Tame Your Tabs With Key Commands

If you sometimes find your desktop cluttered with multiple browser windows, try using tabs in Safari.

Tabs let you open multiple web pages in a single Safari window, so you can easily flip between them. They’re one of the best ways to amp up your web-browsing experience — especially once you’ve tamed them via a few simple key commands. This tip covers the basic moves.

First, make sure Safari is configured for tabbed browsing. From the Safari menu, select Preferences and click on the Tabs icon. Select the “Opens a link in a new tab” option, but leave the others unchecked for now. But take a moment to read the fine print, since it covers some of the tricks we’re about to tackle.

Now open a web page in Safari and try it out. Click on a link while pressing the Command key, and the link opens in a new tab nestled behind the current page. Holding down Command-Shift creates a new tab and brings the new page to the front. You can also open an empty tab by typing Command-t, then type in a URL or load a bookmarked web page. To close a tab, select it and type Command-w, or click on the small x on the left side of the tab.

You can reorder tabs within the Tab Bar simply by dragging them to the left or right. And you can switch from one tabbed page to another via key commands: Type Command-shift- ] (or Command-Shift-Right Arrow Key) to move forward to the next tab to the right, and Command-shift- [ (or Command-Shift-Left Arrow Key) to go to the next tab to the left.

For more cool tab tricks, try Control-clicking on any tab. Or simply right-click Mighty Mouse, and use the contextual menu that appears to create new tabs, close them, move them to new windows, reload them, or bookmark them.