10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do In Mac Safari

There is a lot of hidden functionality in the Safari browser on your Mac. Here are ten things (actually 13!) that you may not know you can do that will help you when browsing the web.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten things that you may not know you can do in Safari on the Mac.
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So first, did you know you could read open tabs that you accidentally closed. I use this all the time. For instance let's say I close this tab here. I can instantly Undo. If you look at Edit, Undo it's Undo Close Tab. A quick Command Z will being that tab back. But there are other ways to do it as well. You can go to History and then there's Recently Closed and see a list of recently closed tabs. Right under it is Reopen Last Closed Tab, Shift Command T. If you close the entire window like this you could bring it back by going to History, and then it's Reopen Last Closed Window and all the tabs return. If you were to Quit Safari and then relaunch it and you've got your System Preferences set so it opens a fresh new window, not the previous one, you can go to History and use Reopen Last Closed Window there. But also Reopen All Windows from Last Session. 
Now you may know you could use the Back Button, clicking it will go back to the previous page. But if you click and Hold the back button you get a list of all of the pages that you've been to. The same is true for the Forward Button as well. 
Now sometimes searching and then finding the webpage that you want isn't enough. You need to find the information on the webpage. So while you're on a page you can use Command F and it brings up a Search Box at the top that will search the webpage. You can set it to Begins With or Contains, do a search, and then it will tell you how many matches and you can flip through each one. It's really handy for finding information very deep in an article. 
Now sometimes you want to have a Tab or a Window open but you don't necessarily want to have a webpage loaded up in it. You could go to Safari, Preferences and under General set New Windows to open with empty page or New Tabs to open with empty page. But what happens if you want to take the existing tab and just have that display a blank page for the time being. This is a tip that goes back to the very beginning of web browsers in the early '90's. What you need to do is go to the location About colon blank. No spaces. That loads up a blank page. An example of when you may use this is say you're about to give a presentation and you know you're going to be showing stuff on the web so you want to get your browser all setup and ready with the window the size and the location that you want. But you don't want to display anything yet. You can go to about:blank and just display a blank page for the time being. 
Now when you go to download something from a webpage you can click the Download link and it will save that to your Downloads folder. But what if you want to save it to a specific location on your drive. You don't want to have to change location of the Downloads folder all the time. Instead you can Control click on the Link, two-finger click on a trackpad or a right click on the Mouse. Bring up the Context Menu and you use Download Linked File As. This allows you to choose a location. You can expand this and choose any location to save this file. So a quick click will save it to your Downloads folder and Control click and then Download Linked File As will save it to a location you want. If you're always doing this and never using the Downloads folder you can go into Preferences and then under General, File Download Location. You could set it to Ask for Each Download. 
When you want to search for something you could just type what you want in the Address Bar here. Hit Return and it will give you search results, usually at Goggle. But you could change the search engine that's used by default by going to Safari, Preferences, and under Search and you could set the Search engine to one of five different options. Now matter what you're default is set to you don't have to use the Address Bar to search. You could go directly to the Search Engine and search using their page. 
Now when you're at a site you may want to Zoom in by using Zoom In and Zoom Out or the keyboard shortcuts for those. If you find that you're always doing that on a certain website you can set defaults for that website. Go to Safari, Preferences, Websites, and then look for Page Zoom. Here it will show me the currently open sites. But even if I don't have the site open if I set something different, like I bumped Wikipedia up to  125%, it will appear in this list. You can change the default right here to whatever you want and it will remember that. You could set the default for all other websites right here. 
Another thing that you could set right here that's really handy is pop-up windows. Select that. It'll show you the current websites and any that you've set something for other than the default. So you can set a specific website to Always Allow Pop-ups. But why would you want to do that? Well I find a lot of websites, particularly financial ones like banks and tax sites, and some things like that, have downloads tied to pop-up windows. So if you don't allow pop-ups sometimes downloading from the site doesn't quite work right. Fortunately those sites usually don't have ads on them of any kind so allowing pop-ups is pretty harmless and then the site works better. 
A fairly new feature in Safari is the ability to automatically translate a webpage. When you go to a webpage that's not in your language you usually get this little button here that you can click and it will translate for you. Now you can see a lot of the text has been translated, although text in images of course won't be translated. Then as you browse that site it will continue to perform the translation until you turn it off. 
Now I showed you before how you could zoom in on a webpage by going to View Zoom-In and Zoom-Out. But if you hold the Option key this changes to Make Text Bigger, Make Text Smaller. It's like zoom but it won't zoom images. Only text. So Option Command and then + you could see changes the size of the text but not the size of the images. In most cases this is all you really want when you zoom-in on a webpage. You just want to make the text a little bigger.
Now when you're at a webpage like this, in the Address Bar all you'll see is the domain name. You won't see the actual page you're at. Clearly we're not at Wikipedia.org here. We are at a specific page in Wikipedia. If I click on the Address Bar I can see the full location. But I could also see that by default. If I go to Safari, Preferences and then Advanced I could select Show Full Website Address and you could see I'll always see the full address here at the top. 
You could also navigate in Safari using just the keyboard. You don't have to go to System Preferences and turn on any Accessibility functions to do that. In Safari, Preferences, under Advanced look at Accessibility here. There's an option here to Press Tab to Highlight each item on the webpage. But note is also says that using Option, Tab will give you this functionality without even turning this on. So while I'm here if I were to normally tab it would go to places like the Search field here. But if I Option Tab it actually jumps around to all of the links. If I want to go to a link I can just press Return. Then, of course, in conjunction with other keyboard shortcuts, like under History the keyboard shortcuts for going back, forward, Home, and under File the ability to go to the Address Bar to type a new address, Command L, I can navigate pretty much anywhere I want using just the keyboard. 
Now a lot of times when we want to search for something we want to actually search for a webpage we've already been to. If you do a search here at the top you can see Bookmarks and History here and it will find a result that's in your history without you having to go to Goggle or another search engine to find the page again. But you could also go to History, Show All History and at the top here you can search just your history and find just the pages that you've been to recently. A quick way to do that with the keyboard is use the shortcut Command Y. Then do Command F to move to the Search Field and then just start typing. 
So there are some things that you might not have known that you could do in Safari on your Mac. I hope you found this useful.

Comments: One Response to “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do In Mac Safari”

Stephen Schulte

4 years ago

Excellent! Perhaps you could mention the ability to PIN web pages – I actually just discovered this today and it is so handy because it takes up almost no space you can sort the pinned mini tabs and when you restart Safari they are there so you can pin something to work on it a day or two or three later…

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10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do In Mac Safari

Comments: One Response to “10 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do In Mac Safari”

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