Searching the Web

Press -L to deposit your insertion point inside the unified toolbar, type something you’re looking for—phony baloney, say—and then press Return. Safari takes you directly to the results page of Google or whatever search site you’ve selected.

As Figure 18-2 makes clear, Safari offers plenty of assistance as you type, in the form of Google suggestions, matching listings from your Bookmarks and History list, and suggestions from Maps, Wikipedia, iTunes, and other sources.

For example, if you type empire state building into the address bar, the first suggestion may not be from the web—but instead from Maps. Click it to open the Empire State Building’s page in the Maps program. And if you type small mouthed salamander, the first hit is likely to be a link to that critter’s Wikipedia page, complete with a tiny photo and the first lines of text.

Figure 18-2. As you type, Safari offers autocomplete suggestions from Wikipedia; Google’s own Suggest feature; and matching pages that you’ve either bookmarked or visited recently.
To save typing, click the correct complete address with your mouse, or use the key to reach the desired listing and then press Return.

Address/Search Bar Tips

Because typing internet addresses and searching for things are so central to the internet experience and such a typo-prone hassle, the address/search bar is rich with features that minimize keystrokes. For example:

• You don’t have to click there before typing; just press -L.

• You can highlight the entire address (so it’s ready to be typed over with a new one) by clicking anywhere inside the bar. Or press -L.

• You don’t have to type out the whole internet address. You can omit the http:// and www portions; Safari fills in those standard address bits for you. To visit http://www.nytimes.com, for example, a speed freak might press -L to highlight the address bar, type nytimes.com, and then press Return.

• You don’t have to use Google. If you prefer to use Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo for searching instead of Google, then open Safari → Preferences → Search and use the “Search engine” pop-up menu. (DuckDuckGo is more limited than Google and its rivals. But it has gained a following among privacy fans because it doesn’t store any information about its visitors or the searches they conduct.)

• You can look up a word on a page. If you right-click or two-finger click a highlighted word or phrase on a web page, you can choose Search with Google (or whatever your chosen search site is) from the shortcut menu to search for that text. And, even cooler, this trick works in all Cocoa programs—not just Safari.

Adding a Bookmark

When you find a web page you might like to visit again, do yourself a favor: Bookmark it. Here’s how:

• Press -D, or choose Bookmarks → Add Bookmark. Proceed as shown in Figure 18-3.

  

  Figure 18-3. When you add a bookmark, Safari offers to memorize this web page’s name, or a shorter name that you specify for it.
  You also have to specify where you want to save your new bookmark; Safari offers several options.
  There’s the Bookmarks menu, or any folders you’ve set up inside it.
  There are the Favorites, a special set of bookmarks that you think you’ll use a lot. They get their own special screen and their own special bar, as you’ll read in a moment.
  There are the Top Sites (“Top Sites”).
  Finally, there’s the master list, the Bookmarks list in the Sidebar; as you can see by (a) in Figure 18-4, this list lets you further categorize your bookmarks by putting them into folders.

• Press Shift--D to add the page to the Reading List.

• Point to the far-left edge of the address bar; hold your cursor down on the button that appears. This time, you get a pop-up menu of the standard locations (Reading List, Favorites, Bookmarks Menu, and so on); choose where you want this bookmark stored. This is a quick method, but it doesn’t offer you the chance to rename the bookmark.

Organizing Bookmarks in the Sidebar

See the button on the toolbar? It opens the Sidebar, the left-side panel shown at left in Figure 18-4. (You can also choose Bookmarks → Show Bookmarks, or choose View → Show Bookmarks Sidebar, or press Control--1.)

Figure 18-4. Here’s “Bookmarks: The Missing Manual.”
(a) Drag your favorite bookmarks here, for one-click access.
(b) The Sidebar lets you organize your bookmarks.
(c) Drag a website’s logo to the Favorites bar to install it there.
(d) You can create and file a bookmark in one step.

At the top of this panel, two tabs await. On the first one, the tab, you can really go to town with bookmark management. For example:

• Rearrange bookmarks or folders by dragging them up or down.

