21 Safari Web Browsing Productivity Tips

Learn some advanced techniques for browsing the Web with Safari on your Mac. Use tabs more efficiently, add a Favorites bar, view two Web pages at the same time, autofill forms, log into multiple accounts at the same time, search engine tips and much more.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for being more productive when using Safari on your Mac. 
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Using Safari is pretty straight forward. Just like using any other web browser. But there are some useful tips that will help you browse the web more efficiently. First of all, really embrace using Tabs instead of using multiple windows to go to different webpages. When you want to create a new Tab just use the keyboard shortcut Command T. Now you can close them just as easily. You can use Command W which is usually close window. But if you go to File and then look at Close Window you'll see when you have multiple tabs open that's Shift Command W. Then Command W is just close Tab. When you only have one tab open then that will close the window. In addition, whenever you close a Link you can choose to open it up in a new tab. If you hold the Command Key down then typically this will open up a new tab that you can then go to. You've got settings for this in Safari, Settings, and then go to Tab. If you check Command Click it opens a Link in a new tab then you can hold the Command Key down, click on any Link, and you get the New Tab. Furthermore, if you check the second box here then it opens up the new tab and jumps to it. These two settings interact with each other in various different ways. So be sure to read this list down here to see exactly how your choices will affect how you use the different modifier keys with a click. 
Note when you have multiple tabs open you can move between them using Control. That's Control, not command, and Tab. So you use Command Tab to go between Apps.  
But then Control Tab to go between Tabs within Safari.  Add the Shift Key to this and you can go backwards through the Tabs. You can also use the Command Key, not the control key, and one of the numbers to jump to a tab. So Command 3 jumps to the third tab, Command 2 to the second tab, and so on with Command 9 always goes to the last tab to the right. 
Now conversely try not to use tabs too much. Some people really slow down their productivity by having 20, 30, 40, 50 different tabs open at a time. Tabs for pages they haven't looked at in quite awhile. You want to kind of limit your use of Tabs to make it the most efficient. It is usually pretty easy to trust that you can find a webpage again. For instance, here I'm looking at a specific article in Wikipedia. I can easily go to Wikipedia and search for this and find it again. It's not like if I close the tab I'll never get back to this page. You can, of course, Bookmark a page as an alternative to adding a tab and then just use the Bookmark if you really feel you'll have trouble getting back here. 
Or you can use History to go back. As a matter of fact if you Show All History or Command Y you can easily search your history. Then you can find a page you were looking at earlier today, yesterday, last week, whenever. Even just using a regular search will show you different results including Bookmarks and History. So you don't even have to go to the History page to actually search your history. Also limit how you use Bookmarks. Having a few Bookmarks can be very handy. Having hundreds or thousands of bookmarks basically defeats the purpose. In most cases you can trust that you can easily find the webpage with a web search next time, or you can use your History like I showed to search for that page and go back to it. You don't have to save every page you find remotely useful as a bookmark. Another alternative to Bookmarks is the Reading List here and you look for Add To Reading List, Shift Command D, you can add a page like to the Reading List instead of your Bookmarks. Then go to the Sidebar here and then go to Reading List. The idea is Reading List is for something you want to go back to and read it later but not necessarily save permanently. Whereas a Bookmark is something you want to save permanently because you need to keep going back to referring to it or it is a page that is updating with new information all the time. 
Speaking of using History, you don't always have to go to History here and then look through your history there or go to Show All History. You can also use the back button for this. If you click the back button once it goes to the previous page. But if you click and hold it it will actually show you a history. The interesting thing is this is a history of just this tab. So not of all the different windows and tabs that you're using in Safari. Just this one. 
Another tip having to do with Tab is that you can actually sort them. So if you have a ton of different tabs you can go to Window and then Arrange Tabs By. You can pick Title or Website and it will sort them by title or the website name. You can also Control Click on any tab here and get that as one of the options. 
If you really have a lot of trouble closing tabs and you always end up with a ton of them no matter how hard you try to limit them there's a setting for you in Safari, Settings, Tab. You can set Automatically Close Tabs to something besides manually. For instance, you can have Tabs automatically close after one day. So if you haven't looked at a tab in one day it goes away. If one day it too short for you maybe try one week. 
In addition to using File and Close Tab, or Command W to close the current tab, you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on any tab and just close that one tab that way or you can Close All Other Tabs. So if you're doing research and you have a bunch of tabs open and you want to get rid of all of them, except for the one you're on, you can use this. There's also a handy Close Tabs to the Right. So you can arrange your tabs, move things around, drag them left and right, and keep the tabs on the left and just close the ones to the right to close a whole bunch of them. So, for instance, you have 3 tabs you want to keep. Just move those to the left and then use this to close all the rest. By the way when you close a tab Undo works. So you can Undo that Close All Tabs to the Right or just closing the last tab. 
