10 macOS Safari Tips That Will Make You More Productive

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at ten productivity tips for Mac Safari.

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So a lot of people primarily use their computers to browse the web. Most Mac users use Safari. So let's look at some tips for making your time using Safari more productive. Let's go into Safari Preferences and go to Tabs. Here there's a set of checkboxes that you should pay attention to. The first one is whether or not Command click opens a link in a new tab. The second one is when this is open is it made active. I prefer to have the first one checked and the second one not checked. Let me show you how it works.

So I'm looking at a webpage like this one and I see an interesting link usually I want to open it up but I want to continue reading what I'm reading right now. So I'll Command click on a link and you could see it opened up in a new tab here but it didn't take me away from this article. I can keep reading it. I can go through and open up a variety of new tabs. Then when I'm done reading this I can go and visit those tabs. Now if on the other hand I had this checked this is how it works. I Command click this and it just takes me away from the original. I find this to be less productive. But note you always have the opposite available. You can see shortcuts here that Command click will open a new tab and Shift Command click will the new tab and make it active. If I check this box they simply switch. Neither one is the right way to go. It's just a matter of knowing how Command click and Command Shift click work and you use the appropriate one at the right time.

Now if you go to General in Preferences here you can set New Windows to Open With and New Tabs to Open With. You can choose a variety of things. The Favorites page, Top Sites, a specified homepage, or Same Page you're currently viewing. I prefer to use Empty Page for both of these. It's the fastest method. So if I go Command T here it opens up and new tab. It's completely blank and opens up instantly. Notice the cursor is blinking here in the Address Field and I can immediately start going to a new page. It's easy enough to get to the Homepage, Top Sites, or Favorites using Shortcuts after that. You can even get to the same page by going to Window, Duplicate Tab right here and you can make a keyboard shortcut for that in System Preferences if you use that a lot.

Now a big time saver can be something called Quick Website Search. You could find the settings for that in Preferences under Search, Enable Quick Website Search, and then click Manage Websites and you should see a list of websites. These would be websites that you've previously done a search on. So, for instance, on MacMost I've got a Search field here. If you've ever used that to search MacMost then it should appear as Quick Website Search in that list. Now instead of using that Search field you can simply type in the Address bar the name of the site. So macmost, then a space, and then search for something like say iMovie. Now notice here there's a special section underneath, Search MacMost.com, and it says search MacMost.com for iMovie. I can select that and it will jump right to the Search Results. 

Not Goggle search results but the custom search results for that site. So for instance if I were to do wikipedia and search for something, since wikipedia is in my Quick Website Search list, I can see I get a variety of options here. I can search wikipedia for that term but also a couple of results already appear here and I can select them. By the way if you want to get to something in this list of suggestions here you don't need to use your mouse. You can use the down arrow to go one-by-one or you could use Command down arrow to jump to the first item in each section. Then simply hit Return to jump to it.

Now notice here at the top in the Address Bar you can see the full URL. The full path to the webpage I'm looking at. But maybe you're not seeing that. Maybe you just see wikipedia.org there. Well, if you go to Safari, Preferences, under Advanced there's a setting here for Show Full Website Address. By default it's off. Then you just get the webpage. I don't like having it off because look at how these three pages all show the same thing at the top. I'd rather know exactly what page I'm at especially for complex websites that have different sections. So I have this turned ON.

You may notice here I've got this list of Bookmarks right under the Address Bar. That's called the Favorites Bar. You turn it on under View, and there's Show/Hide Favorites Bar. Shift Command B. Now this is simply just the bookmarks that are in the Favorites folder. If I go to Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks I'll see all these different folders here and different things just at the top level. I can get to any of them by going to Bookmarks and here at the bottom I can easily access those. I could also click here and then have a list of them on the left. But anything under Favorites will appear here in this special Favorites Bar without me having to go anywhere else and it's always visible. Any Bookmarks' folders I put in here will be little DropDown Menus. So you can store a lot of bookmarks here in your Bookmarks Bar and get to the site you need to visit the most very quickly.

