Advanced User’s Guide to Safari

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Apple’s Safari web browser tends to call itself a bum because it’s pretty boring and comes with every Mac, but over the years Apple has quietly made it pretty useful. Plus Safari is much more popular than you might think. If you’re reading this in Safari right now, here’s how to get the most out of your experience.

When it comes to speed, browser wars have been flat these days. Even when a shift occurs and one browser introduces a new must-have feature, the other updates so quickly that it’s hard to stay at the top of the rankings for long. So, it’s all about features, and where Chrome, Firefox, or Vivaldi emphasize customization, Safari emphasizes simplicity. However, it has a few tweaks, such as Picture-in-Picture mode and Safari Reader. Since it is designed for your Mac and your operating system, it will likely extend your battery life as well. So let’s dive deeper.

Explore the fastest time saving keys

For the most part, Safari uses keyboard shortcuts with all other browsers. but if you’ve never learned how to use keyboard shortcuts, now is the time. Here are some of our favorites in Safari, most of which work in any other browser:

  • Option + arrow key or spacebar: press the spacebar or Option + arrow up or down scrolls the Web page down in increments, as well as Page Up or Page Down in Windows.
  • Shift + Command + \ : Shows all open tabs in a nice grid view.
  • Shift + Command + Click : Opens the link in a new tab and makes it active.
  • Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab : Cycle through all open tabs.
  • Command + 1 – Command + 9 : Selects a specific tab, where 1 is the first, 2 is the second, and so on.
  • Shift + Command + T : Reopens the last closed tab or window.
  • Esc : If you enter text in the URL / search box, ESC restores the current web page address.
  • Shift + Command + R: Displays the site in Reading View, removing ads and other distractions.

Of course, these are just a few keyboard shortcuts, so be sure to check out this complete list of all Safari keyboard shortcuts . If you do something every day with your mouse, chances are there is a keyboard shortcut to do it faster.

Use picture-in-picture mode for multitasking video playback

Since Apple began releasing updates to its operating systems (and Safari) for free every year, useful new features have tended to get lost at random. One of the best things Apple has added to Safari in macOS Sierra is picture-in-picture mode, which zooms out the video and plays it in the corner of the screen. Whether you’re on a laptop or a large 27-inch iMac, this is a great feature for anyone who tends to do multiple tasks at the same time with video in the background.

You can invoke Picture-in-Picture mode in one of two ways. If your site supports picture-in-picture functionality, such as Vimeo , you will see a small picture-in-picture icon in the corner of the video. Click on it and the video will move to the corner of the screen. If you don’t see this icon like you see on YouTube , right-click the video and choose Enter picture-in-picture. If you don’t like how the video snaps to the corners of the screen, just hold down the Command key and click it to move it to the desired location.

Sound control in tabs

If you listen to music or watch a lot of videos in Safari, you know how inconvenient it is to look for the tab that is playing the sound to turn it off. Safari has several different tools for managing this:

  • If the tab is playing audio, you will see a speaker icon in the URL bar and on the tab itself. Click the speaker icon in the URL bar to mute each tab.
  • Hold down Alt / Option and click the speaker icon in the current tab to mute audio on all other tabs.
  • Hold Ctrl and click the speaker icon for a list of all tabs that are currently playing audio.

You never have to search for the sound source through the tabs again.

Use Reading Mode to remove distractions and improve reading

Reading Mode removes all the clutter from the article you’re reading, so you can focus on the text without looking at ads or other clutter on the page. It works in a similar way to a service like Instapaper or Pocket , but without going to another site or using third party services.

If you see a four-line icon in the URL bar while reading an article, click it (or press Shift + Command + R) to activate Reading View.

You can tweak how it looks a bit. When you are in Reading View, click the “aA” icon in the URL bar. Here you can change the font, font size and page color according to your needs.

Pin sites you use frequently, add the rest to your Reading List

If you visit one or two sites every day, such as your email, Facebook, or Twitter, you can pin them to the tab bar. To do this, simply right-click the tab and select “Pin Tab”. The tab shrinks to an icon and moves to the left side of the window.

As for individual articles that you want to keep for later reading, Safari has a feature called Reading List. Reading List is similar to Instapaper or Pocket, but no external services or extensions are required inside Safari.

To add a page to your Reading List, click the Bookmarks menu and select Add to Reading List, or press Shift + Command + D. To view your Reading List, click the View menu and select Show Reading List or press Control + Command + 2. By default, your Reading List syncs between Safari on Mac and Safari on iPhone or iPad.

Customize toolbar

The toolbar is the entire top of the Safari window. By default, the toolbar includes a lot of things that you might not need. You can customize it as you see fit.

Right-click any empty space on the toolbar and select Customize Toolbar. The settings panel will open. Click any item, then drag it to the desired location on the toolbar. If you want to remove an item, click and drag it off the toolbar, then release. You can also add blank spaces using the Flexible Space item.

