See, I upgraded my iBook last week to System 10.3, the Panther release. As part of the process, the default web browser got switched to Apple's Safari. I meant to play around with it sometime when I had the time for it, but until then, I stick with what I'm familiar with. Alarmingly, Apple took the default browser select out of the System Prefs, and put it into Safari's prefs. Dipshits.
Ever since, something hasn't looked quite right in Netscape. I didn't look too closely, assuming it was just the UI widget changes, as Apple has abandoned the Aqua style for the brushed metal toys they created for iTunes. Today, I finally figured it out. My toolbar bookmarks for LiveJournal searches by city were gone. These are my quick links to look at LJs in Poway and Northbrook. I looked at my bookmarks to see if perhaps I'd moved them out of the proper folder, and the bookmark menu was empty. Now I'm in a fucking panic. Bookmarking a page is how I save references to interesting and useful things. It would take ages to re-find everything I'd lost, and there's no way I'd remember all of it anyways. You might make the argument that if I don't remember it, I don't need it, except that a lot of times, a reminder to go back and investigate something further is prompted just by scrolling past it in the menu. It's a storage and reminder system all in one.
It turns out, launching Safari to change the default browser prefs caused Safari to initialize itself. That process entails importing bookmarks and favorites from all other web browsers found on the system. But it then deleted the bookmark files it imported. This is just fucking wrong.
Fortunately, Safari Bookmark Exporter lets you export bookmarks from Safari (which saves them as a System 10 Property List) to the formats of other browsers. So I'm back in business.