How to get the most out of tabs in Safari
February 18, 2009 by Sukrit Dhandhania
Safari is the default web browser that ships with MacOS. It was also recently ported to Windows. Here are some tips to help you get more productive using the tab feature in Safari.
To create a new tab you can use one of the following methods. You can click on the File -> New Tab in the Safari menu, or you can use the keyboard shortcut of Cmd + T. You can also double click on empty space in the Tab Bar to create a new tab. To close a tab you can click on the cross sign for the tab in the Tab Bar, or you can select the tab and use the keyboard shortcut Cmd + W to do the same.
Apple introduced some really neat features with Safari 3. The browser now allows you to drag and drop tabs. You can click and drag a tab from one Safari window and drop it outside the window to have the tab in a new window of its own. Alternately you can drag and drop a tab from one Safari window into an existing Safari window to move the tab there. You can also use this process to rearrange the order of the tabs in one window. Click and drag a tab horizontally in the same window to move to before or after other tabs. If you have several Safari windows open and want to merge all these windows into one single window with each separate window forming a tab click on the Window option in the Safari menu and select the option Merge All Windows.
If you have a browser window open and you want to bookmark all the tabs in this window grouped together you can do that by clicking on the Bookmarks item in the Safari menu and then selecting the option Add Bookmark For These 8 Tabs, the 8 being the number of tabs open in your window. Select where you want the bookmark to be saved.
One hidden feature of Safari which Firefox users may be used to is to have the browser open all new links in a new tab. You can do this manually by holding down the Cmd or Apple key while clicking on a link. However, I find it useful to set this up as the default behavior for Safari. To set this launch the Terminal Application. It’s in you computer’s /Applications/Utilities directory. Enter the following command into the Terminal window and hit the Return key:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
Now quit and relaunch Safari. All the links you click on should now open in a new tab. To roll this back enter the previously entered command into the Terminal with a small change, switch the true at the end to a false. Your links will now open normally again.
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