Safari’s .webloc files in macOS 27.2

For more than 20 years, I’ve had a habit of dragging URLs to my desktop. I’m not going to pretend it’s a great habit, but I found it a handy way to save a link I wanted to check out later. For whatever reason, Apple has recently made this a lot more annoying. In case you didn’t know, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox allow you to turn URLs into .webloc files. Opening one takes you to the saved URL in your default browser. To make one: click on the URL bar and then drag the selected URL out. 1 If it lands in a text area, you’ll get the text of the URL. If it lands on the desktop or a Finder window, you’ll get a .webloc file. These files use the property list (plist) format, and are mostly just fancy wrappers around the URL text. There are two main ways plist files can be formatted: XML-based and binary. Chrome and Firefox still save .webloc files using XML. Safari previously used the XML format, but started saving them as binary plists at some point. I looked through backups and found a…

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