MacMost Now 63: Safari Snap Back

Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at the snap back feature of Safari that allows you to temporarily mark Web pages and search results to return to them quickly.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary Rosenzweig, On this episode of MacMost Now. Let's take a look at an obscure, but upmost feature of Safari, called Snap Back."
"Snap Back allows you to mark specific pages and jump right back to them. This is instead of using the back feature, which will take you back to every single page you ever visited. There's actually three different ways to use Snap Back. Let's take a look at each one."
"First way to use Snap Back is to use Search Snap Back. Say we're looking for something like, Campgrounds in Colorado. We'd type in the little search box at the top right of the Safari Window. And we get our search results. Now, say we select a site to look at. Say, this one looks good. So we go in and take a look at that one. Now, notice right away that we have in the search box now, a little orange arrow. So we dig deeper down into this sight. And we'll click on some links in here, and we keep going. Now if we actually click this little orange arrow, what's going to happen, it's gonna snap back to the latest search results. Click and there we go, right back to that. This is very useful when you're searching for something, you get this great search page of results and you dig down into a site and find out it's not what you wanted, so you just click that Snap Back button and you end up all the way back at your search page. Sure, you could do it from the back button here, but sometimes that can get very long and complicated. So having that search Snap Back is very handy."
"The next type of Snap Back is a page Snap Back. Say you go to a website like, MacMost.com, and you enter through the main home page. Now you decide to go deeper into the site, maybe, you say, Oh, look, I can just ugh, look at blog post's. And from Blog post's I can go down into a blog posting right there. You'll notice that there's a little orange Snap Back in the address bar now, and that will Snap back to the first page you visited on that website. So we click on that and it goes back to the main MacMost page."
"Now, perhaps the most useful of all Snap Back's is the Manual page Snap Back. This allows you to set your own page to go back to. So for instance, say you are at a website like MacMost, you go to the blog's and you see that "Wow" there's a lot of things that I want to investigate here. So before you go investigating, you want to set this page to be the Snap Back. And see right now, there's an orange Snap Back there that will take you back to the MacMost Main page, but instead I'm gonna go to the History Menu and Mark page for Snap Back. The Snap Back icon goes away cause we're already at the page that we'll be snapping back to. But we go down in to a blog post and we'll see that it appears now. When I click on it, it goes back to the blog post, so, if you want to, say, investigate a whole lot of blog posts and you know that some of those are gonna take you to some other sites and dig down deeper, but you want to go back there. You can set this page. You can also see in the History Menu, you can not only mark the page for Snap Back, but you can, ugh look at, ugh, go directly back to the page that you wanted to without clicking an icon, or use the keyboard shortcut and you can also do the same thing for search results Snap Backs."
"So Snap Back's are subtle, but useful tools. It's that type of thing that's not gonna change your world, but once you start using them, you'll probably find you use it all the time and it saved you a few seconds here and there. Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 63: Safari Snap Back”

Glen Farmer

17 years ago

As a new Mac user I found this tip to be excellent and timely.
My son has been driving me nuts about the triple click thing on the Mac.
With this tip I was able to squash another of his Windows is better than Mac rants, ha,ha..
I've been using snapback alot since you pointed it out. Great feature..

Really enjoy your podcasts . The tip coupled with the examples you give really works for me.
Thanks..

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MacMost Now 63: Safari Snap Back

Comments: One Response to “MacMost Now 63: Safari Snap Back”

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