Customize Safari With These 10 Preferences

Safari has a lot of preferences but you can start customizing how it works by focusing on these 10. Change the behavior of what happens when you open a new window or tab, click on a link, or download a file. Also learn how to reduce clutter when typing in the address field.

Check out Customize Safari With These 10 Preferences at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten Safari settings to customize your browsing experience.
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So in Safari, when you go to Preferences, you're faced with multiple tabs with tons of different settings. It's easy to look at all of these and just decide that you'll leave them all alone. But I'm going to show you ten that you should look at to customize things based on your preferences. Let's start off right here with Safari Opens With. This is what happens when you first launch Safari. You could choose to have it open a new window and be ready for you to search or go to a webpage. You can have it open a new Private window which will put you in private browsing mode. You can have all windows from the last session reopen. Now this is the one that you may want to choose. That way you could Quit Safari and then launch it again and you're right back where you were.Then you could do the same thing with Private windows. 
So let's choose this one and let's say I've got a few tabs open here in this window. So I've got my site, Wikipedia, and Apple open here. I'll Quit and then I'll run Safari again and I'm right back with those three tabs. Now right below that there are two settings here. New windows Open With and new tabs Open With. These control what happens when you already have Safari running but you decide to open up a new tab or a new window. You've got the same four choices for each. You can go to the start page, a specific page which we'll look at in a minute, start with an empty page, or use the same page that you're currently viewing. In other words duplicate the current window or tab. In the new windows setting you can also choose all of the tabs that are in your Favorites folder or all the tabs that are in a specific Bookmarks folder. Obviously you can't do that with tabs. You just have those four main choices. 
So Same Page is very useful especially in situations like this. Let's say you're reading an article and you decide you want to dig down by clicking onto a link. You can click on this link here but let's say you're not finished reading this article. You can do Command Tab and you could see how it opens up a duplicate of the same page. Now in the new tab you can click to go down. I'll show you another way to accomplish the same thing in a minute. Now next we've got the Home Page. So the Home Page is something you could set either in New Windows Open or Tabs Open to see that page that's the default when you open up the new window or tab. So you could set it to something useful. For instance if you always go to the same news site to check on the latest news or maybe you go to a Dashboard for your company or organization you can set that as your Home Page. Then every time you open up a new window you could set it to open up that Home Page or every time you open up a new tab you could set it to open up that Home Page. You also have a Keyboard Shortcut under History to just go to that Home Page. 
Now the next one I want to show you is a little confusing. It's Favorites Shows. The default is Favorites. Your Favorites folder in your Bookmarks. So of course Favorites is going to show Favorites so what does this actually do. Well, it controls what happens in two situations. One is the Start page and the other is when you click on the Address field at the top. Let me show you. Here I am at the Start page and you could see at the top is says Favorites and it shows me the Bookmarks I have in Bookmarks, Favorites. Also if I'm at a page, like let's go to this one, if I click here in the Address field you could see I get this Dropdown to start off that shows me my Favorites. You can change what shows up in these two locations. So let's go to Bookmarks and take a look at those. I've created a new folder called Start Page. In there I've put four sites that I want to appear in those two locations instead of what's in Favorites. So I'll go here and I'll change Favorite Shows to Start Page. Now for this to take effect you want to close the current Safari window or just to be safe Quit Safari and start again. Otherwise it kind of retains the old settings. So now you could see on my Start Page I get Favorites here. If I go to a page and then I click here in the Address Bar you could see I have this Start Page folder showing here under Favorites instead of the Favorites folder. 
Now let's look at another setting down here under General. You have Open Safe Files after Downloading. What will happen there is if you download a certain type of file, in this case Movies, Pictures, Sounds, PDFs, Text Documents, or Archives, like zip files, it will automatically open them up after they are downloaded. I prefer to have this setting Off for two reasons. First of all it's a little annoying. A lot of times I want to download an image. I don't want it to launch Preview and show me that image. I could easily go to the Downloads folder and double click it to do that but most of the time I just want it to Save the file. The other problem is I don't consider it completely secure because a long time ago, many years ago, there was an issue where certain files could trigger an app to do certain things and it truly wasn't safe to have those files automatically opened up just because you clicked on a link. Now there's no vulnerability known today that does that but I prefer to keep this off anyway. 
