Safari Pinned Tabs

A new feature in Safari for El Capitan is the ability to save web pages you frequently visit as a pinned tab. Pinned tabs will always appear to the left side of the Safari tab bar as small icons. You can access them like other tabs, but they will automatically appear on any new Safari window you create. If you click on an external link in a pinned tab, the other site will open in a new tab. Plus, pinned tabs are persistent across all windows, matching the same page and page position.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's look at using Pinned Tabs in Safari.
There are many ways to save your favorite websites so you can access them very easily every day. A new way, in El Capitan, is called Pinned Tabs. 
Pinned Tabs are just a quick way to permanently add a site to the Tab Bar. Now you don't see the tabs here because by default it is off. I can go to View and Show Tab Bar. I only have one tab there. Or if I didn't have that on I could actually just by going to another tab, like let's go to Wikipedia here and I'll do Command T and go to Apple here, so I have three tabs open. Anyway you bring it up you've got these tabs. 
Now you can pin a tab by using Window, Pin Tab, and it will compress into just an icon here, over here on the left. This means this tab is permanently going to be there in the Tab Bar. I can do that with a second window. I can actually Control Click on it there and I can hit Pin Tab for that one. So you can see I've got these two sites here and I've got a third site that is just open normally.
There is no close button here for any of these because you never permanently close them. It basically pins them as always open. It doesn't mean that it is going to load the page if you're not there but it will probably preload it so it's always there ready to go. So I can close this tab here and it kind of behaves as if no tab is open. I've got the Favorites listed here and the Frequently Visited as I would if I had the browser just in a completely new state. But I have these tabs here that I can quickly and easily access. 
They won't go away. If I quit, if I do whatever, you can see there is no way to close these. These are for things that you want to have open all the time. Things that have information you access all the time. If you use web based email, for instance, you may want to have that as a pin tab. If you are always checking certain news sites you want to have that as a pin tab. It is just very easy to get to it.
If you want to unpin a tab you can Control Click on it here and Unpin it. You can also close it so now it is gone. Basically it seems to do the same thing. In addition to that you can rearrange them. So, for instance, let's reopen that one and this one here and I'm going to pin both of these. If I want to rearrange the order they are in I can just click and drag them around like that just to change it.
You can also drag and open tab here just over to the left to pin it. Likewise you can drag a pinned tab over to the right a little bit to unpin it.
So here is some other things about Pin Tabs. Say I was in Wikipedia, I'm in this pinned tab here, and I'm going and looking through Wikipedia it will stay inside that tab. But then I go to click on an external link and what it will do is it will open that external link in a new tab automatically. So you can see that tab stays there because it is still on Wikipedia but as soon as I try to go outside of Wikipedia it will jump to a new tab.
Now these pinned tabs are persistent between windows. So you can see here I'm in my Wikipedia pinned tab, I've gone into a webpage and I've scrolled down to the bottom of that webpage. If I were to go and open a new window in Safari you can see that I have the same pinned tabs here. If I go to Wikipedia you see it matches my location between the two windows. And if I were to scroll around say or maybe go to another page, so let's go all the way to the top here and just go to the contents page of Wikipedia, as soon as I switch to this window it updates that Pin Tab to match. 
So I'm always in sync between these windows. It's like I'm looking at the same webpage in the same position but in two different windows.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Safari Pinned Tabs”

Scott Beattie

9 years ago

Hi Gary - Can you explain the difference between Unpin Tab and Close Tab when right-clicking on the pinned tab icon in the tab bar? I can't see any difference between the two. Both close and unpin will close the tab and unpin it.

Gary Rosenzweig

I agree. They seem to do the same thing.

I'm not finding anything definitive in Googling this question. I just posted the question on Apple Discussions - and I will let you know what I find out.

Hi Gary - Here is the response that I got from Apple Discussions. When you right click the pinned tab icon and chose Unpin Tab - the page will be unpinned and return to a normal table. When you close Close Tab - the tab will be unpinned and closed. Surprisingly - this appears to be working as stated - today - however - yesterday (my first use of tab pinning) was not exhibiting this behavior - both Unpin and Close were unpinning and closing the tabs. Possibly a glitch related to first use?

Comments Closed.

Safari Pinned Tabs

Comments: 4 Responses to “Safari Pinned Tabs”

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