I made a video a few months back about Safari on the iPhone, where I discussed why I think
it’s the browser of choice on iOS, and shared some tips to help you get the most out of it.
I’ll link to that video in the description of this one, but I realised that for me,
certainly when I’m working, I use Safari on my Mac way more than I do on my iPhone,
and I’ve not really talked about how to get the most from it here, on a Mac computer. So that’s
what I’m going to be doing in this video, 8 tips to help you get the most out of Safari on the Mac.
Stick with me until the end of the video, I reckon there’s at least a few tips and shortcuts here
that you won’t have been aware of. OK, let’s get into it.
Let’s start from the, well, the ‘start’ I guess, and talk about the Start Page.
This isn’t the same as your Home Page, a Home Page is an actual website,
this is kind of like a Safari dashboard, that can be synced across all your Apple devices.
It’s customisable, and it’s actually really pretty useful, as I’ll now show you.
To customise your Start Page on the Mac, it’s this little icon in the bottom right of the Start Page,
clicking on that will give you some options. First up, you can choose whether or not you’d
like the Start Page to appear on all of your devices. I like the fact that in general,
working in the Apple ecosystem makes everything nice and seamless across all your devices,
and so personally I always have this enabled. You can then choose which features of the
Start Page you’d like switched on or off. Favourites and Frequently Visited should be
pretty obvious, I actually don’t bother with either of these, as I’ve got a Favourites bar
constantly showing up here at the top, but both options are there if you want them.
Shared with you is really good, and extremely useful. Now due to app limitations, this will
only work with things like iMessage, I think it works with Mail also, it won’t work with an app
like WhatsApp for example, but here you can see all of the links that have been shared with you,
and you can also see who has shared them with you. By default, it’s going to show you
the most recent 3 links, you can click the ‘Show All’ to see everything,
but this is great if you know you’ve been sent a link recently, and you can’t recall what it was,
or who sent it to you, so long as it was shared via iMessage or Mail, it’s going to show in here.
Privacy Report shows you how many trackers Safari has prevented from profiling you in
the last 7 days, I don’t bother with this personally, nor do I use Siri Suggestions,
although I do quite like having the Reading List showing, especially when I’m on my iPad,
as I often put things in my Reading List, only to then forget all about them, so having this here
serves as a pretty useful visual aid. iCloud Tabs is another tool that I
find really useful, this shows the tabs that I’ve got open on my other devices,
I can pick up viewing something on my iPhone when I’m away from my desk for example. Background
image is a fairly trivial but I guess nice way of making the Start Page look a bit personalised,
and you can choose from either one of the images already included within Safari, or your own image.
OK so, we started with the Start page, the next thing that I reckon you’re most likely
to do within Safari is either input a URL, or search for something using the search
engine of your choice, and so there’s two tips that I’m going to quickly show you for this.
The first is a keyboard shortcut to get you from wherever you are in Safari,
up to the browser bar, ready for you to input a search term, and that’s Command,
Option and the F key. Tapping this command will quickly take you up to the browser bar,
and from there you can immediately begin typing in either a URL, or a search term,
so this is a handy little keyboard shortcut to know if you spend a lot of time in Safari.
The second tip is, for me at least, one of those ‘how did I not know that’ tips, and
that’s that you can return to the search results of a query at any time using a keyboard shortcut.
So here for example, I’ve gone to the browser bar, and I’ve typed in a search term,
and then I’ve clicked on a link, and to show you how useful this is, I’ve actually clicked through
a few links within the site itself. To get back to the search results, I’m going to have to hit the
back button however many times to take me back. Or, I can hit Command, Option and the S key,
which will immediately bounce me back to the most recent search results. How useful is that?
Just quickly, if you’re getting value from these videos, I’ve started a free newsletter
called The Proper Weekly, where I share tech news, behind the scenes information about me,
and a tip or trick for your iPhone, iPad or Mac. I send it out once a week on a Friday,
and it’s free to sign up to, if you’re interested, the link will be in the description.
So, in the previous tip I showed you a cool trick related to getting back to the search
results quickly, but there is of course another option, and that’s to open links in new tabs,
rather than opening links within the existing tab. The benefit of this of course is that you’ll still
have the search result tab visible up at the top, and you can easily navigate back to it.
