Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today’s episode, let’s learn how to customize the Safari toolbar.
So, like Finder windows, you can customize the toolbar at the top of Safari. With a whole bunch of different options let’s look to see what’s available.
So in Safari, the toolbar is everything here at the top. Its got several sections like the title area here. At the bottom its got a bookmarks bar. In the middle here is the area we’re going to concentrate on. Its the buttons in your toolbar. Now, you can alter these buttons by selecting View, “customize toolbar.” This brings up a whole palette of different buttons that you can drag and drop into the toolbar. For instance, if we wanted to add a home button, we could drag this home button right here between the forward and backward buttons and the URL area. And drop it there and we’ve got a home button there. Likewise, we could drag something off into the palette area and it will remove it from the toolbar. Now we have a whole bunch of different buttons to choose from. For instance, you’ve got the ones you already have like the back and forward button and also the area with the URL and search fields. But you also have a “top sites” button. It will take you to your top sites page. Something that will take you to your homepage. You can create a new tab with this button. You have two buttons, one will take you to your history page and another to your bookmarks page. You have a button to add a bookmark. A button to hide or show the bookmarks bar. A autofill button which will fill in commonly used web fields with things like your name and email address. You have a zoom in and out button. You have a “open in dashboard” button, which will allow you to select an area of the webpage and use that as a dashboard widget. You have a button to mail or print the page. Also a button that opens up your downloads window. And a “report bug” button. Then at the bottom you’ve got one of the most important things. Which will restall, restore all the defaults. So, for instance, if I add a bunch of things here, and I decide I want to restore the toolbar to how it was, maybe because I’ve gotten rid of something I shouldn’t have like that. I can just drag this to the toolbar, drop it, and it restores it to its original settings.
So, let’s take a look at how some of these work. For instance, let’s add a “new tab” button here. Let’s add a “add bookmark” button, a “bookmarks bar” button, zoom button, and then click done. Then we’ve got these in our toolbar. Click on the “add tab” button. We’ve got a new tab. Click on the plus button and we have the ability to add this page to our bookmarks. This will hide that bookmarks area. And this will zoom in using Safari’s great zoom feature which keeps everything in perspective. The, uh, the same size for the images as the text so you really can read the page without breaking it.
There’s one button that a lot of people ask for, uh, and can’t find. And that’s the reload or refresh button. And that’s because it’s actually part of the URL area here. It’s this little symbol here on the side. It only appears after the page has completely loaded. Now it’s an X to stop loading. And then once it’s loaded in you’ve got the refresh button there. You can also alter the toolbar but right-clicking or control-clicking on one of these buttons. So here’s the bookmarks bar button. I can control- or right-click on it and I’ve got some options. One is to customize that toolbar and open up that same customization palette we had before. Another is to remove just that one item. A matter of fact, a lot of people end up discovering they can customize their toolbar this way by accidentally right-clicking and then, before they know what they’re doing, remove that item and if it’s something important like the back and forward button. Then they need to restore it. It’s where they discover the customize toolbar option. Another thing you can do is you can select “keep item visible.” If you selected that then as you shrink the Safari window by resizing it. It will try to keep this button visible and buttons that don’t have that selected, like this one, it will get rid of those first. So if I shrink this window, you can see it will get rid of that button first and keep the “add bookmark” button as long as it can. And by the way, you can also hide the elements of the toolbar. For instance, you see how we can hide bookmarks bar, and that’s here. You can also hide the button area by selecting this option. And then you get nothing but the title area.
So that’s a look at what you can do to customize your Safari toolbar. Hope you found this useful, till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

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