Tip: Open pages as tabs in Safari

If you often have several Safari windows open, you should consider opening those pages as tabs in a single window instead.

Tabs are especially useful while researching, where you’d traditionally have many related windows open on a topic. Instead of a collection of unruly windows, tabs gives you a single window focused on that topic:

individual_windows.png

tabs.png

Without tabs

With tabs

If you’re researching multiple topics simulaneously, you can have multiple windows open, one per topic perhaps, each with many tabs per topic.


Tabs appear in the tab bar:

tab_fullsize.png

 

How do I open a page as a tab?  Create a new empty tab by choosing New Tab from Safari’s File menu. You’ll see the tab bar appear with your new tab already selected. Type in the URL of the page you want to view.

There’s also a handy keyboard shortcut for opening pages in tabs:

Hold down the Command key when you click on a link.
tab_file_menu.png

How do I move between tabs?  To view a tab, just click on it in the tab bar. There’s another handy keyboard shortcut for moving between tabs:

Type Command Shift → and ← to view the next and previous tabs.

How do I close a tab?  You close tabs a lot like you close windows: click in the tab’s closebox, choose Close Tab from Safari’s File menu, or type Command-W.

 

You can customize tab behavior within Safari’s tabs preferences pane, but the default behavior will probably suit you fine.

tab_prefs.png

Saturday, December 29th, 2007, 3:53 pm    Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “Tip: Open pages as tabs in Safari”

  1. Leland December 29th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    Another tip: Add a tab by dragging a website address URL into the tab bar. You can drag a URL from anywhere — a text document, an email that somehow didn’t render it as a clickable link, or even other links in the web page you’re viewing right now — and the new tab will load in the background.

  2. Don December 30th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    If you have a Mighty Mouse–or a mouse with a scroll wheel where pressing on the wheel produces a click–if you click on a URL link with that scroll wheel it will open in a new tab.

  3. RobbieC September 10th, 2008 at 11:33 am

    The question is how to open Safari in tab view as default…this is very handy in IE7.

  4. John Blackburn September 10th, 2008 at 12:54 pm

    RobbieC, do this:
    1. Open a new window.
    2. Go to Safari’s View menu and choose Show Tab Bar. That setting is remembered for new windows, meaning new windows will open with tab view as default.

  5. RubenW October 25th, 2008 at 3:58 am

    you should open terminal (on a mac only) and copy paste this code in terminal and pres enter: defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true