Safari and Google Chrome keep their bookmarks in two separate worlds. Save a page in Safari on your Mac and it stays on your Mac. Save one in Chrome and Google Sync pushes it to every other Chrome install you own, phone included, but Safari never sees it. Anyone who splits time between both browsers ends up with two bookmark lists that drift further apart every week.
Safari Chrome Sync closes that gap. It’s a free, open source macOS app that reads and writes both browsers’ bookmark and history files directly, so changes made in one show up in the other. Because Chrome bookmarks ride on Google Sync, anything pulled in from Safari also lands on a Windows PC or any other device signed into the same Google account.
What Safari Chrome Sync Does
You install Safari Chrome Sync as a native macOS app that sits outside both browsers, rather than as a browser extension, and it copies data between their local files on a schedule you set, anywhere from every 5 minutes to every 2 hours.
The first sync is a one-way copy: everything in Chrome gets replaced with Safari’s bookmarks, folders included, matched 1-to-1. Every sync after that runs both ways, so new bookmarks and history entries move in whichever direction they were added. Deletions are the one place this breaks down, and there’s a dedicated fix for that further down.
Install the App and Grant Full Disk Access
Safari’s bookmark and history files are protected by macOS, so the app needs a specific permission before it can read them.
- Download Safari Chrome Sync.dmg from the project’s GitHub releases page
- Open the DMG and drag Safari Chrome Sync.app into your Applications folder
- Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, click the plus button, and add Safari Chrome Sync from Applications
- Confirm the toggle next to the app is switched on
Skip that permission step and the sync will fail silently with no bookmarks moving in either direction. The app also installs a LaunchAgent so it starts automatically at login, no need to open it by hand every time.
Wipe Chrome Clean Before the First Sync
Because the first sync overwrites Chrome entirely, starting with a clean Chrome avoids a fight with Google Sync trying to restore what you just deleted.
In Chrome, open chrome://bookmarks, select everything in the Bookmarks Bar with Cmd+A, and delete it. Repeat for Other Bookmarks and any other folder listed. Give it a few seconds so Google Sync uploads the empty state to the cloud before moving on.
Then clear the browsing history separately. Open chrome://settings/clearBrowserData, switch to the Advanced tab, set the time range to All Time, and check only Browsing History, leaving passwords and other data alone. Quit Chrome completely with Cmd+Q once that’s done.
Reset the Sync State and Run the First Sync
Open Safari Chrome Sync and go to Tools → Reset Sync State, then confirm. This tells the app to treat the next run as a fresh first sync rather than an incremental update.
Quit both Safari and Chrome completely, then click Sync Now in the app. The log viewer shows progress in real time, and the run is finished once it reports the sync as complete. Open Chrome afterward and it will show Safari’s full bookmark structure, which Google Sync then pushes out to every other signed-in device.
How Daily Syncing Behaves From Here
Once the first sync is done, everything after runs in the background on whatever interval you picked. The target browser has to be closed for a sync to reach it, so a bookmark saved in Safari lands in Chrome after Chrome is next closed and a sync runs, and the same applies in reverse.
- Add a bookmark in Safari, it appears in Chrome once Chrome is closed and the next sync runs
- Add a bookmark in Chrome, on the Mac or on a Windows PC via Google Sync, it appears in Safari once Safari is closed and the next sync runs
- Delete a bookmark in Chrome or on a Windows PC, it’s removed from Safari on the next sync
- Delete a bookmark in Safari, this one has a catch, covered below
Pulling in changes made on a Windows PC works best if Chrome on the Mac gets a moment to sync with Google first. Open it briefly, close it, run Sync Now before opening Safari, and the app writes the updated Chrome data into Safari before Safari ever loads.
Why Deleting a Bookmark in Safari Doesn’t Always Stick
Delete a bookmark in Safari and sync it over, and Google Sync will often bring it right back if that same bookmark still exists on another device, such as a Windows PC running Chrome. The sync removes it from Chrome on the Mac, Google Sync checks the cloud, finds the bookmark still alive elsewhere, and restores it. That’s how Google Sync is designed to work.
To make a deletion permanent, delete the bookmark in Safari and also delete it manually in Chrome on every other device, or remove it directly from chrome://bookmarks on the Mac before Google Sync gets a chance to restore it. Once Google Sync has propagated the deletion everywhere, running Safari Chrome Sync again will let it stay gone.
Safari has its own native sync across Apple devices through iCloud, the same feature Apple expanded with Safari 16, but it has no way to talk to Chrome or Google Sync on its own. Safari Chrome Sync is what bridges the two, and it does so as free, open source software released under the MIT license.
Our Take
I like that this exists as a standalone native app rather than a browser extension buried in Chrome’s Web Store, since extensions of this kind tend to get pulled the moment Google tightens its bookmark API access. Running it as a LaunchAgent that quietly syncs in the background is the right call for something meant to be forgotten about once it’s set up.
The deletion behavior is the one thing to plan around before adopting this as a daily driver. If you delete bookmarks often and use Chrome across several devices, expect to clean up in more than one place until Google Sync catches up. For anyone mainly adding bookmarks rather than pruning them, that’s a minor tradeoff for keeping two ecosystems from drifting apart.
