Strange happenings with Safari Bookmarks

[NSquirrel]

On my iPad air 2 I have a long, long list of Safari bookmarks, of which the first 13 are displayed in the favourites bar, the rest become visible when selecting the three dots at the right hand end of the favourites bar.

For some unknown reason, the first 26 bookmarks, in one big block, moved to the very end of the bookmark list. How? Where they were moved to, they maintained the order that they had been in originally. As far as I know I can only move one bookmark at a time, and hence I have just spent the last hour moving the whole block back one at a time, by shifting each one up a dozen of so places at a time. (Hence I was able to produce the screenshot above.)

Anyone experienced this or have any ideas, please? Btw, I have done a reset and will do a full back up in the morning; latest ios installed. (Guess what- I was going to do the full backup today, then had to put it off!)

Very strange.

 

[NSquirrel]

I think that I have located part of the problem. Somehow Firefox, on Windows 7, has synced with Safari on the iPad, I synced the two a couple of years ago, but am no longer even signed in to sync in Firefox. The Firefox bookmarks were added today to the top of my existing ipad bookmarks, complete with some additions I made today, hence pushing the iPad ones to the end of the list and deleting anything beyond the first 26. (This suggests a limit to the number of bookmarks in ios.)

I do have a problem with the latest version of Firefox (65.0.1) and had reverted to 64.0.2 after a 20 minute or so experiment with the newer version to see if the problem still exists. Perhaps 65.0.1 ignores sync authorisation?

Now what I need to do is to stop Safari accepting further attempts to sync from Firefox, while maintaining my Safari iCloud backups.

 

[twerppoet]

Can’t help you with the FireFox issue.

However, you can have considerably more bookmarks than the ones in Favorites. You just have to get to them via the Bookmarks icon. You’ll also notice that you can have subfolders in Favorites, whicy show up as menus in the favorites bar.

I’m surprised that Favorites appears to be limited to 26, though I suppose it makes sense. They are meant to be easily accesable in the bar tab and the default screen, so too many would be very difficult to use anyway. Bookmarks you don’t use often would be bettter off in another folder, and more easily organized.

 

[J. A.]

Favourites is certainly not limited to 26 in Safari on the iPad. I do have more than 30 sites bookmarked in Favourites, additionally 15 folders with more than 150 further bookmarks.

 

[NSquirrel]

Thank you for replies. I was incorrect about the ios bookmark limit above. Firefox had basically messed up all bookmarks and sorted them somehow or other, shifting some to the end. So not really an iPad problem, it was just that the effect first appeared on the iPad.

( I did have a brief look at a nice new mac laptop recently, but then had to go elsewhere before my wife spotted me -especially when I saw the price tag...)

 

[NSquirrel]

Just a final note - and feeling somewhat embarrassed. When installing and then reverting to the earlier version of Firefox, I inadvertantly re-enabled the normally disabled Windows iCloud addon, which was set I suppose, when I originally bought my iPad, to sync bookmarks.

 

[twerppoet]

I use the Windows iCloud service, so I can easly get to iCloud Drive on the laptop, and check my email/contacts/calendars in Outlook if needed. I keep bookmark and photo sync turned off.

Keep in mind my laptop is mostly used for my amateur radio software. It gets very little use outside that.