Open new blank pages in Safari

Here’s a quick Tuesday timesaver for the 80 percent of you who browse with Safari. Safari’s preferences let you specify what happens when you open a new browser window—you can open an empty page, your home page, a copy of whatever page your viewing, or your bookmarks window. Say you’ve told Safari to open a home page, say Macworld.com in new windows. But what about those times when you just want a blank window? You could change your preferences to open a blank window instead, but you may prefer to usually see your home page.

If you use Command-N to create a new window, you’ll get your specified home page. This seemingly makes it impossible to get a new, empty browser window. But here’s a sneaky workaround—instead of hitting Command-N, hit Command-T (File: New Tab). When Safari opens a new tab, it opens it as a blank page. Best of all, this is true even if Safari doesn’t presently have a window open—a new window will appear, but it will remain empty.

For this to work, you need to enable tabbed browsing—which you should have done anyway, as it’s a great timesaver on its own merits! Just open Preferences, click on the Tabs icon, then check Enable Tabbed Browsing. Now you’ll be able to use the Command-T trick to get a new blank window.