You hear more criticism of Safari than you do of any other browser on OS X -- but then, of course you would. It's the one that comes on your Mac, and if nobody ever criticized it, you'd never think to try
Chrome or
Firefox's latest build (that will likely be incremented before you finish this paragraph), or any of the other options. There are things that rival browsers do better, but by far the biggest difference between them all is your personal taste - but bailing on Safari means you're missing out on excellent features, and most especially so in the very latest release. Here are ten fast and short pointers for getting more out of Safari on your Mac.
This is not to say that you shouldn't look around, or keep a spare alternate browser on hand for troubleshooting. Who knows, Firefox 38 might be perfect for you, and Chrome has its fans too, but the Safari you've already got is good -- sufficiently good that if you have skipped straight to Firefox 39 or Chrome and haven't even looked at Safari, that's not fine at all.
Press Apple-L
This actually works on every browser, but it's so handy that once you know and try it, you won't go back. When you're in Safari, just hold down the Apple key, and tap on the letter L. Safari immediately highlights the address bar -- doesn't just take you there so you can start typing, it also highlights what is already there. If you just want to reload the page, hit Return. To add something to the end of the address like a specific page, tap the right arrow, then begin typing. Or yes, just Apple-L and start typing: whatever is already there will be replaced by what you type, and off you go.
Total savings each time you do it: probably too small to measure, but it feels fast: you think of a site or you think of a Google search term and, snap, you're writing it. You're not breaking concentration to find the pointer and move it around.
Press the spacebar
Open a long webpage (or a Reader view -- more about that in a bit). Tap the spacebar. It moves you down the page by about a screenful. You can keep doing that until you reach the bottom -- or you can hold Shift before you tap the spacebar and now you'll move back
up the site by about a screenful.
Pinch to see your tabs
New to Safari for OS X Yosemite, there's a button next to the familiar Sharing one. If you use a mouse, you can click on that, but it's more satisfying if you have a trackpad -- because you don't have to mouse up to that little icon, you just pinch in with two fingers. Either way, Safari changes to show you all your currently open tabs in one spot. It looks great, and it's very easy to see where everything is, because each tab is shown as a thumbnail image instead of simply its title. It's also clever: if you have four consecutive tabs open on the same site, it will stack those together. We'd like to see it be just a touch cleverer, and group them even if they aren't on consecutive tabs.
We'd also rather like it if this showed you every page you've got open, not just all the tabs on one page. But for the speed of seeing what's where and then moving to the right tab instantly, this tab view is gorgeous.
You can't rearrange your tabs here, you have to go in to one and then drag the title bars around but if you ever need to do that, you probably also want to keep the tabs to come back to later. Right click on any one of them and you get an option to bookmark all of the tabs at the same time.
That's nice, but it's the full-on tab view we like -- and partly because it has one more feature worth singling out, namely ...
Open tabs from other devices
Oh, but this is so good. Right there on that same tab view there is a straight list of all the tabs and all the pages you have open on all your other devices that are using the same iCloud address. So at your Mac, you can see and open the page you were reading last night on your iPad. Rush out of your office before you finish reading a page on your Mac, and you can open it on the train on your iPhone.
It is also a visual reminder that you have too many Apple products, but we'll gloss over that.
Close tabs for speed
This is the only tip here that isn't about speeding up how you use Safari, it's about speeding up how Safari itself works. Every open tab takes resources from your system, and especially when you're very low on disk space, this matters. If your Mac is running slowly, and you find you have a lot of windows and tabs open in Safari, just quit the whole application and you'll see an improvement.
This is no help to you if you need those tabs, but it shows you the performance hit and now you can relaunch Safari -- which will reload all those tabs and windows just as they were -- and start picking off the ones you can do without. Oh, but what if you open your notebook back up in a coffeeshop, and all those tabs are replaced with a login page? Never fear! One you have logged in successfully, close the entire Safari window (don't quit the app, just close the window) and choose "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" under the History menu item. Voila! Genius!
Top Sites
Top Sites is a long-standing quick way to get to the websites you use most often. The latest version is by far the best, though, as it's subtle enough to ignore when you don't want it, and big enough to use when you do. Where previous ones took over the whole Safari window to show you five massive icons, the new OS X Yosemite Top Sites is a drop down that appears when you click in the address bar. Click there -- or if you don't want any of your top sites, just keep typing and go where you need.
This Top Sites, though, is also neatly arranged into two portions. One is constantly updated list of the sites that you have been visiting most often, which is a boon when you're on a job that needs you forever checking the same two or three sites. The other is a more bookmark-like list of sites you have
chosen to be top ones. Initially, these will be the ones you've previously added to what was called the Favourites Bar (it's still called that, but by default it's switched off; you'll never miss it). From now on, you can just go to a site you want to add, click in the address bar to call up the Top Sites and then drag the new site in there. Remove old ones by dragging them off to the side, and they vanish.
