Using the New Safari Tabs Features On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Safari Tabs features.

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So ahead of the release of macOS Monterey Apple has released Safari version 15. If you've gotten it through software update you now have access to the Safari features that Apple has been talking about for Monterey even if you're still in Big Sur. The big feature you'll notice is how Tabs look and work. 

So here I am in Safari. Let's open up some new Tabs. You could just use Command T for that and let's go to another page. I'll do another one. Now we've got three tabs open here at the top. It already looks a little bit different. The way these are framed is different. You'll see a box here around the address of the current tab that we're on and then each tab is this rounded rectangle here at the top. In addition if you turn on the Favorites Bar you'll notice that now the Favorites Bar is now below the tabs instead of above them. Now if you've been following along with Apple's announcements regarding macOS Monterey you'll notice  this isn't how Apple originally said it was going to look. Instead it was all supposed to be one line with the Address Field built into the tabs. Well that is actually a feature except you've the option to have it look this way or on one line. Go to Safari Preferences and then go to Tab and here you'll see an option to switch between the two styles. So separate is there by default but you can switch to the Compact View and then you get to see it all on one line. The difference is that the Address Field is now built into the current tab. So here I could actually type in this tab here, since this is the one I'm using, and change the address. If I switch to this tab then this becomes the active Address Field. Of course you can use this not only to type URL's but to start searches. 

So you can switch between these two to get the look that you want. So I think this view will appeal to people that want to save space. Have as much space available for the page itself and have the top bar take up as little space as possible. This one will appeal to people that like to have a separate address/search field here at the top. Another option you've got here is Show Color in Tab Bar. So notice here on this site the background color for the page is green so the Tab Bar, the whole top area here, takes that appearance. If you don't want that you can simply shut it off and then you'll just get a neutral color there at the top. 

Now the look of the Tab Bar is actually a minor change. The major change is the addition of Tab Groups. Previously you may have had ten, twenty, thirty tabs open all crowded into the Tab Bar. But now with Tab Groups you can group them together and only see some tabs at a time. So to use Tab Groups start by going to the sidebar here. I'm going to click here to show the sidebar. Here at the top you'll see all of your ungrouped tabs. It says there are three of them. Now if we want to create a Tab Group we can click here and it gives us the option to create a new empty tab group or create a Tab Group with the tabs that are currently shown. You can also find these in File and you'll see New Empty Tab Group and New Tab Group With right there. So let's say, yes we want to create a tab group with this. So we'll do that and we'll give it a name. Let's say these are the tabs I would like to check in the morning. So I'll put it there and now you could see I've got this group here and also I've got one ungrouped tab. I go back to that and it's basically my Home page set to be blank. So I can continue to add tabs here that are ungrouped and you could see I've got these three tabs here ungrouped. My Morning group are these three tabs. 

So I can click here and create more Tab Groups if I like. So I'll create one called Movies here. So you can see I've added three tabs here and these are in my Movies group. I can switch to the Morning group and then back to the Movies group. It remembers exactly which tab I was viewing, even my position on the page. Then I always have my ungrouped tabs right here. 

Now you can do all sorts of things with tabs. Simply Control Click, right click or two finger click on a trackpad, and you can take a tab and move it to a Tab Group and select it here or create a new Tab Group with that item. You could also just drag and drop. So I could drag this to a tab group like that. You also saw there were options there to arrange tabs by title or website. You can also Close All Other Tabs or Close Tabs to the Right. 

So one interesting thing to note if you've ever pinned tabs before you still have that option here to pin a tab but only in the ungrouped tab. If you go to the grouped ones there's no option to pin. The reason for that probably is that tabs in Tab Groups already act like pinned tabs. So it's not that you can't pin a tab it's just that they're all pinned all the time. You can also Control Click on the Tab Groups right here and then just jump right to a tab in a group. Tab Overview is available by either clicking the regular button at the top right or clicking here and then you get to see Tab Overview just for that one tab group. If I switch to another tab group and I go to Tab Overview I'll just see the ones in that group. 

Tab Groups also work with New Windows as well. Let's open up a new window here. You can see I've got two Safari windows. I can move to a Tab Group in one window and then be viewing that Tab Group there and another Tab Group in another window. So the tab groups aren't tied to a specific window. They're in every window. Also there are a few keyboard shortcuts to move between tabs and tab groups. Like before you could go to Previous tab and Next tab using Control and Tab or Shift Control Tab. You can also to the next tab group with Shift Command down arrow and the previous one with Shift Command up arrow. Another thing to notice is when you have a separate tab layout the Reload button is here to the right side of the Address Bar. There is really no additional things inside tabs except the Close button. But in the Compact View the Reload button doesn't seem to be there but if you move the cursor over the tab you can see it's there. You also get this button here which has additional functionality. Then you can also, instead of always having to bring up the sidebar, you get this little pulldown menu here and you could switch to a Tab Group that way. 

One last preference I want to show is Automatically Collapse Tab Titles into Icons. So you can see here this is a really crowded field of tabs and each one just shows the Icon for the site. If I turn that Off you could see it now shows the title for each one but I can't see them all at once. At the right here I can see there's one kind of hidden there and I basically use my trackpad to scroll over between them all. It's kind of a nice feel to it but I could see other people wanting to have the smaller tabs with just the icon in them. 

So after updating to Safari version 15 take some time to play around with Tabs. You don't have to decide whether you like the Compact or Separate version right away. Try one one day and one the other and if you change your mind later on you could always go back and try another one. It's so easy to switch. For me the biggest problem was having to get used to having Favorites below the Tabs. But after a few hours I got used to it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.