There’s a couple of ways that you can do this. The first is to set a preference,
which you can do by going to Safari, then Preferences, and then choosing Tabs. Here,
you can choose to have Safari open links in tabs Never, Always, or Automatically. I’ve
got Automatically selected, which I guess is applying some kind of rule or logic to things,
although not knowing what that is, I can’t really say how useful this is,
as there are times when I want things open in a new tab, and times when I don’t.
The other method is to choose for each link, and the way that you would do that,
is you press and hold the Command key, as you click on a link. Doing this will open the link
in a new tab, regardless of how you’ve got your preference setup, although you do need to ensure
that you’ve got this option selected first. And whilst we’re on the subject, Command,
Shift and clicking on a link will open the link in a new tab, but also make that the active tab,
rather than simply opening it in the background. Command, Option and clicking on the link will open
the link up in a new window, rather than a new tab, but again it will do this in the background.
Command, Option, Shift and clicking on the link will open the link in a new window,
and make it the active window. And finally, you can use Command
and the number keys, to quickly bounce between active tabs, which is useful if you’ve got lots
of tabs open all at once, and you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts for navigation.
Here’s another bit of tab magic for you, have you ever closed a tab by mistake,
only to immediately regret doing so? Maybe it’s something that you were browsing that
you now can’t remember how to get back to. Undo doesn’t work, and whilst you could go
into your browser history and try to find your way back that way, there is a much easier method.
Simply press Shift, Command and T on your keyboard, to reopen the last tab that
you closed down. Just like that, the tab is back, and you can pick up where you left off.
If you’ve got multiple tabs open at the same time, and the existing methods that I’ve explained for
navigating between them don’t really work for you, you could instead make use of the Tab
Overview function. Press Shift, Command and the backslash button, this one here by the return key,
and you’ll see that all active tabs will kind of zoom out into the screen,
giving you a visual overview of everything that you’ve got open.
You then simply click to zoom back into the tab that you’d like to make the active tab.
OK, final tab related tip, and for some reason there’s no keyboard shortcut for this one,
although if you watch my recent Mac Tips video, which I’ll link to in the description, I do
show you in that video how to create a keyboard shortcut for essentially anything on your Mac,
so you could create one if you wanted. Regardless, the tip is that you can pin a tab,
which essentially means that the tab that you pin can’t be closed by accident,
as it will remain constantly pinned to the left of your browser tabs section,
essentially a permanent tab. In fact, if you fully close down Safari,
the next time that you open it up, the pinned tab will still be pinned here to the left, and
you can do this for multiple tabs, so if you’ve got something that you always need access to,
that you’re fed up of opening each time you open Safari, this could be a solution for you.
To do this, with the tab that you’d like to pin open and active, head to Window,
and then choose Pin Tab. To reverse the process, do exactly the same thing, but choose Unpin Tab.
Your reading list is, in my opinion, one of the more underrated aspects of the Apple ecosystem,
I think it’s excellent, essentially a place where you can immediately store articles or
pretty much anything that you want to be able to read later on, offline, on any of your devices.
Quickly adding things to your reading list from Safari is really easy,
as there’s a keyboard shortcut for it. Just press Command, Shift and the D button,
to add whatever you’re currently viewing into your reading list. You’ll know it’s happened,
as you’ll see this little animation of your current tab shooting off into your reading list.
So the final tip is useful if you’re the kind of person who prefers clicking things with your mouse
over using keyboard commands, and that’s because most of the things that we’ve spoken about in this
video can be added in to your toolbar at the top of Safari through customisation. I really
appreciate the minimal approach to Safari on the Mac, but minimal only works if it still gives you
the functionality you need, and with this tip, you can get it setup exactly the way you need it.
Head to View, and then Customise Toolbar. This menu is actually a bit confusing,
because you would think that you’d be dragging and dropping items from the top of this window,
into the bottom, but that bottom part is just a visual representation of the ‘default set’ of
menu options, you actually drag things up into the real menu bar, or drag to remove
things out of the real menu bar. So here, I can add a couple of things in as you can see,
or I could remove a few things out. Almost all of the functionality that we’ve been talking
about in this video is covered here, so you should be able to play around with this,
and get everything setup just how you like it for your workflow.
So there you go, 8 tips that you can start implementing to help you get the most out
of Safari on the Mac. What about you, any good tips for Safari that you think I’ve missed out?
Or, do you refuse to use Safari? If yes, what do you use instead? Chrome, Firefox?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it. And as ever, if you found this video useful,
do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content
like this in the future. See you on the next video.