Tabbed browser tricks
Mac Tip #220/09-November-2005
Way back in Tabbed Browsing Mac Tip #136/11-Feb-2004 I introduced the notion of using Tabs in your web browser. This means you can have one web browser window open but have different web pages available within that.
Your web browser is the software you use to visit web pages. If you use Mac OS X you’re probably using Safari, but there are several others you could use. Check out the links at the end. They all use Tabs. My current favourite is OmniWeb, even though it costs US$30 and the others are free.
In the older Tip I explained about different key commands for opening links into tabs, but there’s more you can do.
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Instead of special clicking to open a link into a new tab try dragging the link onto an empty space on the Tab bar. That creates a new tab and opens the link into it.
Remember to click on the thumbnails of the screenshots to see a larger version.
To move between tabs use Command Shift and the right or left arrow. You can also use Command Shift and the curly braces { or }.
If you install a freebie called Safari Stand and choose Toggle Sidebar you’ll see that each tab is represented by a small thumbnail of the page. You can click on a thumbnail to move to that Tab or drag the icons around to change the order of the tabs. Safari Stand can do a lot more besides.
In spite of your best attempts to control it a website may pop a link open into a new window. Safari Stand allows you to drag the Favicon from that web page into the Sidebar of the window you already had open. That will open the web page into the window you were trying to use.
You can see an example in the screenshots online.
The Favicon is the small graphic at the left hand end of the Address Bar. Many websites have their own icons these days. At MacTips.Info it’s the inverted traffic signal or red, orange and green circles.
In Safari (with or without Stand) try Control clicking on the actual Tab in the Tab bar to find some interesting options, such as refreshing all tabs, closing other tabs, reloading tabs and so on.
- Safari Stand: hetima.com
- Firefox: www.getfirefox.com
- Safari: www.apple.com/safari
- Opera: www.opera.com
- OmniWeb: www.omnigroup.com
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