• Create a folder by choosing Bookmarks → Add Bookmark Folder. Or right-click or two-finger click anywhere in the list; from the shortcut menu, choose New Folder.

  Type a name for the folder, press Return, and then start filling it up by dragging existing bookmark names onto it.

• To delete a bookmark or a folder, right-click or two-finger click its name. From the shortcut menu, choose Delete.

• To edit a bookmark’s name, right-click or two-finger click it, or hold your cursor down in it. From the shortcut menu, choose Rename.

• To edit the web address a bookmark opens, right-click or two-finger click its name. From the shortcut menu, choose Edit Address.

While you’re poking around, you might notice a special folder that was here before you arrived. The Favorites folder lists the bookmarks you’ve installed on the Favorites screen described on the following pages; it’s just another way to see, choose, and organize those same items. The Bookmarks Menu folder performs that same function for the Bookmarks menu; it gives you an easy way to organize what’s listed there.

Organizing Bookmarks in the Editor

Before the slick new Sidebar came along, there was an earlier way to organize bookmarks: the bookmarks editor. You can open this special, spreadsheety window by choosing Bookmarks → Edit Bookmarks or by pressing Option--B.

In the bookmarks editor window, drag the bookmarks up and down to rearrange them. You can edit a bookmark’s name or underlying address by clicking it. Delete one by clicking it and then pressing Delete. There’s a New Folder button at top right, too.

Favorites Bar

Some people amass dozens or hundreds of bookmarks—so many that, in day-to-day surfing, it’s an unwieldy list.

Fortunately, Safari lets you elevate a few special bookmarks to Favorites status. These are the sites you figure you’ll open the most. And Safari gives you two ways to see them.

First, the Favorites bar is a horizontal strip just beneath the address bar (visible in Figure 18-4). If you leave this bar open all the time, you have instantaneous, one-click access to a few very special sites.

To make this bar appear or disappear, choose View → Show Favorites Bar. Or press Shift--B.

Then:

• Add a favorite. You add a bookmark to this bar exactly as described in “Adding a Bookmark”—but for the new bookmark’s destination, choose Favorites.

  You can also drag your current web page’s name from the address/search bar directly onto the Favorites bar. (Don’t click first—just start dragging directly downward on the address bar.) You’re offered the chance to type a shorter name for your new Favorite.

  Tip

  You can also drag a link from a web page (not just the tiny website logo) onto your Favorites bar. In fact, you can also drag a link directly to the desktop, where it turns into an internet location file. Thereafter, to open Safari and visit the associated web page whenever you like, just double-click this icon.

  Better yet, stash a few of these icons in your Dock or Sidebar for even easier access.

• Remove a button from the Favorites bar by dragging it down and away.

• Rearrange the buttons by dragging them horizontally.

• Edit a button by right-clicking or two-finger clicking its name. From the shortcut menu, choose Rename or Edit Address.

Favorites View

Apple figures that, many times, you’ll want to begin your surfing session with one of your Favorites. So whenever you open a new window, create a new tab, or click in the address bar (and don’t type anything), you’re shown the Favorites page (Figure 18-5). Or just click the icon at the far left of the Favorites bar. (If that’s not what you see when you open a new window or tab, you must have changed the settings in Safari → Preferences → General → “New pages open with” or “New tabs open with.”)

Figure 18-5. Here’s Favorites View. It’s a good starting point—a page of icons for your favorite bookmarks.
If you turn on Bookmarks → Show Frequently Visited in Favorites, you get a second section that lists the websites you visit often.

The beauty of the Favorites page is that it has lots of room both horizontally and vertically. And it doesn’t eat up any space—it’s completely hidden until you click in the address bar.

You can edit the icons on the Favorites page, of course:

• Rearrange them. You can drag any icon to a new spot.

• Remove them. Drag an icon out of the main Favorites view window to make it disappear in a puff of cartoon smoke.

• View them as folders. If you put several bookmarks into a folder, it appears on the Favorites panel as a single icon filled with even tinier icons.

• Add an icon. When you find a page you’d like to add to the Favorites screen, choose Bookmarks → Add Bookmark (-D); on the “Where” sheet that appears, choose Favorites. Click Add.

