Yosemite overhauled Safari, stripping away toolbars, offering up new views, and making searches a whole lot smarter. El Capitan offers fewer, but no less useful, tools. I’ve no doubt you’ll be thankful the first time you mute a noisy tab ①. And you might find yourself enamored with Safari’s newest timesaver, pinned tabs, too.
① Two of Safari’s best new features—pinned tabs (circled, upper left) and the capability to quickly mute noisy tabs—will save you time and irritation.
New! Stop the Noise
There’s a special circle of Hell reserved for auto-play Web advertisements. But no longer do you have to hunt feverishly through all your tabs to make the noise stop:
A Sound icon appears next to the name of any tab with audio. Click this to mute the tab.
As in the figure above, click and hold the Sound icon to the right of the Smart Search field to see the command to mute the current tab or all others (particularly useful if you’re watching a video and something on another tab starts up).
New! Pin Your Go-to Sites
Whether you’re a compulsive Facebook user or you read all your Gmail in the browser, you probably have sites you keep open all the time. El Capitan’s Safari takes a tip from Google Chrome and lets you pin those sites to the side of the Tab Bar (View > Show Tab Bar) for one-click access ②.
② Pinned tabs use either the site’s custom icon or a generic icon showing its domain name’s first letter. (Here, “D” stands for Dropbox, “A” for Amazon Smile, and “T” for Trello.)
Although pinned sites look a lot like the bookmarks saved in the Favorites Bar (View > Show Favorites Bar), they differ in subtle but often convenient ways:
Up-to-date info: Pinned sites update in the background, so they always include current content.
No wasted space: Favorites—labeled by the pages’ names unless you’ve renamed them—spread out across the browser window, but a pinned tab is only as wide as the site’s custom icon or, if it doesn’t include one, the first letter of the site’s domain.
Easy to find: When you start opening tabs, they stack up left to right. Open a favorite and it mixes in with the rest, which means you have to hunt to find the tab you want. (Or worse, you keep opening favorites in more new tabs—adding to the chaos!) You’ll always know where to find your pinned tabs: fixed in place at the left of the Tab Bar.
Designed to stay put: Pinned sites also differ from favorites in that they stay, well, pinned. Click a favorite on the Favorites Bar and then click an external link on the page. What happens? The favorite’s tab fills with the external link’s page. (Unless you Command-click the link to open it in its own tab.) Pinned sites work differently: Navigate to the pinned site’s subpages and they load in the pinned site’s tab. External links automatically open in separate tabs so that you don’t lose your place.
Not synced across devices: You can access your favorites in Safari on all devices that use the same iCloud account. Not so for pinned tabs. Once you’ve pinned a page, it appears in the Tab Bar of all new Safari windows, but only on that particular Mac. You’ll need to recreate your pinned tabs elsewhere.
Synced by content: Pinned tabs may not sync across your devices, but their content does synchronize across open windows on your Mac.
Say you open your pinned Facebook tab and navigate to a friend’s profile. Then, you open another window and click the pinned Facebook tab there. It will not open to your Facebook home page; instead it will open to your friend’s profile.
Be forewarned: this behavior isn’t always helpful. If you want to compare two pages from the same site and try to use pinned tabs to do so, you’ll be thwarted when the original pinned tab transforms to match the newly opened one.
Pinning a Site
Open an often-visited page and then do one of the following:
Drag its tab to the left side of Safari’s tab bar.
Control-click the tab and choose Pin Tab from the contextual menu ⑥.
⑥ To pin a tab, Control-click it and then choose Pin Tab.
Choose Window > Pin Tab.
A tab the size of either the site’s custom icon or the first letter of its domain name appears. This is the pinned tab.
Removing a Pinned Site
Drag its tab toward the right side of Safari’s Tab Bar.
Control-click the site’s icon in the Tab Bar and choose Unpin Tab from the contextual menu ⑦.
⑦ To remove a pinned tab, Control-click it and then choose Unpin Tab.
Choose Window > Unpin Tab.
It turns back into a regular tab.
New! Save Time with Tab Shortcuts
In the past, you could access your first nine favorites in the Favorites Bar (left to right) by pressing Command-1, Command-2, Command-3, and so on. Now those shortcuts map to tabs in the Tab Bar, starting with your pinned sites.
You still can access favorites using the keyboard. Add the Option key—Command-Option-1, Command-Option-2, Command-Option-3, and so on.
