Things you didn't know you could do with links in Safari in macOS

Do you have the status bar at the bottom of Safari's browser window visible? It shows useful information like the destination of links. Use it to see how keys modify the action of clicking them.

If you don't currently have Safari's status bar on the screen, it is because it is either hidden or there is nothing to show. Go to the View menu and select Show Status Bar. Let the mouse hover over a link on a web page and you will see it display the link destination in the bottom left corner of the Safari window.

The link destination is not always obvious from the text on the screen and sometimes one or more words of text are highlighted and you wonder what site is being linked to. It can be useful to know the destination and if you use web mail for example (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud Mail), for example, you can often see if something will lead to an advert, bad website or some other unwanted destination, a PDF file you would rather not download, and so on.

The staus bar is very useful and it automatically appears when it is needed and disappears when it is not. At one time it was fixed and and on the screen all the time and we had to use an extension like Ultimate Status Bar to auto-hide it. Now this feature is built into Safari.

View web link destinations

What you may not realise is that there is more to the status bar and clicking links on web pages. Normally when the mouse hovers over a text link or linked button, image or other item on a page in Safari, the destination of the link appears in the status bar like this.

Add to reading list

Hold down the Shift key while the mouse hovers over a link on a page and the action is changed to Add to Reading List. The reading list is a collection of saved pages you can read later. Click the button in the Safari toolbar to open the sidebar and click the reading glasses icon to see all your saved pages.

Open the context menu

The Control key is used throughout macOS to access a context menu which changes according to the application being used and the object being clicked. Ctrl+click links to show the menu.

Open in background tabs

Hold down the Command key when clicking a link and the page linked to is opened in a new tab. However, you stay on the current page and the tab opens in the background. This is useful when you want to see the destination page, but don't want to lose your current place.

Open in a new tab

Suppose you want to open a link in a new tab, but also want to switch to that tab straight away so you can read the article. Just hold down Shift+Command when clicking a link.

Open links in background windows

You might want to open a link in a completely new Safari window so that you can view two web pages side by side. There isn't much space on a MacBook screen, but iMacs are useful for this because they are so much larger. Hold down Option+Command when clicking a link and the page will open in a new window behind the current one.

Open links in foreground windows

If you want to open a link in a new window and switch to that window, press Shift+Option+Command and click the link.

It can be difficult remembering all these different ways to open links in Safari and you might just want to memorise your favourites. If you want one you can't remember, just let the mouse hover over a link, press different combinations of Shift, Ctrl, Option and Cmd and read the action in the Safari status bar at the bottom of the window.