delete. I sorted the content by Parent (its a column header) and then selected the massive stack of junk and deleted it. That took a bit, but it worked and then synced. I had to delete the bookmarks on the iPhone and the laptop and have syncing off when I did the work on my main iMac. But everything is clean and ready to go. And the bonus. Safari is faster. So this is also a way to make Safari on your Mac way faster. Or it least it is for me. Safari was a dog until I cleaned the bookmarks up.