How to Change Your Homepage in Safari on Mac
Want to change the homepage in Safari for Mac? Whether you’re new to the Mac or just haven’t bothered to tweak Safari homepage default settings before, you might find it worthwhile to change the default homepage in the Safari browser. You can do this within a matter of seconds too.
The browser homepage is the first web page that your browser loads up when you open it. Unlike some other browsers, Safari opens up the Favorites window rather than a webpage. Many users prefer to set a favorite website (like osxdaily.com of course) or a search engine as their default homepage. For example, when you open up Google Chrome, it loads the Google search engine. Or, when you launch Microsoft Edge, you’re welcomed by the Bing search engine. However, on Safari, the default homepage is set to Apple’s website since they don’t have their own search engine. But of course you can set any web page as your homepage, and by doing so it prevents Safari from opening the Favorites window upon browser start. If this sounds appealing to you, read along and you’ll changed your default homepage in Safari on Mac in no time.
How to Change the Homepage in Safari on Mac
Changing the default homepage in Safari is a straightforward procedure on macOS. Stopping Safari from opening the Favorite window is pretty easy to do as well. Just follow the steps below to get started.
- Open “Safari” on your Mac from the Dock.
- To access Safari’s settings, click on “Safari” in the menu bar and choose “Preferences” from the dropdown menu.
- This will open a new settings window on your screen. Click on the “General” tab.
- Now, before you change your homepage, you’ll need to prevent Safari from opening the “Favorites” window. To do this, set the option “New windows open with” to “Homepage”.
- Next, for the homepage, type in the website URL that you want to use. Or you can head over to a specific webpage in Safari and choose “Set to Current Page” if the URL is too long. Hit the “Return” key when you’re done.
- You’ll be prompted to confirm your changes. Click “Change Homepage” to save your new settings.
There you go. You’ve successfully changed the default homepage to your preferred web page in Safari on your Mac. Pretty easy, right?
From now on, you don’t have to worry about Safari opening the Favorites window every single time you launch Safari. Instead, you could set it to a popular web page like osxdaily.com, Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever else you’d like to see.
That being said, Safari’s Favorites window is actually pretty useful to quickly launch certain websites with just a single click. You can add as many websites as you want to the Favorites tab. You can add websites to Favorites from your iPhone and iPad too, and the changes will be synced across your devices over iCloud.
If you made these changes just to quickly access Google as your search engine, we’d like to inform you that Google is already set as the default search engine in Safari. You can type your queries in the address bar and there’s no need to set Google as your homepage for this purpose. Likewise, you can also change the default search engine that’s used by Safari on your Mac. If you’re one of those people who rely on DuckDuckGo, Bing, or Yahoo search, you’ll find the option to change that in Safari’s preferences.
And of course you can also change the default web browser on the Mac as well, so if you’d like the default browser to be Safari, or something else, you can easily tweak that setting.
Did you change your homepage in Safari? What’s your preferred homepage and why? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
