Force tabs instead of new windows for Safari
by Stii
The new Safari 4 is awesome. It is in fact better than Firefox/Flock for a change. It looks fantastic, has great new features and is much faster. The only problem is new windows not opening in new tabs. IMHO, it is a silly mistake Apple makes! It should be a setting you can change in your preference window like any other.
In your preference window you can select:
⌘ – click opens a link in a new tab
Brilliant. Clicking on links in different ways does different things with those links.
The problem though is that when a link on a site has the HTML attribute target=”_blank” set (which opens a new window) Safari opens a new window instead of a new tab for that window. Firefox handles it correct in that it opens a new tab, not a new window.
However, this can be fixed easily on Mac. Simply open up the terminal and execute:
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
After that, restart Safari if it was running for the setting to take effect and the problem is solved.
On Windows it seems there are no easy fix. We had a look this morning and could not find something.
This is quite a stupid mistake Apple made. If you look at how intuitive OSX is and how big they are on usability, this is shocking by Apple standards. Even the fix on OSX is such an obscure one. Why not simply add it to the preferences window? Why should one have to run a command to fix it? Blegh. We’ll see what happens.
Older versions of Safari gave me some problems with JavaScript dying while executing, but a pretty slick browser otherwise.
I love the new Safari 4, and I hope it gets a ‘Recently Closed Tabs’ feature (similar to Firefox) instead of just a History menu (which I find pretty much useless – when you click on one of the entries they open in your current tab/window).
The new tab / new window issue also bugged me, but given that Safari 4 is still in Beta I hope they’ll fix this in the final release.