Top Sites

The Top Sites window (Figure 18-6) used to be the starting-out page in Safari. It’s exactly the same idea as the Favorites view—it’s a screen full of website icons—except that Safari chooses them, not you. It calculates which are your favorite websites according to how often and how recently you’ve visited them. The idea, again, is to save you time; the sites you’re most likely to want to revisit are one click away.

Ordinarily, the Top Sites change over time, as your activities change. But you can override Safari’s attempt to curate this page in various ways. For example, you can pin a certain site so that it never leaves the Top Sites screen, or you can manually add a page.

Figure 18-6. The Top Sites display is a little harder to get to than it was in previous versions of macOS. But if you’ve turned the feature on in Safari → Preferences → General → New windows open with → Top Sites, then you’ll see it every time you open a new window or tab.

Here’s some of the other fun you can have:

• Rearrange the thumbnails by dragging them around.

• Delete a thumbnail by pointing to it; click the button that appears in the top-left corner after a couple of seconds. This page will never again appear in Top Sites.

• Pin a site so that it’s always in Top Sites, even if you don’t visit it much: Point to it and click the pushpin icon that appears in the top-left corner after a moment.

• Add a new page to the Top Sites display. You can drag a bookmark from the Sidebar (“Windows and How to Work Them”) into the Top Sites window, or even onto the Top Sites icon () on the toolbar, if you’ve installed it there. Or, when you choose Bookmarks → Add Bookmark (-D) to bookmark an open web page, choose Top Sites as the location. You can also drag a web address wherever it may appear—an email, web page, or document, for example—into the Top Sites window or onto its toolbar icon.

The master password list

You can view a master list of the actual memorized names and passwords. It waits for you at Safari → Preferences → Passwords. You have to prove your identity with your Mac password or Touch ID before you’re allowed to see them.

On this screen, you can view a password by clicking its row (Figure 18-9). You can change any saved password, too; double-click it. To add a password manually, click Add. Or, if a login no longer pleases you, click it and hit Remove.

This list, by the way, might display the occasional symbol. That’s flagging passwords you’ve used more than once, for different sites. Almost everyone does that, because who’s really going to memorize 300 different passwords? But security experts frown on the practice, because it means once a hacker gets the password for one of your accounts (from some corporate data breach, for example), then he’s got access to your other accounts, too. Since macOS can remember and fill in your passwords all by itself, you might as well avoid that fate.

Tab View

When you’ve opened a few tabs, their names, in titles across the top of your Safari window, get pretty cramped. Fortunately, there’s also Tab view: Miniatures of all your open tabs. To see it, click the Show All Tabs button on the toolbar ()—or how about this? Just pinch two fingers on your trackpad. Figure 18-13 explains all.

iCloud tabs

At the bottom of Show All Tabs view (Figure 18-13), a special treat awaits: A list of whatever browser windows and tabs you had open on your other Apple gadgets, like iPhones or iPads. Thanks to the miracle of iCloud syncing, the last windows and tabs you had open on that other gadget (even if the gadget is turned off) show up here.

Figure 18-13. Tab view gives you a horizontally scrolling parade of miniatures so you can easily spot what’s in your open tabs.
To get here, pinch with two fingers on your trackpad, or click the Show All Tabs button (shown by the cursor here).
In Tab view, you can scroll among the tabs in the usual way (drag two fingers on your trackpad, for example). Sites with multiple pages open appear as stacked thumbnails. When you find the tab you want, click or press Return.
You can also back out of Tab view without switching tabs at all, just by spreading two fingers on the trackpad.

The concept is to unify your Macs and i-gadgets into one glorious, seamless web-browsing experience. You’re reading three browser windows and tabs on your phone—why not resume on the big screen when you get home and sit down in front of your Mac?

Amazingly enough, you can even close the tabs and windows on your other gadgets, by remote control—by clicking the button next to each one.

You won’t see these tabs unless the Macs have Mountain Lion or later. And, of course, Safari has to be turned on in System Preferences → iCloud (on the Mac), or Settings → iCloud (on the phone or tablet).

