One of the things I find very bland about the Safari web browser for the iOS platform is how all of the bookmarks show the same icon. Not only does this look repetitive and fatiguing for the eyes, but it isn’t as friendly to interact with.
Most modern desktop web browsers show the actual website icon when you bookmark a web page, and the mobile Safari web browser should be no different. If you’re jailbroken, you can install a new jailbreak tweak called BookmarksIcons to accomplish this.
A new dynamic for Safari bookmarks in iOS
With BookmarksIcons, you can more easily see what webpage is what without really having to read the website names from your app’s Bookmarks list.
The icons are not only prettier to look at than a repetitive icon, but they make identification much quicker and it works better with your brain’s cognitive recognition process.
When I glance at a list of icons with website names next to them, I hate it. And honestly, it just looks less appealing. As soon as I see the icons added, I can instantly recognize what website is what in the list without feeling like I have to do work just to read through my long list of bookmarks.
How it works
The tweak takes the website image and shrinks it down into a scalable icon that is displayed in your Bookmarks menu from the Safari app. Once they’re applied, they stay there for every time you open the Safari web browser to use a Bookmark.
Sometimes, some of your Bookmarks won’t have an icon, and BoomarksIcons has you covered, because there’s a blue Update Icons button at the bottom left of the Bookmarks menu in Safari when you install this tweak.
If you tap it, it will go through your Bookmarks and instantly save the icons for the websites you have in your menu so they’re displayed properly:
The progress bar shows the progress of the downloading, importing, and updating. You can cancel the process at any time, or you can hide the prompt while it completes in the background so you can continue using Safari while it finishes.
Configuration
As far as configuration goes, the tweak really doesn’t have many options you need to change. It adds a preferences pane to the Settings app so you can basically enable or disable icon borders around the Safari Bookmark icons, and empty the icon cache every so often to clear any bugs that may arise from saving image files:
Apart from that, the tweak is mostly autonomous.
Wrapping up
Having an icon to increase the speed of recognition of what you’re looking at is not only easier on the eyes, but it is far nicer to look at. When you see it on your device for the first time, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without this feature before.
If you’re interested in trying BookmarksIcons, you can download the tweak on your jailbroken device from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $0.99.
What are your thoughts on adding website icons to the Bookmarks menu in the Safari app? Share in the comments.