[UPDATE 2009-05-11: Since posting this, the Mac version of Chrome has be updated with a functional bookmark manager. At the very least, at least you can still use this article for how to find where it's storing the bookmarks. Maybe it will help you transfer them between computers or something.]
I have searched the internet high and low for how to edit bookmarks in Google Chrome for Mac. In a large number of places, the general answer that I found and that it is not supported yet, i.e. the bookmark manager for Chrome on Mac has not been activated. (Edit: If you get the new DEV channel version, it’s enabled. Thanks Justin.)
The only way to edit bookmarks is through the tedious use of the star icon to the left of the address bar. By clicking that star you can add a bookmark. If that star is filled yellow, you’re on a page you’ve already bookmarked so you can click it to edit where it’s saved or delete it altogether.
I ran into an interesting problem that I could not fix. I somehow saved a bookmark for http://google.com into my bookmarks bar. Since the address bar will never read that exact URL, Chrome doesn’t recognize me ever visiting that exact URL and thus never filling in the star so I can delete it. Make sense? http://google.com always resolves to http://www.google.com so I couldn’t delete the bookmark. There is no way to right-click the bookmark and edit it. That functionality is simply not available yet in Chrome for Mac.
The first thing I tried was to delete Chrome from my computer altogether. I reinstalled Chrome and opened it “for the first time” to find that all of my bookmarks were still there. WHAT?
[On a Mac, deleting applications is rather simple: drag the icon from the applications folder into the trash -- done. If you have a dock icon, drag that too. The great thing about a Mac is that those icons in your applications folder are actually a package -- a bundle of files -- that appears to be a single clickable file. All the files that you need to run the application are contained within this package, so to get rid of it, you just drag it to the trash.]
When I opened Chrome to see that all my bookmarks were still there, I knew that the bookmarks had to be stored in a separate file located somewhere outside of the package. (I guessed that they were stored in some kind of XML format.) I started poking around my harddrive and found the file where the bookmarks are stored.
/Users/MY_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks

The file is called Bookmarks and there is no extension. You can open it with TextEdit.app (I used my development program called Coda). All of your bookmarks are stored here in some kind of list format (Edit: It’s JSON. Thanks Trey.) with each element containing the attributes date_added, id, name, type, and url. You also find “children” attributes that contain all the same information for folders.
[If you just want to delete all your bookmarks and start over, just delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and restart the Chrome application.]
Now you can edit your bookmark structure by hand. Close Chrome, go to town, save the file, and reopen Chrome. BE CAREFUL. You are editing code that the browser needs to be able to parse in order to run properly. If you mess up something, stuff breaks in an unrecoverable way. You’ll have to:
- Delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome
- Delete the Chrome.app from /Applications
- Download and reinstall Chrome again
Hope this helps someone. Definitely helped me.
Any information you might have that could help, please let me know in the comments.
Recent Comments