Bend Safari to your liking
1 Turn stuff on
Safari minimises URLs and doesn’t preview where links go. Change this by View > Show Status Bar (to display link targets on hover) and ‘Show full website address’ in the Advanced preferences (so you get more than a domain in the address bar).
2 Tame notifications
Websites increasingly ask to bug you with push notifications. Generally, avoid allowing them to do so. If one is continually flinging notifications your way, you can disable them in the Notifications category within Safari’s website preferences.
3 Edit website settings
In the Websites section of Safari’s preferences, select one of the categories from the sidebar. You’ll see settings for currently open websites and also closed but configured ones. These can be adjusted using the menus, without visiting the sites in question.
4 Set global defaults
At the bottom of the Websites tab (excepting the Notifications category) is a menu labelled ‘When visiting other websites’. Use this to set a default for websites you’ve not manually configured – for example, to have Reader activate by default on all sites, unless otherwise stated.
5 Prevent tracking
In the Privacy section of Safari’s preferences is the new ‘Prevent cross-site tracking’ setting. On by default, it stops advertisers following you around the internet. So no more shop adverts appearing everywhere after you briefly check out something of interest.
6 Use extensions
This isn’t new to macOS High Sierra, but it’s worth investigating the Extensions tab in Safari’s preferences. From here, you can add useful functionality to Safari, such as web clippers, alternate search engines, security add-ons, and more.