Safari’s Top Sites feature is nifty and all, but what I’ve really wanted to do is have new Safari tabs open showing me my recent browsing history. I couldn’t figure out a way to do this until just now. Maybe if you’re an experienced Safari user this is obvious, but I’m still a fairly recent Safari adopter.
If you look in Safari’s preferences, it will show that new tabs can be set to Top Sites, Home Page, Empty Page, Same Page, or Bookmarks. No ‘History’ option. The good news is that you can work around this by choosing “Bookmarks” (as shown above) and then click on “History” under “Collections” at the top-left of the window.
Safari remembers what you had selected in the Bookmarks window, so whenever you open a new tab, it will open to the Bookmarks with the History selected. You could also do this by setting new tabs to open to an Empty Page and then press Command + Option + 2 (Show All History). If you find that key combination too awkward, as I do, you can reassign it in System Preferences under Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.
Personally, I like this because I can use Command-T to open a new tab and have the history show up right away. I’d still prefer to be able to use the History view which is shown if you start with Top Sites and then click the History half of the button-tab at the top of that window, but this is the next best thing.
TUAWMac 101: Open new tabs to reveal browsing history in Safari originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 26 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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