Curiously, Top Sites works whenever you click into the address and search bar -- unless you're in tab view. For some reason, it just doesn't appear then. There you have to click on the Top Sites icon: it's a square grid of dots near the traffic light-like icons. That's always available to you, and it always presents Top Sites as a full page instead of a drop down.
See the whole website address
This is less a new feature, and more a way to placate people who dislike how Safari now hides website addresses. So where your address bar used to show in full something like -- sorry, this is going to be ugly -- "http://www.macnn.com/articles/15/01/27/youll.want.to.use.pdfs.more.when.youve.got.one.of.these/" it now just shows you "macnn.com."
Those who dislike this say it's hiding vital information from readers, but it's done to make sure we inescapably see the most important part of the address. Even on a big iMac screen, addresses can readily be longer than are displayable in one go in that address bar, and there's a way to take advantage of that if you weren't the fine, upstanding person you are. Imagine there's a nasty, money-grabbing, virus-laden website, and it tricks you into going to a page whose full address is "www.nastymoneygrabbing.com/virusladen/padding/more/padding/buywindowstoday/makethisaddresslong/www/macnn/com." There is a good chance all you'd see is the macnn/com bit at the end, and potentially be fooled.
Safari now makes sure it shows you the nastymoneygrabbing bit, and we like that. However, it takes some getting used to when you've had the full address all these years, and also you may well want to just twiddle the address. Say you work internationally and you're comparing an update on the UK and the US versions of your site. They may well be hanging off the same .com address, but with just a /uk/ or a /us/ somewhere in there. Rather than slog through finding the international menu or something, it's handy to just be able to click in the address, change that one letter from "k" to "s," and hit Return.
So do exactly that. Even though Safari doesn't show you the full address by default, it's there. Click on the address and you get the full thing, ready to edit and change as you need. If you highlight the URL bar and select all to copy a URL, don't worry -- you'll always get the full URL. If you just can't abide this new way of showing addresses, go to Safari Preferences, select Advanced and click on "Smart Search Field: Show full website address."
Private browsing
Press Shift-Apple-N or choose File, then New Private Window. A new Safari window opens, and the browser won't remember any site you go to, any search you make, any passwords you enter. It's not like this will protect you from NSA-level snooping, but it probably does mean that you can be the owner of nastymoneygrabbing.com without your family knowing. We're not judging, though you should be ashamed of yourself.
One nice touch in this feature is that any tab you open within this private window is also private. Don't step outside the private window, though; the other window still keeps its history and all that.
Share pages
You do this. You read something great on MacNN, and you want to tell someone, lots of people, everyone about it. We don't mind. In any browser, there is a button for sharing these things -- but in Safari, sharing is built into OS X. So you set up your Twitter and Facebook account details once, and forever after can just tap that Share icon at top right.
There is more to it than Twitter and Facebook, though. By default, Safari's Share menu has options for emailing pages to people. You can send pages to people over AirDrop, via iMessages, and you can just keep them for yourself by "sharing" them to your own Safari Reading list for taking a look later.
Reader view is a terribly underused feature as well. Any time you find yourself reading a longer, multi-page or single-page article, you might try pressing that little paragraph-like icon at the very left end of the URL bar. Suddenly, the page you were reading transforms into an ad-free, larger-print, paper-like reader view that you simply scroll down to continue reading. No more endless page clicks, and you can even save the article as a PDF in this view. Or put it in your Reading list for offline enjoyment, say the next time you're on a plane or a cruise ship with no (affordable) Wi-Fi.
Just like with extensions on iOS 8, though, other apps can get in to this list. So if we see a page we need to read for a particular task we've got to do, we can click on the Share button and send it straight into our OmniFocus To Do list. We happen to prefer
Pocket to Safari's Reading List, so we can also send longer articles there to read on our commute home.
This list of options can start to get rather long, so a particularly handy new feature is that once you've shared something to someone by one of these routes, Safari remembers. It adds that person and that method at the bottom of the list, so you can quickly repeat the step and send them something else.
Reading what others share
Without you or anyone having to actively choose to share a link directly to one another, you can get a glimpse at what your social circle is reading via the "Shared Links" sidebar. They need to have posted a link to Twitter or LinkedIn, but then it appears like a recommended reading list. If the article or site is any good, you can share it to your social services, - and it might come up on
their Shared Links.
Plus, you can add RSS news feeds. We wouldn't recommend that, though -- we're RSS news fans, and we use dedicated apps like
Reeder. But you could add some serious news, if your Shared Links seem to be all cat videos today.
Safari, especially in the newest version for OS X Yosemite, is under appreciated. Move to Firefox 99 if you fancy it, but give Safari a proper try first.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
Check back for a new Pointers column every Tuesday and Thursday for OS X or iOS hints, tips and tricks!
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