Now let's look under Tabs. The second item is When A New Tab or Window Opens Make it Active. Now if you look at the first item here it says when I Command click it opens up a new tab. So this is what I was talking about before. If I click on this link here it will take me to that link. But if I Command click on it it opens up a new tab and keeps the current tab at the current location. Now noticed it opened up a new tab but now I have to manually go to that new tab. Well, with this setting it could do that automatically. So now I Command click here and you could see how I jumped to it. So basically what it comes down to is which behavior do you use the most. Do you want to be able to click on something and open up a new tab and then you have to go to it yourself or do you want to have it automatically take it to that new tab. Notice when I check and uncheck this the description below here changed. The and makes it the Active Tab will switch between Command click and Command Shift click. So obviously Command click should be the one that you want to use the most often and Command Shift click is the alternative.
Now let's look under Search. Here you've got two settings. Include search engine suggestions and Include Safari suggestions. These things will appear when you start doing a search. So you can see here if I Search I'll get Siri suggestions and Goggle suggestions. A lot of time this clutters things up and if you have a slow connection it could even take some time to generate this. But you could see if I turn this off and turning the first off will automatically turn off this then typing that will give me none of that. I can just search Goggle using this current term. Also you've got Show Favorites here. So notice when I click in the Address field here it shows me Favorites and Frequently Visited. This also clutters things up a little bit so if you want to get rid of it you can turn that off. Now when I click in this field I get none of that. 
Now let's move over to Advanced. The one thing I like to have turned on is Show Full Website Address. You may notice that in the Address Bar here I see the entire address. But by default that is off meaning that when you're at a page here you just see the website. Usually that's not good enough for me because sometimes I could have multiple tabs open for the same website but I want to be able to see exactly which page each one is looking at. Now another important one is Reading List. Save Articles for Offline Reading automatically. If you use the Reading List, say on your MacBook, to save pages so you can read them later, turn this on. That way it will happen automatically. So when I have an article like this and I go and add it to the Reading List I can then go to my Reading List here and know that this article is ready for offline viewing. Otherwise I'd have to Control click on it or swipe to choose an option to save it. If you want to use the Reading List for offline reading all the time just turn this on and it becomes basically a feature that does exactly that. 
Here's a bonus one. Go back to Search and make sure you have checked Enable Quick Website Search. You can click here on this button to see different sites that have this setup. How do sites get in this list? Well, you have to them and do at least one search. So, for instance, at MacMost use the Search field at least once to do a search or at Wikipedia use it once. Now once you've done that you can go into the search field up here, type the website name, and then a space, and then type a search term. Notice that you'll get Search MacMost.com for iMovie. So this is Quick Website Search. It basically does a search into that website using the native search field in that site. So I can do the same thing for Wikipedia. Something like that and you can see I get the Quick Website Search here. I get the same result as if I had used the Wikipedia search field.
So checkout each of these preferences and set them to your liking so you can get the most out of using Safari.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Customize Safari With These 10 Preferences”

nick

9 months ago

hi Gary, any idea why “Safari opens with…” shows me only two choices? They are: “All windows from last session” and “All non-private windows from last session”. I’m using v 14.0. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: If you have “Close windows when quitting an app” turned off in System Preferences, General, then those two options no longer make sense, so they are taken away.

Dolores

Hi Gary, Do same instructions to set up “Safari opens with: All windows from last session” apply to MacBook Pro? MackBook Pro is my device. Have followed video instructions, tried w/ and w/o ticking “Close windows when quitting an app”. Made sure MacBook Pro is up to date. When I open, then close Safari, it opens to new page w/ prior open windows not present. Since I have it set to open with Favorites, that is what I see; prior windows are not seen as open! Help!

Dolores: The Mac model doesn’t matter. Not sure why it isn’t working for you. Just check those settings and experiment.

8 months ago

Hi Gary, Got it!
“All windows from last session” works if you select “Quit Safari” from drop down window. Does not work if you click on red circle with x. Thanks.

Customize Safari With These 10 Preferences

Comments: 5 Responses to “Customize Safari With These 10 Preferences”

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