Pinned Tabs

This feature is hard to describe but handy to have: pinned tabs. These are special, square, icon-only tabs at the far left end of your window that never go away, even when you close the window or quit Safari. (You can see three of them at the left end in Figure 18-14.)

That might sound like the same thing as a bookmark, but there’s a difference: When you click a bookmark, Safari takes a couple of seconds to fetch that web page and then display it. A pinned tab, on the other hand, is already loaded; Safari keeps its underlying page constantly updated.

That effect is especially useful for sites you check often throughout the day—sites like Facebook and Twitter, or mail sites like Gmail. Every time you click that pinned tab, the corresponding page appears, already loaded and up to date.

As a bonus, clicking a link on a pinned page opens up in a new tab, so the original page is waiting for you when you’re done. When you’re reading your Twitter feed, for example, you can click a link in someone’s tweet to open the page he wanted you to see…you read it…you hit -W to close the tab…and you’re right back in your Twitter feed, ready to click another link.

See Figure 18-14 for details on creating (and removing) pinned tabs.

Figure 18-14. To pin a site, drag an existing tab all the way to the left. Or choose Window → Pin Tab. Or right-click a tab and choose Pin Tab. To remove a pinned tab, drag it to the right, or choose Window → Unpin Tab.

The Reading List

The Reading List () stores entire web pages that you want to read later (Figure 18-15). These aren’t just bookmarks (links); the Reading List downloads and stores the full contents of each page you’ve requested so you can read them when you don’t have an internet connection. Better than that, actually: It stores that page and any other pages necessary to continue reading an article you’ve flagged.

The Reading List also makes it faster to flag a web page you like—you don’t have to make up a name or a location for it, as with a bookmark. Also, the Reading List keeps track of what you’ve read; you can use the All/Unread buttons at the top of the list to view everything or just what you haven’t yet read.

You might treat the Reading List as a list of pages you’ll want to read once later, and use bookmarks for pages you like to revisit frequently.

To make matters even sweeter, iCloud synchronizes your Reading List among your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and so on (if you’ve turned on Safari syncing in System Preferences → iCloud). It’s as though the web keeps your place as you move from gadget to gadget.

To add a page to the Reading List, use one of these techniques:

• Shift-click a link. That simple trick adds the linked page to the Reading List. You don’t have to visit the page itself (only the link to it), or even to open the Reading List first.

• Click the button. This button appears only when you move your cursor to the left end of the address box.

• Use the menu. Choose Bookmarks → Add to Reading List, or press Shift--D.

• Use the Share button. You can also click on the toolbar and choose Add to Reading List.

To view your saved pages, open the Sidebar (click ); then click the Reading List () tab. Or just choose View → Show Reading List Sidebar (Control--2).

To read the pages in the Reading List, you can press Option-- or Option-- to move up and down your list.

Figure 18-15. To revisit a page in the Reading List, just click it. Screen out the pages you’ve already read by clicking the Unread tab at the top. Delete an entry by right-clicking or two-finger clicking it and choosing Remove Item from the shortcut menu.

Keyboard Control

Efficiency freaks generally prefer keyboard shortcuts to using the mouse, so Safari is filled with them.

Press Tab to jump from one text box or pop-up menu to the next on your web page. Add the Option key to jump from one link to another (and when you highlight a link, press Return to “click” it).

The Download Manager

No browser has ever made tracking downloads simpler.

When you click a link to download something from a web page, it visibly flies to the upper-right corner of the Safari window, where the Downloads button () appears. You can then monitor the progress of the download at a glance—because the Downloads button fills up with blue as the download completes.

As Figure 18-16 shows, you can also view and manipulate a list of everything you’ve downloaded recently, all without leaving the comfort of whatever page you’re on.

To pause downloading, click the button next to the download’s name. Later, you can generally pick up from where you left off by clicking the Resume () button.

Figure 18-16. Click the Downloads () button to view this list of recent downloads. Double-click an icon to open the download. Drag it out of the list onto your desktop, or onto a folder on the desktop. You can even drag it onto a Dock icon to open that file with a particular program.
Click the button to jump to the file wherever it’s sitting in the Finder. To remove an item from the list, click it and then press Delete. (The Clear button erases the whole list.)

