Learn how to preview your open websites by viewing your open tabs as thumbnails in Safari.
With Safari, you can now preview your open websites when they are in tabs. This was introduced with macOS Big Sur, but I have found that it works with macOS Catalina as well. See how to preview your open tabs with Safari in this video from my Tutor for Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
In this video, we’re going to look at our tab previews we have in Safari. Now, this was introduced with Mac OS Big Sur, but also, if you do update Mac OS Catalina, you’re going to see the same options in Mac OS Catalina with Safari. Let’s take a look at our tab preview in Safari. Let’s go to my Mac.
Let’s go and open up Safari here. Now, if you’re not familiar with tabs, what we can do is we can open up multiple websites in tabs. So basically, it’s going to be in one window. We can have multiple websites open in one window. Let’s go and do that.
Let’s go over to my sites here. I’m going to open up Dan’s Tutorials. Now, what I want to do is I want to open up a new tab. One way of doing that is going over to the + here, I click on it, and now I can open up a new tab. So let’s go over to Apple. If we look, I’m in one window here, but you’re going to see that I have two tabs. I have my tab here from Dan’s Tutorials, and then I also have Apple. Let’s go and open up one more tab. I click on the +, and then we go over to Wikipedia. I’m going to open up Wikipedia here. Now I have three tabs. I have Wikipedia, as well as Apple, and then I have Dan’s Tutorials.
If I want to open up another tab, I can also go up to File in the menu bar, and then you’re going to see New tab. My favorite way of doing it is through Command-T, hold down the command key and the T key.
So now I have three tabs open in this browser. One window with three tabs. I can easily go to different websites by just clicking on the tab. But you may have noticed that when I hover my cursor over top of a tab, what I get is a preview of that website. This is our new tab preview that was introduced with macOS Big Sur. But again, you will also see this if you update macOS Catalina. So now I can easily get a preview of a website just by hovering over the tab. Let’s go and see what the Wikipedia tab looks like. Again, I just placed my cursor over the tab, and then I get a preview. I don’t actually have to click on it to see what is in that browser or what is in that tab. If I want to switch to it, all I have to do is just click on it, and now I’m looking at that website. Let’s go and see what Apple has on their front page. I go over to Apple here; we get our preview. And again, I go over to my tab here with Dan’s Tutorials; I have a preview.
So that’s how the new tab preview works in Safari and macOS Big Sur, and also with macOS Catalina. Basically, when you open up multiple tabs in Safari, what you can do now is get a tab preview. Just move your cursor over the top of the tab, don’t click on it, just move it over top of the tab, and then you’re going to see a thumbnail of what that website is; click on it, to go to that website.
So that’s the new tab preview we have in Safari.