Set Always Open New Windows in Tabs with Safari for Mac OS X

Dec 9, 2010 - 4 Comments

Safari icon You can set Safari in Mac OS X or Windows to always open new windows into new tabs instead. In fact, new versions of Safari default to a variation of this behavior, but older versions need Safari to manually be set to open new windows as tabs, but with a little adjustment you can make Safari open all windows always into tabs, even those tiny pop-ups you may encounter on some websites. Yes really, ALL windows in Safari.

This is a really nice feature that helps keep your web browsing tidy in Safari, here’s how to enable it:

How to Open New WebPages in Safari Tabs on Mac

  • Open Safari Preferences under the “Safari” menu
  • Click on the “Tabs” icon
  • Next to “Open pages in tabs instead of windows” select “Always” from the pulldown menu
  • Close Safari Preferences

open new window in tab safari

Note the default setting in modern versions of Safari on Mac and Windows is “Automatically” – this is different from the “Always” setting which overrides the small windows that are sized for things like videos or other accessory browser windows.

Safari always open new windows into tabs

Now anytime a new window is created it will instead go to a new tab in the currently active containing window.

This works in the Mac OS X version of Safari and the Windows version too. It’s supported in all versions.

.

Related articles:

Posted by: William Pearson in Mac OS

4 Comments

» Comments RSS Feed

  1. Alberto says:

    Well, I auto answer me ;)

    With cmd + alt + click (on the link) it will open a window behind the active one

    With cmd + alt + click + Shift (on the link) it will open a window over the active one

  2. Alberto says:

    Okay, it is nice, but if I want to open just one page in a window what I should do??

  3. cdw9 says:

    I don’t understand why this isn’t default, it’s always one of the first things I change!

  4. Jared says:

    You should mention that this catches pop-ups too which is helpful when you have one of those annoying Flash popups that runs in the background and heats your Mac up to 250° while rocketing the CPU to the moon.

Leave a Reply

 

Shop on Amazon.com and help support OSXDaily!

Subscribe to OSXDaily

Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Twitter Feed Follow on Facebook Subscribe to eMail Updates

Tips & Tricks

News

iPhone / iPad

Mac

Troubleshooting

Shop on Amazon to help support this site