Status Bar

The status bar at the bottom of the window tells you what Safari is doing (such as “Opening page…” or “Done”). When you point to a link without clicking, the status bar also tells you which URL will open if you click it.

For those two reasons, it’s a useful strip, but it doesn’t appear when you first run Safari. You have to summon it by choosing View → Show Status Bar.

Reader

How can people read web articles when there’s Times Square blinking going on all around them? Fortunately, you’ll never have to put up with that again.

The Reader button () in the address/search bar is amazing. With one click (or press of Shift--R), it eliminates everything from the web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos, or anything else.

The text is also changed to a clean, clear font and size, and the background is made plain white. Basically, it makes any web page look like a printed book page or a Kindle page, and it’s glorious (Figure 18-17).

To exit Reader, press the same keyboard shortcut, or click again. Best. Feature. Ever.

Figure 18-17. Seriously, which way would you rather read an article? Like this (top)? Or in the calm peace of this (bottom)? Not only does Reader get rid of all the ads and clutter and blinking, it even knits multipage articles together into one seamless, scrolling page. Use the space bar or two fingers to scroll, as usual.
Using the button as a pop-up menu, you can change the typeface for your Reader view—or click one of the four circles to change the background color. Some people find that light text against a dark background is especially soothing.

Graphics Worth Saving

When you see a picture you’d like to keep, right-click or two-finger click it and choose Save Image to Downloads (or Add Image to Photos Library, or just Save Image As) from the shortcut menu. Safari stores it as a new graphics file, freed from its birthplace on the web. (You can specify where Safari saves downloaded pictures on the Safari → Preferences → General tab. In that case, the shortcut menu’s wording changes to say, for example, “Save Image to ‘Pictures.’ ”)

Expanding Web Forms

If the customer-service comment form on that corporate website doesn’t give you enough room to rant properly, you can resize the text box right on the page—a very welcome feature. Figure 18-18 tells all.

Figure 18-18. This trick works on a web page’s text fields—comment boxes, forms to send a letter to the mayor, and so on. You can resize such boxes by dragging the three diagonal ribbed lines in the lower-right corner of the text field. The rest of the page adjusts itself to the new text-box size, and you have room to say what you need to say.

Saving Web Pages to Disk

You don’t have to be online to read a favorite web page; you can tuck it away for later, thanks to the Reading List feature described earlier in this chapter.

The old way of saving a page, though, is still around. You can save it to your hard drive—to archive it for good, or to send it to somebody, for example—by choosing File → Save As.

At that point, to save the entire page, along with all its images, movies, and so on, choose Web Archive from the Format pop-up menu. (Choose Page Source only if you intend to edit the raw HTML web documents and repost them, or if you just want to study the underlying code.)

Sending a Page to a Friend

When you come across a particularly interesting news story, op-ed piece, or burrito recipe online, Safari is ready to help you tell a friend about it. While looking at a page, click and choose Email This Page. Or, if you’ve installed the Mail button () onto the toolbar, as described in “Customizing the Toolbar”, click that instead. Once Safari has prepared your outgoing email message, you can add a comment if you want and then choose Reader (if it’s available), Web Page, PDF or Link Only to determine how your buddy will receive the page.

Note that links take only a split second for your recipient to download, and they’re guaranteed to display properly in all email programs. All your recipients have to do is click the link to open it in their web browsers.

By the way, here’s a handy feature: At the bottom of the menu, you see the names of people to whom you’ve recently sent web pages, and by which method. For example, you might see “Casey Robin, email” or “Kelly Switt, Messages.” Those shortcuts make it incredibly easy to send more pages the same way, to the same people, again later.

Designate Your Start Page

What’s the first thing you see when you open Safari? Is it the Apple news website? Is it the Top Sites display (Figure 18-6)?

Actually, that’s up to you.

Choose Safari → Preferences → General tab. Here the “New windows open with” pop-up menu offers choices like these:

• Favorites. The Favorites screen (“Favorites View”) makes a great starting point.

