discover these Safari tips to improve your productivity. Safari is a default browser on Mac built for better battery performance. Apple claims you can browse 2 hours longer and watch Netflix videos 4 hours longer compared to Google Chrome or Firefox.
But for a normal user, especially those who migrated from Chrome or use Chrome side by side, Safari is still not an easy browser to use unless you have the proper settings to use it more productively.
10 Safari tips to improve your productivity
In this article, we explore 10 Safari tips to improve your productivity and user experience.
Pin Safari Tabs
Pinning tabs in the browser allows you to add a site icon to the left side of your tabs. These tabs will be active in the background even if you have closed the particular tab and it helps to reopen the page quickly.
This is a very useful feature to quickly go to the required page when viewing many sites in a single browser window.
When on a page, go to “Window > Pin Tab” to add the site icon to the left side of your browser tabs. Right-click on pinned tabs and choose close or unpin at any time to remove the pinned site.
Reader view: block ads
Reader view is the wonderful option that allows you to see the page content without distracting from ads and sidebar content. When a website supports a reader view, Safari will display a wrench icon (4 lines) to the left of the site’s address in the address bar.
Click it to see the simple content of a web page without ads. Reader view is also available in “View > Show Reader” and use “View > Hide Reader” to see the default web page again.
When reader view is on, you can see an icon to increase or decrease the font size to the right of the address bar. By clicking the font size icon, you can also change the page background color and font family to make it more comfortable to read.
The reader view option will be visible only if the page supports it; otherwise you will see the wrench icon in the address bar.
Full URL display
By default, Safari displays the domain name in the address bar without the full URL, including the page name. This may look good when viewing random sites, but it causes difficulties for users who want to explore more categories on a particular site by searching the URL.
Also, developers creating websites need to know the full URL instead of the domain name.
You can enable the display of the full site address in Safari in preferences. Go to “Safari > Preferences” or press “Command + Comma (⌘ +,)” to open the preferences and navigate to the “Advanced” tab.
Enable the Smart Search Field option “Show full website address”.
When you move your cursor over the address bar, you can also see a + icon to add the page to your reading list.
Web page source display
Seeing the source of a web page not only helps to understand the page layout concepts, but also helps to learn CSS/HTML quickly. Especially for web developers, inspecting an element on a page will save a lot of time.
By default, Safari browser does not show developer options like Google Chrome or Firefox. Fortunately, you can enable it in the “Advanced” tab of the preferences.
Once enabled, Safari will display the “Develop” menu. Right-clicking on the page will now display the options “Show Page Source” and “Inspect Element”. You can use these tools to view the source code of a web page.
Using Safari extensions
While it’s easy to get browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, there are useful extensions available for Safari as well. Open the Safari browser and go to Apple’s Safari extensions page.
There are hundreds of extensions like ad blocker, translators, screenshot tools etc. Click the “Install Now” button to add the extension to Safari.
When you opened many tabs, it is easy to go to the particular tab by using “⌘ + number”. For example, use “⌘ + 1” to go to the first tab and “⌘ + 5” to go to the fifth tab in the browser.
This is a default setting in Safari and you can enable it in preferences in case it doesn’t work for you.
You can also enable opening a link in a new tab (otherwise you can open in the same tab) and trigger an open tab when a new tab is opened.
Disable website tracking
Websites track user activity for various needs, with interest-based advertising technologies, websites like Google use the tracked data to show relevant ads on the sites you visit.
For example, if you have viewed a page related to “web hosting”, you may notice that any other page you open will have ads related to web hosting. Safari allows you to disable tracking for this website by sending an additional header in the request.
To request that websites not track your activities, enable the “Ask websites not to track me” option against “Website Tracking” in the “Privacy” tab of Safari preferences.
Although Safari sends the “Do Not Track” request to websites, the sites must either obey or disobey the request.
Clear history and caches
During the period of time, there will be a lot of unnecessary data accumulated like history and cache. This will slow down the performance of Safari when viewing web pages. You can clear the history in the “History > Clear History…” menu.
When you have enabled the developer menu (as explained in section 4 above), you can also delete the cache under “Develop > Empty Caches”.
For a developer, it is very useful to set “Disable caches” to see the modifications instantly in the browser without problems.
Show all tabs icon
There is an icon called “Show All Tabs” available at the top right corner of Safari Browser. This icon helps to see all open tabs in a single browser window sorted into domains.
You can easily close or choose the required tab when you have many open tabs.
Use iCloud with Safari
If you’re using multiple Apple devices like Mac, iPhone, and iPad, use iCloud sharing to store bookmarks, reading lists, and passwords across all your devices.
Additional Tips Safari to improve your productivity, share icon
It is very easy to share the article of what you are seeing in the Safari browser. Simply click 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 the “Show Sidebar” icon to see bookmarks, reading lists, and shared links.
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