Now we've already seen how the Address Bar can show you a variety of things including Quick Website Search. You can select the Address Bar anytime by using Command L. Anything you type in here will give you a variety of different results including some things you may not know about. For instance there's a section called Switch to Tab. If you have a tab already open that matches this result you'll see it here. So you can use this as a quick way to get to different tabs. You'll also see Bookmarks and History. So instead of having to go to Bookmarks and search through these or open up the Bookmarks sidebar and drag down and use the search field here or do the same thing with History going through all the different history here or Show All History and then Search, you can simply just start off, right away, by typing something in here and looking in the Bookmarks and History section. It will find anything there. 

You can use this for not only searching the internet but  just for quick access to Bookmarks and History without having to worry about any of those menus or special screens.

Another way to search for tabs is to click this button here and it brings up the Tab View. You can see previews of all the tabs. You could also get to it by going to View, and then Show Tab Overview. So Shift Command backslash gets you there really quickly. Now if you do Command F you get a Search Field here and you can search the tabs that you have open. You can just narrow it down that way. But better still you can skip the Command F and actually just start typing as soon as you get to this screen. It will start the search.

Let's say you're not in Safari currently. You're using another app or just on the desktop and you want to go to Safari and start a website search. Well you can do that really quickly without having to activate Safari first. Just use Spotlight. Command Space to bring up the Spotlight menu.  Then type your search term. Now you're going to get some results here. You're going to see Bookmarks and History, which is a good way to access those. You're also going to see searches for files and you'll even see website searches here as well. But you can just skip all that by using Command B. You don't even have to wait for all this to populate. Just use Command Space, type something, and Command B will instantly launch Safari and do a search from that term.

You probably already know that Safari has custom settings for each website. Go to Safari, Preferences and then go to Websites and you can see a list of websites that have custom settings. You can select any one of those and then you can go through all the different settings for that site. But there's a quicker way to get to that when you're already at the site. You can go to Safari, Settings for this site and notice this little control comes out of the Address Bar here. So another way to get to it is simply Control clicking the Address Bar and selecting Settings for this Site. Then you have all sorts of controls like the Default Page Zoom, whether or not video and audio automatically plays, and things like Camera and Location access for that site.

Another quick way to get to this is to customize the Tool Bar. If you go to View, Customize Tool Bar you can add the Website Preferences button to anywhere in the Tool Bar. Now you can just click on this to get to Website Preferences.

Another really useful custom button under Customize Tool Bar is iCloud Tabs. Add that. Now if you've got an iPhone, iPad or another Mac signed into the same iCloud  account and you're using Safari on that and you have tabs open there you can click here and see those tabs. So in this case  on my second Mac, a MacBook Pro, I've got these two tabs open. It makes it really easy to be looking at a website on my MacBook Pro, close it, then go to my desktop Mac, then click this button and I can click here to jump right to a page that I have open on the MacBook Pro.

Here's a bonus tip. That is to use Reader View. So when you have an article like this if you click here you get Reader View. For wikipedia it's really not that big a difference. But for a website that has news articles and it's filled with ads and all sorts of distractions going to Reader View can really help your productivity. So it's worthwhile to learn the keyboard shortcut. Just look under View, Show Reader. It's Shift Command R. You can quickly and easily go to Reader View, with Shift Command R, and then the same keyboard shortcut gets you out of it. If you customize this site you can select Use Reader When Available. I find this often leads to trouble. Sometimes you don't get all the content. Like you don't get videos to some images. So it is best to go to the website, just as it is even with the ads, and just  quickly switch to Reader View when you identify that it's an article you can read that would look better in this mode.

So there are some productivity tips when using Safari. If you have a productivity tip for Safari that I haven't included be sure to mention it in the comments below.