Alexito's World

A world of coding 💻, by Alejandro Martinez

Replace tabs in Safari

Oh, that feeling when you find small features that you didn’t know.

I found that you can have, in Safari, a folder in the Bookmarks bar that automatically opens all its pages in different tabs, without having to open them one by one.

I created one of this special folders from the menu Bookmarks/Add bookmarks for These X Tabs... and I was surprised when the created folder had a small square in the right side.

The problem is that I didn’t want that behavior, that feature doesn’t open a new window with this tabs, it actually replaces all the current tabs for the ones in the folder, so it may make you lose all your tabs. Yes it does.

I wanted to disable it and I end up editing /Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist (is nice when your past self is there to help you).

I found the key that enables that behavior:

WebBookmarkAutoTab = YES

The fun part is that after that I realized that in the UI there is an option to toggle that! silly me.

Even if I didn’t want that enabled for the specific folder, it’s a really nice feature in order to have some group of tabs that you always want to open when changing contexts.

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