Another thing you can do is Pin a tab. So you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click here and Pin Tab. This does a few things. First it moves it all the way to the left and takes up less space. In taking up less space notice there is no Close button for this. You can still Control Click it and then Close Tab but Command W won't work to close that tab. If you close this window all of these tabs will go away. But the Pin tabs will stick around. So it is basically a way to work with tabs and show that some tabs are more important than others. Plus if you ever click on a link in a pinned tab and it goes to a different site notice that it will open up in a new tab, not change the page on the pinned tab. 
While keeping the number of Bookmarks under control is important, there's one particular folder in Bookmarks that has an interesting feature. If we go here to Edit Bookmarks and look at all the bookmarks here you can see there's a Favorites folder. It works just like a regular folder when you're looking at your bookmarks. But if you go to View and turn on Show Favorites Bar these bookmarks, the ones in the Favorites folder, will appear here underneath the Address Bar. As a matter of fact a folder inside of this will appear as a little Dropdown Menu. So you can put the sites that you go to all the time everyday here in your Favorites folder and then use fewer tabs. So there is no need to keep this tab open, for instance, that shows Apple's page because I've got a Favorites bookmark that I can easily access at any time just by clicking right here. 
Now if you are using a lot of tabs one thing you can do is separate them into different windows. So I've got this one window here with these three tabs. I can create a new window here and now I've got a bunch of different tabs here. But a way to do that in one window is to use Tab Groups instead. So I'm going to go to File and then New Empty Tab Group. Then I can go here and have some new tab groups and this is in a separate tab group. I can easily switch to this Tab Group and I'm back where I was before and then go to this one. It's like having two separate windows open except I'm only using one Safari window, each with its own set of tabs. 
Now you're going to be doing a lot of searching if you're browsing the web. Here are 3 of the best SEARCH TIPS that work in just about any search engine. One thing is when you do a search with multiple terms in it, like this, the search engine is going to interpret what you mean. Do you mean these two words together? Do you mean that each word is found somewhere on the page or maybe just one word is found on the page? But, if you put quotes around it, it does two things. First, it is going to look for those words together. So if you look at the search results here you'll see not only does it find pages with those two words together but actually shows you a segment of the page that contains those two words. So you can look at the context in which they are used. The other thing it does is say that you only want to see pages with these exact words in them. So it is not going to look for similar words. The next thing is to use minus to subtract terms. So if you're looking for something like this but you know you're not interested in this specific brand you can put a minus, without a space, and then the word after it, like that. Then your search results won't include that term. The ads might though. But the actual search results will be without that. You can do multiple ones as well like that. The third tip here is to use Site: and then no space. Then type a domain like Apple.com and then type what you want to search for. The results you get are only going to be from that site. It can be a subsite as well. So you can type site:discussions at Apple.com space and then a regular search term and you'll only get results that are there. 
But you don't actually need to do that in a lot of cases. For instance, if I were to type Macmost and then space and then a search term, like iMovie, notice there's Search Macmost.com here. You have to go down here to click on it and you'll get not a search engine search result but a search result using the native search engine of that site. So you go right to site and you could see by the URL it's just doing a search with that site. The controls for this are in Safari, Settings under Search. Look for Enable quick website search. Click Manage Websites and it will show you which websites you can do this with. Note you have to have gone to the website at least once for this to work. However, go to that website once and the developer has coded it correctly, it will then be added to this list because Safari will learn how to search that site. 
It is also common when you search to do a search like this, go to the search results, and then click on a result there. Then maybe continue to go and click on other links. Then you get to a dead end and you decide you want to go back to the search. You could go, in your History, back up to where you see the search there. But there is also a way to do it if you go to History. Look for Return to Search Results and go to Option Command S. Then that takes you right back to the search page where you started your journey. 
Now even when you search the web and you find the page you want sometimes the information you want isn't right there at the top. You can search on a webpage itself using Edit, and then Find. The keyboard shortcut there for Find is Command F. This is search on the page. So Command F brings up this little search box here and you can start searching for something and it will jump to the results. Also, an easier way to read a page without having all of the, maybe, the ads, the Sidebar items, navigation items and all of that is to use Reader View. You go to View and then Show Reader,  or Reader Shift Command R you can get this. There's a button up here for it too but the button doesn't always appear. Shift Command R will work even in cases where the button may not be there. Then it could be easier to read and even search with Command F for contents on this page. 
