How To Block or Allow Pop-Ups in Safari on a Mac

Most of the time you don't want to allow sites to open up their own pop-up windows. But occasionally you want to allow it for some sites. Here's how to set it up.
Check out How To Block or Allow Pop-Ups in Safari on a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about pop-up windows in Mac Safari.
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So pop-up windows are when you go to a webpage and a second web browser window opens up. In the past these have been annoyances in the web browser when you get a window opening up that you don't want. Currently few websites will ever use these because most browsers, including Safari, will block them automatically. However, there are times when you want a pop-up window. For instance, some important websites, in particular, for some reason, banking websites will often throw up a pop-up window to go to another page instead of just doing everything in the current browser window. If you have them blocked you often see a message saying you should see a new window appear. If you don't please unblock pop-up windows. So, how do you do that? 
Here I've created a sample webpage and if I were to refresh the webpage it should open a pop-up window. Except, of course, Safari is blocking it. As a matter of fact if I refresh you'll see a message up here, Pop-up window blocked, that appears briefly notifying you that there was an attempt to open a pop-up window but Safari said No. 
So how do you allow it if you actually want the pop-up window. 
Well, it used to be that you could go into, I think, the File Menu in Safari and there was an option there to Allow or Block pop-up windows. But you won't find it in any of the menus in Safari today. So if you go to Settings and you look under General there is no mention of pop-up windows there. Nothing under Tabs. Nothing under Security. Nothing under Privacy. So where is the Setting to allow pop-up windows? 
Well, it is under Websites because Safari will block or allow pop-up windows depending upon the site. This is for security. You can Allow a pop-up window, say, at your banking site so you never have to deal with it again. It will just work as expected. But still blocked on every other website. So go to Websites and here you're going to see a list on the left of all the different ways you can customize the settings for specific websites. Go to the bottom and you'll see Pop-up windows. Select that and on the right you'll see a list of websites. You'll see all the sites that you currently have open, maybe in different windows or tabs, and you'll also see any place where you've set a custom option for pop-up windows. In this case I don't have any of those and I only have this one page open. So that's all I see here. You could see it is set to Block and Notify which is exactly what it did. It did know I have a pop-up window but it did give me a notification of it in the address bar. 
I could set it to Just Block, so don't notify, or I can set it to Allow for this website. As soon as I've done that I now have a Custom Setting for this particular site and it will always appear here in this list. If I ever want to remove that custom setting I can select it and click the Remove button or I can just change the setting here. So now let's try reloading this page and see what will happen. You could see not only does it reload the page but it also gives me the pop-up window. So now I've allowed it just for this website. 
Let's go and change it back to Block and Notify. Let's look at a second way that pop-up windows could appear. That's with a Link. So this will open up and different pop-up window than the one automatically opened when I loaded the page. The difference there is automatic versus manual. The page is trying to automatically open a pop-up window so it is blocked. But here this is manual. I'm clicking a Link, taking an action, to open a pop-up window. The page isn't doing it on its own. So, when I do this it will show the pop-up window even though I have it blocked. It's only blocking the automatic pop-up windows, not the manual ones. 
Another thing to note is that not all pop-up windows are actually pop-up windows. They're two very different things. One is an actual pop-up window. A real window that is being created that will be separate from your regular window. Just like in Safari if you would choose File, New Window. The other would best be described as an overlay. Its content is on the same webpage. There's no new window created. Just a floating element in the HTML on the page that appears somewhere over some other content. It could be static. It could even allow you to drag it around and move it like it is a kind of a normal window. But it is still content on the page itself. Not a separate window. Those won't be blocked by this because they're not really new windows at all. It is just a different way of displaying content at a site. 
Now, as far as these settings are concerned there is one more thing you should know. There is a default setting here at the bottom. When visiting other websites - it is BLock and Notify, Block, or Allow. So this is what happens when something isn't in this list. Say it is a new webpage that you've gone to for the first time. How should it behave? Should it Block and Notify or Allow pop-ups. Well, it is going to use this setting here. You should have this set to Block and Notify. Don't set it to Allow. That's like going back in time to when web browsers just allowed pop-up windows. 
Also note here that you've got Share Across Devices at the lower left. This will use iCloud to share your settings in here including which websites are allowed to show pop-up windows with your other Macs and other devices. 
Let's change this to Allow, and I want to show you how this works differently if you are in Full Screen Mode. So here I am in Safari in regular window mode. Just a window. But if I go to Full Screen Mode, well then how exactly does a pop-up window work. Because this is full screen mode. There are no windows. Well, if you open a pop-up it just opens it up in another tab. Same thing if I were to reload this page. It will open up the original page here and it will open up the pop-up window in a 2nd tab. So it will use tabs instead of windows. But still follow those same rules. So if I were to go into Settings here and Block and Notify and then reload this page it won't open up a new tab with that pop-up window. 
So that's how you deal with Pop-up windows in Mac Safari. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
How To Block or Allow Pop-Ups in Safari on a Mac

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