Master Safari settings

You’ll be surprised how much freedom you have to tailor the Safari settings to suit your needs. While in Safari, click on Safari>preferences and you’ll be presented with an array of settings categories, the key ones of which are detailed below. You will find similar settings for Safari on your IOS devices by going to Settings>safari.

1 What you see

Under General, click on ‘Safari opens with’ and you can go straight into a private window by default, and determine what a new Safari window or tab opens with – such as a homepage of your choosing.

2 Sticking to tabs

Under Tabs you can make it so that every new web page you open is opened in a tab rather than a new window. A new option also lets you toggle on icons in tabs.

3 Find passwords

All of your web page logins are safely stored on your Mac. To find one, go to the Passwords preferences and then click on a password to view it. Duplicate passwords will be flagged up with ‘!’ icons.

4 Change search engine

Go to the Search preferences and click on the ‘Search engine’ menu if you want to change it. There are four to pick from, including the reassuringly private search engine, Duckduckgo.

5 Prevent tracking

Under Privacy, discover which websites have stored data that can be used to track your browsing habits by clicking ‘Manage Website Data’. Ticking the Website Tracking options reduces this.

6 Site options

Go to the Websites preferences and you can tailor the options for your websites in bulk. For example, you can set one to always open in Reader, determine which can auto-play movies and much more.