HOW TO Tailor preferences and options in Safari

1 STARTING SAFARI The new Start page is a key part of Safari 14, but your Mac may not show it automatically as this depends on how you have Safari set up. Open Safari Prefs > General, and set “New windows open with” to the Start Page.

2 OPTIONS MENU You can customize your Start page by using the new Options menu, located down in the bottom-right corner of the window. There are several options, but let’s start by looking at the ones for faster browsing.

3 FASTER BROWSING To speed things up, you can set the Start page to display your Favorites and Reading List, as well as pages you often visit. Selecting Siri Suggestions, makes the page look a bit cluttered, so let’s turn that off for now.

1 BACKGROUND IMAGES You can also customize the Start page with your own background image. There’s a set of backgrounds already built into the Options menu, but you can select an image of your own by clicking “+” in the menu.

2 IN PRIVATE There’s another vital feature now available on the Start page. The new Privacy Report tells you how many trackers have tried to monitor your browsing online over the last week, and have been blocked by Safari.

3 TRACK AND TRACE Click on the Privacy Report to see more detailed information. You can view the trackers on each website, and also see which trackers appear most often. Safari also highlights the worst offenders, such as doubleclick.net.

1 WHO’S WATCHING? For a quick privacy report on individual websites, click on the “shield” icon (left of the main address bar at the top of the window). Go to Safari > Prefs > Privacy to change any settings, such as Block All Cookies.

2 ON THE TAB Tab management gets a much-needed boost too. Safari now supports “favicons,” which make it easier to quickly identify multiple tabs. Hover the mouse over a tab to get a quick preview of that web page.

3 EXTENDING SAFARI Apple is encouraging developers to produce more “extensions,” which can add other new features to Safari. Go to the main Safari menu and select Safari Extensions to see a selection you can download from the App Store.