Personally, I reproduced the Chrome toolbar by removing the Sidebar, Share, and Show Tab buttons, and then moving my extensions to the right of the URL bar.

Add the best extensions

Safari doesn’t have as many extensions as Chrome or Firefox, but it does have most of the popular ones. Apple’s Extension Gallery has tons of officially approved extensions if you just want to browse through them. Here are some of our favorites:

  • LastPass / Dashlane / 1Password : It doesn’t matter which password manager you use, just use a password manager . Safari includes a service called iCloud Keychain, which is Apple’s attempt at creating a password manager. Don’t use this . ICloud Keychain is not available on other operating systems, which means Apple locks you and all your passwords across its ecosystem. They cannot be exported. There is no way to share them. Use a third party password manager instead. Go ahead and turn off iCloud Keychain completely while you’re working on it.
  • Pocket / Instapaper : Pocket and Instapaper are good bookmarking services and are much more reliable than Safari’s built-in reading list. With Pocket or Instapaper, you can organize this list and access it outside of Safari, which is pretty darn useful.
  • ublock / Disconnect : If you are tired of ads, pop-ups, scripts, trackers, or other nasty privacy-violating parts of the Internet , then you should install Disconnect or Adblock Plus. Disconnect protects you from tracking, malware and malicious ads, while uBlock does the same, but also blocks ads, which is much better than AdBlock Plus .
  • NoMoreiTunes : Safari disgustingly opens iTunes or the Mac App Store every time you land on an app page in iTunes. There is no official way to disable this or change the behavior. NoMoreiTunes is a third party extension that disables this awful feature.

Many other popular services also have extensions, including: Evernote , OneNote , Bear , Todoist , Wunderlist , Honey, and Pinterest .

You can also install extensions that do not appear on Apple’s official page , but you have to manually double-click the extension and click the Trust button to install it, which may put off some users.

Enable debug menu

Apple likes to place hidden debug menus behind the terminal command , and Safari is no exception. Open Terminal (Applications> Utilities), then enter this and press Return:

 by default they write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1

When you’re done, restart Safari and you will find the Debug menu item. Here are a few of the features on this menu to look out for:

  • Disable Web Processes Per Tab / Restrict Web Processes Per Click To 20 : Enabling either of these two options prevents tabs from reloading in the background. While for most of us the setting for each tab can be a little extreme, the 20 limit should be very useful if you tend to have many tabs open.
  • Video / audio requires user action: Don’t like autoplaying videos? This switch tries to stop them completely. Just go to the Debug menu and select Media Flags to enable it. This will stop the autoplay of videos on sites like YouTube as soon as you load the page.
  • Reset Most Popular Sites / Recalculate Most Popular Sites: If you like the Top Sites feature in Safari, which opens a new tab with your most visited sites, but finds that it’s not particularly accurate, you can force Safari to recalculate them or just erase history and start over from reboot.

These are the options I’ve found useful, but you may find other settings that will improve your viewing experience. Play with the different options to see what they do and find out if they work for you.

Troubleshoot the biggest Safari annoyances

Safari does some pretty nasty things and tries to get you to use iCloud Keychain. While some of the troubles are different for everyone, here’s what I did to make Safari better for me.

  • Change your default search engine to Google: Safari’s default search engine is Yahoo, which is ridiculous no matter what decade you’re in. To change it, open the Safari menu, choose Preferences and then Search. Select the search engine you want. While you’re in this menu, you can turn off Enable Safari Suggestions, Enable Fast Website Search, and Show Favorites, if you’re not a fan of Safari’s auto-complete search results or logging. frequently viewed sites.
  • Disable the bookmarks sidebar and enable the Chrome-style favorites bar: Some people might like the bookmarks sidebar, but even after giving it a chance, I had to abandon it. Click View> Hide Sidebar or View> Hide Bookmarks Sidebar to get rid of the sidebar. If you’d like your favorites to appear below the URL bar, as in Chrome, click View> Show Favorites Bar.
  • Disable AutoComplete: Since we already suggested that you don’t use iCloud Keychain, go ahead and disable AutoFill (because you should just save all this information in your password manager). Go to Safari> Preferences> AutoFill and uncheck all boxes.
  • Change new tab and window options : By default, Safari opens your popular sites when you open a new tab or window. If you just don’t go to the same five or six sites all the time and don’t mind that someone looking over your shoulder knows what these sites are, you probably want to change that behavior. Go to Safari> Preferences> General. Here you will see a drop-down list for “Safari Open with”, “New windows open with” and “New tabs open with”. Change them to whatever you want. Personally, I use blank pages for all of them, so I don’t get distracted and forget why I opened a new tab to start.

Safari will never be a super powerful or highly customizable choice, but it is definitely one of the most popular for Mac users. That’s not a bad thing: Safari is stable, tends to be secure, and it’s pretty hard to screw it up. It’s also a lot more powerful than you think if you take the time to customize it to your liking.

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