The Cluttered Sidebar Problem
Safari on macOS features a unified sidebar that houses your Bookmarks, Reading List, and Shared with You links. The Reading List is designed to act as a temporary holding pen for articles you want to read later, syncing across all your Apple devices via iCloud. However, if you rely on dedicated read-it-later services (like Pocket or Instapaper) or if you simply prefer keeping your bookmarks aggressively organized, you likely never use Apple’s built-in Reading List. Unfortunately, the Reading List icon (the eyeglasses) takes up prominent space at the top of the Safari sidebar, and you cannot simply right-click to delete it. If you want a minimalist, bookmarks-only sidebar, you have to hide it through the menu bar.
How to Hide the Reading List in Safari
You can customize exactly what appears in the Safari sidebar by adjusting the View settings.
- Open the Safari browser on your Mac.
- If the sidebar is not currently visible, click the Sidebar icon in the top left corner of the toolbar (it looks like a small square next to a rectangle) to open it.
- Now, look at the very top of your Mac screen to the main macOS menu bar.
- Click on View.
- In the dropdown menu, locate the option labeled Hide Reading List Sidebar Icon (Note: depending on your macOS version, it may simply say “Customize Sidebar…” or you might need to uncheck “Show Reading List”).
- In newer versions of Safari (macOS Ventura and later), you can actually customize this directly from the sidebar itself. Control-click (or right-click) anywhere in the empty grey space of the open sidebar.
- A context menu will appear listing “Bookmarks,” “Reading List,” and “Shared with You.”
- Click on Reading List to uncheck it.
The Result
As soon as you uncheck the option, the eyeglasses icon and the entire Reading List section will instantly vanish from your sidebar. Your Bookmarks will immediately slide up to fill the empty space, giving you a cleaner, distraction-free interface dedicated entirely to your permanent web links.