Now Tabs are great for having multiple pages you can access very easily. But what if you want to see more than one page at a time. Well, of course, you can click the Green button or hover over it and go to Enter Full Screen and it take you to a Full Screen version of this window. Which can be handy to focus on what you're doing. But you can also do Split View. Let's go here to the Menu and create a new Safari window. Since I was in Full Screen already it creates a new window also full screen. So let's go to another page here. I'm going to enter Mission Control, so Control and Up Arrow. Now you can see my two full screen Safari windows. I can drag one to the other and it will go into Split View mode. Now I'm looking at both at the same time. I can drag the middle bar a little bit, to give one a little more space if I want. But this could be really handy. Like say you can have Goggle Docs open in one taking notes and then you're research here in multiple tabs in the other. 
Another way to get to this is if you've got two Safari windows open like this. Go to either one of them and hover over the Green button and say you want to tile that to the left or right side of the screen. It will ask you to choose a window for the other side with the windows that are available on that Desktop and now you're in Split View again.    To go back you can use these Green buttons again or you can go back to Mission Control here and then just simply Close that space and now everything goes back to regular windows. 
A productivity tool that is in Safari is the Start Page. This is what you get when you create a new Tab, like this, or you can go to Bookmarks and Show Start Page there. You've got control over whether or not that shows up under Tabs. You've got New Tabs Open With and you can choose Start Page. In Windows Open With and you can choose Start Page. The Start Page can be very useful. It's another place where you can show the Favorites Folder in Bookmarks. It can also show Frequently Visited Pages, Reading List, your recently closed Tabs. So another way to get back Tabs that you've just closed. You've got your Settings with the Start Page at the bottom right here. You can Add or Remove the things you like from it. 
A problem I often hear people have is they go to a webpage and they are asked for the millionth time today to enter in a name or email address. But you shouldn't actually have to type anything in Safari. As long as Safari can recognize this is an email address, in other words the website developer has coded it correctly, you should be able to click in here and it should either give you a list automatically or you can click here to Autofill from your email addresses. It is taking this from your Contact card in the Contacts app. So make sure that is up to date and has the email addresses you want. But even for non-email fields, like this name field here, I can click here and I can have it fill in information from my Contact. It will not just fill in that one field but as many fields as it can figure out. If you go to Safari, Settings and then look for Autofill. Make sure you have all these checked. These are shortcuts to different parts of macOS that holds this information. 
Now let's say that you need to be logged into the same site but with two different accounts. Like you have your personal Facebook account but you also manage one for work. You can do that pretty easily just by being logged in in your main Safari window into one account and then creating a new private window, which has its own cookies and website data, and logging in here. Then you can be logged into two separate accounts. The problem is once you close the private window it's gone. You have to create it again and login again. But, if you use Profiles you can now be logged into multiple accounts. So you can open a new window in Safari that is using a different profile. That can be logged into a different Facebook account and you can close that window but then reopen a new window in the same profile when you're still logged in. It's like having two separate Safari apps. One where you're logged into a site under one account and one that you're logged into that same site in a different account.
Of course no video on productivity and efficiency is complete without some keyboard shortcut tips. Some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Safari are Command L which instantly takes you up to the Address Bar and you're ready to type. So you can start a new search or go to a webpage right away without ever having to take your hands off the keyboard. Also, if you ever need to refresh a page you don't need to go and find this tiny little button here in the Address Bar. Just use Command R and it will refresh the page. Also, the Back Button is something you might use a lot. You don't actually need to use the button. The keyboard shortcut, as you can see here for back, is Command and then the left square bracket. If you do close a tab and want to get back to it, a handy way, like I showed you is History. The keyboard shortcut for that is simply Command Y. But then you still don't have to go to the mouse or trackpad after that. You can just use the Down Arrow keys to go to the entry you want and then press Spacebar and it will jump to that page. 
So I hope you found some of these Safari tips useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 6 Responses to “21 Safari Web Browsing Productivity Tips”

Sheldon
7 months ago
Thanks bunches
Brian s
Another fantastic list of tips. THANK YOU
Richard Albrecht
Loved the video, I picked up a lot. Was wondering it you had a source to find these laid out so I can have a quick reference in notes?
Gary Rosenzweig
Richard: There's a transcript above if you want to use that.
Jack
Incredibly useful video,
Phil
Fantastic stuff... so many hints and tips I didnt know - and I get so excited when there is one that I do know :)