MacMost: Safari

In Safari 14 the new Start Page replaces Top Sites. The Start Page has several sections, including your Favorites, Frequently Visited sites and more. You can customize the Start Page to act much like the old Top Sites page, while also including your Reading List and iCloud Tabs pages.

Tabs are a useful alternative to using multiple Windows in just about any app or situation on your Mac. Here are some tips to get the most from using tabs in apps like Safari, Pages and even the Finder.

Here are 10 quick tips to help you use Safari on your Mac in a more efficient way. Learn how to quickly search your bookmarks and history, find open tabs, read articles, search specific sites and more.

There are many very useful Mac features and functions that users don't know about because they atre hard to find. You can batch rename files, dictate text, see a paper tape in Calculator, summarize text and easily remove ads from web articles.

Many people are experiencing problems with YouTube showing an error message instead of the video. Usually this is caused by an ad blocker browser extension.

It seems that uploading to Instagram is something you can only really do from your phone. But by tricking the site into thinking your Mac is a phone, you can easily upload photos and viddos to Instagram in Safari on your Mac.

If you ever have trouble reading text on your Mac because it is too small, there are many ways to adjust text in different places to help. You can make a universal change by adjusting your display resolution, use helper features like Accessibility Zoom, or change the display size for text in apps like the Finder, Safari, Mail and more.

Reader View is a special mode you can bring up in your web browser that gets rid of ads and other page elements and lets you focus on the text of an article. In Safari on your Mac you can bring it up with the click of a button or a keyboard shortcut. You can also set a website to always show Reader View when possible, though this can cause problems. Firefox also has a Reader View, but Chrome's version is difficult to get to and doesn't work as well. Safari on iOS and iPadOS also has Reader View.

You can use JavaScript in Automator to fill in a web page form. If you make this a Quick Action you can access it from the menu bar or as a keyboard shortcut. This can help speed up situations where you need to fill in the same form every day.

The new version of Safari in iPadOS (iOS 13) is now a desktop browser rather than a mobile browser. This means sites should look and work like they do on a Mac, not an iPhone. With this comes new features such as a download manager, zoom buttons, per-site settings, and one new feature that even Safari for Mac is missing.

Here are 50 shortcuts that will make it quicker and easier to navigate around web pages and tabs. Learn how to use your keyboard to move around on a page, find information, and jump to different pages and tabs. Also find out about ways to click on links with modifier keys to open them in different ways and how to drag tabs and downloads.

The Safari Reading List on Mac, iPhone and iPad is a better way to save a web page to read later than bookmarking. The page will be added to the left sidebar where you can easily return to it. Items sync across your devices using iCloud and you can also save them to read even when you are offline.

Most Mac users are browsing the web using either the built-in Safari browser or they have installed Google's Chrome browser. Both browsers have their advantages. Each works well within their own Apple or Google ecosystem. Safari has some clear advantages when it comes to MacBook battery life and privacy. Chrome works better for Google Apps users and those that also have Android or Windows devices.

Clearing the browser cache was simple in Safari, but the menu command is gone. However, you can still clear the cache, and do so more efficiently by clearing cache, cookies and other items on a per-website basis. You can also bring back the Empty Cache command. Clearing a website's cache and cookies is one way to fix things when a website starts misbehaving.

If you are having trouble accessing a website, it could be because of a problem with your DNS cache. To reset your DNS cache on your Mac, you need to enter a command using the Terminal. In most cases, this will work, especially if you are using macOS Sierra, High Sierra, or Mojave. Earlier versions of OS X may need some additional commands as well.

When you download a file in Safari, the file is saved in the default location, usually the Downloads folder. You can select any location as the default in Safari Preferences. You can also have Safari ask you each time you download a file and then you can select the location and even change the filename. You can also bring up the context menu in most cases and decide whether to use the default location or a specific location each time.

Websites use notifications to send you alerts when there is a new post or just to get your attention when not at the site. Sites have to ask for your permission to send these notifications, but it is easy to accidentally allow them if you are not paying attention. You can turn them off by going to your browser settings. Learn how to turn website notifications off in Safari, Chrome and Firebox.

The Favorties Bar in Safari can be a hard-to-read line of small text. But you can always add any Emoji character, just like you can with folder and file names. Finding the perfect emoji for a bookmark is sometimes easy and at other times challenging. The result is a colorful and easier-to-read Favorites Bar and Bookmarks menu.

Some people like to put web location files on the Desktop or in the Dock as an alternative to using browser bookmarks. A better idea may be to create a folder to hold web location files and then add that to the Dock. You can set it to List mode and then use file names and folders to further organize your Dock bookmarks.

While private browsing windows do not really give you privacy, they are useful for a variety of things. You can use them to log into the same site as multiple users, or to view your own site or accounts as someone who is not logged in at all. You can search and shop without building up a history that can haunt you later on. It is also useful for giving presentations and getting around soft paywalls.