On other occasions (it depends what you have open in those pinned sites), Safari returns to non-fullscreen mode and closes everything. The second quirk we’ve noticed is that when closing the last “regular” tab, if you have any pinned sites Safari pops up a dialog asking if you want to close them.
This is what happened when writing this article in a pinned tab, after attempting to close my only regular tab: Closing the last regular tab attempts to also close all pinned sites/tabs. Whether this gets fixed or is a feature remains to be seen. With a pinned tab selected, Command + W seems to just take you to an open tab, if there is one – the pinned tab is not closed, which is not necessarily the expected behaviour. For example, usually with a regular tab open, Command + W will close the tab and take you to another that’s open. There do seem to be a couple of quirks however when using the keyboard shortcuts to close a pinned tab. You can also “unpin” sites by selecting them and dragging back toward the right until they become a regular, full-size tab again. If you select any of your pinned sites, any other pinned sites’ icons are just greyed out. Select any tab and slide it all the way to the left to pin it. In the case of this particular website, Chris is shown as a black icon with a grey “c”, helping you to quickly identify it later on. To use the feature, simply grab any tab and slide it all the way to the left, where it appears as a much smaller mini tab with its icon simply show as a single letter. It’s quite useful for those sites that you always have open, but don’t want them to take up too much room in the tab bar. In another change to the way that tabs can be managed, Safari now lets you “pin” tabs to the left side of the tab bar. The audio management in Safari is a small but welcome addition, finally enabling you to turn off those distracting (and too loud) pop-up ads that somehow make it past the pop-up blockers! You can perform the same action on the audio icon on any tab, so see a similar set of options. Just click and hold on the audio icon to bring up available options. By clicking on any of those tabs, you’ll be taken straight there. If you click and hold the audio icon in the task bar, you’ll also see various options to mute / un-unmute tabs, as well as a list of tabs that are playing audio. Confused? It’s pretty natural and intuitive once you actually use it… However, if the current tab is playing audio, the default action of the task bar icon is to mute / un-mute the current tab. Clicking the task bar mute icon will mute / un-mute all other tabs if you don’t have any audio on the current tab. The icon that appears on the task bar changes functionality slight depending on whether your currently selected tab is playing audio.
In the screenshot below, I have selected a tab where there is no audio content, and the task bar audio icon is shown as a blue outline: A blue outline means no music is playing on the current tab.
Notice that in the title bar, there’s an identical icon (in blue) that’s solid if the current tab is playing audio, or just shown as an outline if it’s on another tab. Likewise, to un-mute just click the icon again. To mute an individual tab, simply click the icon to mute the audio. Safari now makes it much easier to see at-a-glance which tab is playing audio, as well as allowing you to mute all tabs or a single tab.Īny tab that is playing audio now displays a small speaker icon at the right side of the tab itself, as shown below: Every tab playing audio shows the speaker icon.
Have you ever opened dozens of tabs and find that one of them is playing an audio track such as an advert? Or perhaps you’ve opened YouTube and played a couple of songs, only to find that later you have to quickly scan your open tabs to get back to the one that you want to mute?