The Missing Bookmarks
Safari on macOS offers a clean, minimalist reading experience. To maximize screen real estate, Safari utilizes an auto-collapsing sidebar to house your Bookmarks, Reading List, and Tab Groups. If you click the Sidebar button to view your bookmarks, and then click on a web page to begin reading, Safari might automatically hide the sidebar, assuming you are finished with it. If your workflow involves constantly jumping back and forth between a dozen different bookmarked research folders, having to re-open the sidebar every single time you click a link becomes an incredibly tedious chore.
Locking the View
To maintain your navigation structure and stop macOS from automatically hiding the sidebar in Safari when you interact with a web page, you must adjust the View menu settings.
First, open the Safari browser. Ensure that the sidebar is currently closed. Navigate to the very top of your screen to access the macOS Menu Bar. Click on View. In the drop-down menu, look for the option labelled Show Sidebar and click it. The sidebar will appear. However, this doesn’t lock it. To ensure it stays pinned, click View again. If you see an option that says “Keep Sidebar Open,” select it. Note: In newer versions of macOS (like Sonoma or Sequoia), simply opening the sidebar via the View menu (or pressing Shift-Command-L) permanently pins it to the left edge of the window, preventing it from auto-hiding when you click the main browser pane, unlike clicking the toolbar icon which sometimes triggers the temporary overlay mode.