10 Mac Safari Tips to Improve Your Productivity

Safari is a default browser on Mac built for better battery performance. Apple claims you can browse longer hours and watch videos longer compared with Google Chrome or Firefox. But for a normal user – especially those migrated from Chrome or using Chrome in parallel – Safari is still not a user-friendly browser. However, you can use appropriate settings in Safari to make things easier. In this article we explore 10 Mac Safari tips to improve your productivity and user experience.

Mac Safari Tips

You can’t uninstall Safari browser in Mac as it comes as part of the macOS. Therefore, we recommend optimizing Safari usage with the following tips instead of using an additional browser app.

1. Pinning Tabs

Pinning tabs on the browser allows adding a site’s icon on the left side of the tabs. This tabs will be active in the background even you have closed the particular tab and helps to reopen the page quickly. This is very useful feature to quickly go to the needed page when viewing many sites on a single browser window.

When you are on a page, go to “Window > Pin Tab” to add the icon of the site to the left side of the browser tabs. Right click on the pinned tabs and choose close or unpin option any time to remove the pinned site.

2. Reader View – Block Ads

Reader view is the wonderful option allows you to view the page content without distracting ads and sidebar content. When a website supports a reader view, Safari will display a wrench icon (4 lines) left to the site address on the address bar. Click on it to view the plain content of a webpage without any advertisements. Reader view is also available under “View > Show Reader” and you use “View > Hide Reader” to see the default web page again.

When the reader view is on, you can see an icon to increase or reduce the font size at the right of the address bar. By clicking the font sizing icon you can also change the background color of the page and font family to make it comfortable for reading. Note that, reader view option will be visible only if the page supports it, otherwise you will see the wrench icon on the address bar.

3. Viewing Full URL

Safari by default shows the domain name in the address bar without the complete URL including the page name. This may look fine when you view random sites, but cause difficulties for users wanting to explore more categories on a particular site by looking into the URL. Also developers creating websites need to know the complete URL instead of the domain name.

You can enable viewing full site address in Safari under preferences. Go to “Safari > Preferences” or press “Command + Comma (⌘+,)” to open preferences and navigate to “Advanced” tab. Enable the smart search field option “Show full website address”.

Note that when moving the cursor over the address bar you can also see an + icon to add the page to reading list.

4. Viewing Web Page Source

Viewing the source of a webpage not only helps to understand the design concepts of the page but also helps to learn CSS / HTML quickly. Especially for web developers, inspecting an element on a page will save lot of time. By default, Safari browser does not show the developer options like Google Chrome or Firefox. Fortunately, you can enable it under the “Advanced” tab of the Safari preferences.

Once enabled, Safari will show “Develop” menu. Now right clicking on the page will show “Show Page Source” and “Inspect Element” options. You can use these tools to view the source code of a webpage.

5. Using Safari Extensions

Though it is easy to get browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, there are also useful extensions available for Safari. Open Safari browser and navigate to “Safari > Safari Extensions…” menu to open Safari Extensions category in Mac App Store. There are hundreds of free extensions like Ad blocker, translators, screen capture tools, etc. Click on the “Install Now” button to add the extension to Safari.

6. Tab Navigation Using Command + Number

When you opened lot of tabs, it is easy to go to the particular tab using “⌘+ number”. For example, use “⌘+1” to go to the first tab and “⌘+5” to go to fifth tab on the browser. This is a default setting in Safari and you can enable it under preferences in case if it is not working for you.

7. Disable Website Tracking

Many websites track user’s activities across tabs to collect various data. With the interest based advertising technologies, websites like Google uses the tracked data to show relevant ads on the sites you visit. For example, if you have viewed a page related “web hosting” in one tab, you may notice any further pages you open will have web hosting related ads. Safari allows to disable this website tracking by sending additional header on the request.

In order to request websites not to track your activities, enable the option “Prevent cross-site tracking” against “Website tracking” option under “Privacy” tab of Safari preferences. Note that, though Safari sends “Not to Track” request to websites, it is up to the sites to obey or disobey the request.

8. Clear History and Caches

Over the period of time there will be lots of unnecessary data accumulated as history and cache. This will slow down the performance of the Safari when viewing the web pages. You can clear the history under the menu “History > Clear History…”.

When you have enabled the developer menu (as explained in section 4 above) you can also delete cache under “Develop > Empty Caches”. For a developer, it is very useful to set “Disable Caches” to view the modifications instantly on the browser without problems.

9. Show All Tabs Icon

There is icon called “Show all tabs” available at top right corner of Safari browsera. This icon helps to view all open tabs in a single browser window classified under domains. You can easily close or choose the required tab when you have many open tabs.

10. Using iCloud with Safari

If you are using multiple Apple devices like Mac, iPhone and iPad, use iCloud sharing to store bookmarks, reading list and passwords across all your devices. You can use the “iCloud Tabs” option available in sidebar to quickly access available tabs from other devices.

Bonus Tips – Share Icon

It is very easy to share article what you are seeing on the Safari browser. Just click on the “Share” icon to share the article on external social sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter or add the page to reading list and bookmarks.

Click on the “Show sidebar” icon to view the webpages shared with you from others.