How to Regain a Missing URL Address Bar in Safari for Mac OS X

Sep 25, 2014 - 28 Comments

Missing Address Bar in Safari

The address bar in Safari shows you what website URL you are currently visiting, and it also doubles as a search bar in recent versions too. That makes it a fairly critical component of the Safari browser for many of us, so if you use Safari as your default web browser and find that it mysteriously has gone missing, it’s understandable if you’d be a bit annoyed.


It’s likely that if the address bar has disappeared that a setting was accidentally toggled or disabled, and thus it’s almost certainly easy to recover and reveal again if you find yourself in this situation.

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure the Safari toolbar is set to be visible, because where URL’s and web addresses are displayed is part of the toolbar. Just pull down the “View” menu and select the first option, which if it’s hidden should be “Show Toolbar”.

Show the toolbar in Safari to regain a missing Address Bar

That should make the entire toolbar, with back & forward buttons, URL bar, sharing features, immediately reappear.

Address URL bar visible again in Safari for Mac OS X

If the toolbar is visible but the address bar is still missing, it means the toolbar was probably customized and the URL bar removed. That’s also an easy fix. Again, return to the “View” menu and choose “Customize Toolbar”, then drag and drop the default option into the toolbar to regain the lost address bar / smart search field and all other toolbar components.

This applies to the desktop versions of Safari in OS X, and the behavior of Safari on the Mac is different from Safari in iOS, which auto-hides the URL and navigation bar to conserve screen space. The Mac version does not do that, so if yours goes missing, it’s almost certainly the toggled setting situation described above. One thing that Safari for Mac does do though is shorten the URL in the toolbar, which must be changed if you want to see the full URL of a website via a settings option.

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Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

28 Comments

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  1. glenna says:

    Ok so I used the second option
    I 1st went under the view the first line is checked and greyed out saying always show tool bar in full screen
    so I went under the customize tool bar option
    it says you can drag the default set into the tool bar
    But how do I see or get the default set? do I type that in somewhere??

  2. Lucy says:

    Thank you so much!! It was a very simple and quick problem to solve! :D

  3. Lora says:

    A huge thank you for this advice…worked like a charm!! Other pages did not address this properly or step by step, thanks again!!

  4. Lacy says:

    Thanks! Quick and easy fix.

  5. Laurie Greenberg says:

    Thank you! VERY helpful.

  6. Jevoris says:

    Thank you!! Fixed it within seconds literally!

  7. Lisa says:

    Hi there
    I just updated to el captain and Safari 9.0.3 to which the toolbar to search for anything has disappeared…I thought I’d change my default search (in preference)to yahoo but then changed my mind…so went back into preference to reset it to the default safari…but no luck whatsoever…it just keeps going back to the last page I visited
    Any help would be grateful??
    I’m going to try what you’ve done on here to try and get the toolbar back…really hope it works

  8. Jinny says:

    You saved my day- Thank you so much for posting this!

  9. cici says:

    thank you so much

  10. Toby says:

    Thank you so much!

  11. Kerri says:

    thanks so much! This was driving me crazy :)

  12. Jason says:

    this is so stupid. why would apple even make it disappear? what? we are never going to want to go any other place than what we have in our favorites? lame “feature”.

  13. Justin says:

    I’m very good with my mac. And I’m actually a little embarrassed that I had to follow this guide. I totally skipped over the “Show Toolbar”button in the “View” menu like 10 times… Thanks for your guidance. :)

  14. Chris says:

    This was so simple and it helped a lot! Thanks

  15. Ebruli says:

    Thank you! – and the world is back “in order”.

  16. Kitties says:

    Thank you for that information. Now I can actually go to websites in which are not in my top sites page

  17. Julia Eberly says:

    Thanks so much! I am fairly knew to Apple and could not understand why my URL address bar and back arrow had disappearred. All I needed was to show toolbar.

  18. Rizki says:

    thanks you very much <3

  19. Tom says:

    Thanks. Your article was simple to follow. Complete success.

  20. Peter says:

    Thanks, that was the most simple answer and the quickest solution to my dilemma, P.

  21. Sandra says:

    Thank you!

    I’m new to Mac OS X and thought i might have malware!

  22. Raidria says:

    What a simple!! Thank you so much XD

  23. Dalt says:

    I don’t know why the developers would think it’s a good idea to hide the address bar. Users should always be able to hide/turn features off but it’s nice to know where you are. I think most users can quickly eyeball a URL and know that’re on oxdaily or ESPN or whatever.

  24. Shirley says:

    The tabs are so dark in iOS 8 that we can’t see the X to close the tab. It is really bad. Are there any adjustments to make it visible?

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