Apple Safari

How To: Always Open Links in New Tabs with Safari 4 [Mac]

Safari 4 Beta for Mac annoyingly doesn’t always open links in tabs, and there’s no real preference control to set this like there is in other browsers like Firefox or Opera. Apparently, this characteristic has been floating around in prior versions of the browser, too. While I like Safari’s speediness and mildly dislike the new tab placement in the beta, what bugs me the most is the issue I indicated with the title of this post.

While it is possible to make Safari [always] open links in new tabs, there is no user-friendly way to do this. To accomplish this behavior you will have to enter a line in Terminal.app:

  • Quit Safari (CMD+Q)
  • Open Terminal (\Applications\Utitlities\Terminal.app)
  • Enter:
    defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
  • Close Terminal and re-open Safari

Tada! That does it indeed. While this is easy enough, Apple should have included it here:

safari4betaprefstabs

Note: A solution to this problem in the Windows-version of Safari 4 has not yet been found.

First Screenshots: Safari 4 Beta for Mac

Apple recently released the public beta of Apple Safari 4. Some of the new features include:

  • Top Sites: Tab homepage similar to Google Chrome’s, only fancier
  • Cover Flow: Integration of iTunes-like Cover Flow for viewing history and bookmarks
  • Tabs on Top: Also taken from Google Chrome (see screenshots)
  • Nitro Javascript Engine: Once more, inspired by Chrome. Safari’s JS engine would render web apps up to 30 times faster than IE7 and 4 times faster than Firefox.

Not that I’m complaining, but did Apple just take the Chromium project and tack on its own additions? I haven’t looked into this yet, but Safari 4 certainly shows a lot of similarities with Google Chrome… On to some screenshots.

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