Or, go to Safari > Preferences > Tabs and deselect the Use Command-1 through Command-9 to Switch Tabs checkbox to revert to the favorites shortcuts.
New! Take Advantage of Reader Options
An often-overlooked feature is Safari Reader. Most Web pages contain loads of elements that vie for attention ⑧.
⑧ Ads and sidebars clutter Web pages, making it harder to concentrate on the text.
But in Reader, a simplified page view strips out anything—sidebars, jiggling ads, links, polls—that isn’t text, images, or videos, making a page easier to read and print ⑨.
⑨ Safari Reader strips away everything unnecessary to make the article easier to read.
Another bonus: Even if an article has more than one page, you’ll see the entire thing in Reader without having to click multiple links. In El Capitan, Reader gives you the ability to customize how articles appear.
Invoking Reader
When you stumble upon an article or blog entry you’d like to read, check to see if the Reader icon appears to the left of the Smart Search Bar. If so, click it to see the page in Reader. (Alternatively, choose View > Show Reader or press Command-Shift-R.)
Changing Reader’s Look
Previously, you got what you got with Reader—it included few options of any sort. Last year, Yosemite added the capability to make the text larger or smaller. And now you can also choose from four color schemes and eight fonts.
To customize your view, click the Reader Appearance Options button to the right of the Smart Search field. In the popover that appears, you can size text up or down. Click the big A until the text is big enough for your eyes, or click the small A until text is tiny enough to be to your liking.
Click a dot to select from the four color schemes. A black background with white text, for instance, may be better for reading in dark rooms, as well as easier on older eyes ⑩. Georgia is Reader’s default font; select any of the eight you prefer.
⑩ Use the Appearance Options popover to customize Reader’s look.
Leaving Reader
Click the (now black) Reader icon in the Smart Search field to return to Safari’s regular view.
Choose View > Hide Reader.
Press Command-Shift-R.
New! Play Web Videos Full Screen
As of El Capitan, a compatible video in Safari shows an AirPlay icon in its controller. Click this to choose your Apple TV and stream just the video to it, without mirroring the entire screen. You don’t need to worry about notifications or what’s on your screen. In fact, you can stream from a Safari tab and continue working on your Mac while the video plays on TV.
New! Update Safari Extensions Automatically
Safari extensions offer many ways to customize the browser, from the Turn Off the Lights extension—which lets you dim the rest of the Safari window when you watch a video—to extensions that hook into apps and Web services like Pinterest or Evernote. Go to Safari > Preferences > Extensions and click Get Extensions to browse.
Now you can automatically keep your extensions up-to-date. Choose Safari > Preferences > Extensions and select Automatically Update Extensions from the Safari Extensions Gallery.
New! More Sharing
Safari’s Share menu simplifies sharing links via AirDrop, email, Messages, and social media. Click the Share button in the toolbar to pick a sharing option or click More to customize which services appear. You can also save links for later or, as of El Capitan, send them to the Reminders and Notes apps ⑫.
⑫ Now you can use Safari’s Share menu to send a Web page link to Notes or Reminders (seen here).
New! Hide the Toolbar in Full-screen Mode
Safari’s toolbar always appears, even in full-screen mode. You don’t have to stick with the status quo: to make the toolbar disappear until you slide your pointer to the top of the screen, enter full-screen mode and then deselect View > Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen. (The menu item is dimmed out if you’re not in full-screen mode.)
appears next to the name of any tab with audio. Click this to mute the tab.
to see the command to mute the current tab or all others (particularly useful if you’re watching a video and something on another tab starts up).
appears to the left of the Smart Search Bar. If so, click it to see the page in Reader. (Alternatively, choose View > Show Reader or press Command-Shift-R.)
button to the right of the Smart Search field. In the popover that appears, you can size text up or down. Click the big A until the text is big enough for your eyes, or click the small A until text is tiny enough to be to your liking.
icon in the Smart Search field to return to Safari’s regular view.
icon in its controller. Click this to choose your Apple TV and stream just the video to it, without mirroring the entire screen. You don’t need to worry about notifications or what’s on your screen. In fact, you can stream from a Safari tab and continue working on your Mac while the video plays on TV.
button in the toolbar to pick a sharing option or click More to customize which services appear. You can also save links for later or, as of El Capitan, send them to the Reminders and Notes apps ⑫.