• Homepage. If you choose this option, Safari will open up with whatever page you’ve specified in the “Homepage” box. Google—or its news page, news.google.com—is a good starting place. So is your favorite newspaper home page.

  If you’re already on the page you like, just click Set to Current Page.

• Empty Page. Some people prefer this setup, which makes Safari load very quickly when you first open it. Once this empty window opens, then you can tell the browser where you want to go today.

• Same Page opens a new window that’s a duplicate of whatever window you just had open.

Finding Text on Web Pages

The address/search bar can help you find websites that match your keywords. But some pages are so long, dense, or poorly designed that finding the words on the page takes a whole ’nother search engine. Fortunately, Safari’s search-within-the-page function shines a light on the word or phrase you’re seeking.

To use it, press -F and then type your search word into the Find box (Figure 18-19). As Safari locates the word or words, it displays them within a bright-yellow box and dims the background of the rest of the page. The Find bar also tells you how many times the word or phrase occurs on the page; you can jump to each instance. Click the to start over with new search terms, or click Done to close the Find box and return to your normal browsing activity.

Figure 18-19. Once you enter your search word (“giants,” in this case), the browser dims the page and highlights every instance of that word—making it much easier to find what you’re looking for across a crowded web page.

The History Menu

The History menu lists the websites you’ve visited in the past week or so, neatly organized into subfolders like Earlier Today and Yesterday. (A similar menu appears when you click and hold the or button.) These are great features if you can’t recall the URL for a website you remember having visited recently.

PDF Pages Online

PDF files are all over the web as, among other things, forms to download, online brochures, and scanned book pages. But they aren’t always especially readable in a browser window.

Unless, that is, you’re using Safari. The next time you’re squinting at a PDF in a window, point to the bottom edge of the document; you’ll see a toolbar like the one in Figure 18-20 appear. With these four icons, you can zoom out, zoom in, open the file in Preview, or save the PDF file to your Downloads folder.

Figure 18-20. If you’re having trouble reading the tiny type in a PDF, point your mouse to the bottom of it to invoke Safari’s PDF toolbar. You can zoom out, zoom in, open the file in the Mac’s Preview program, or even download it from the website with a well-placed click.

Picture-in-Picture Video

Apple recently added a feature to Safari: picture-in-picture video (Figure 18-21).

When you’re watching a video, you can click a PIP icon () to detach it into a small, floating, movable window, so that you can keep watching as you do other work. That floating mini-video window even hangs around when you switch Spaces (“Spaces (Virtual Desktops)”).

Once it’s on the screen, you can resize it (drag by the lower-right corner), move it to a different corner of the screen (drag the picture), pause it, or pop it full-screen (those buttons appear when you point to the video without clicking).

This feature works in Safari and iTunes—but not, alas, on any video you come across. It works only on videos that use HTML5, like those on Vimeo and ESPN.

It does work on YouTube videos, but there’s a trick to it (see Figure 18-21, bottom).

Assessment: neat when it works—and if you notice that tiny icon.

Figure 18-21. Top: Picture-in-picture! Now you can keep half your brain distracted by a running video while you try to get your work done.
Bottom: In YouTube, the picture-in-picture icon doesn’t appear—but the feature is still available. The trick is to right-click or two-finger click twice! The first time, you see the pop-up menu shown here at left; the second time, a different pop-up menu appears (right), with the PIP command at the ready.

Erasing Your History

Some people find it creepy that Safari maintains a complete list of every website they’ve seen recently, right there in plain view of any co-worker who wanders by.

To delete just one particularly incriminating History listing, choose History → Show All History. In the resulting organizer window, highlight the offending address, and then press your Delete key. Choose History → Hide History to return to normal browsing. You’ve just rewritten History!

Or, to erase the entire History menu, choose History → Clear History. In the resulting box, you can specify that you want to erase only the last hour’s worth of history, only today’s history, the last two days’ worth—or your entire history.

Of course, the History list isn’t the only set of footprints you leave as you surf. But the Clear History command erases all other shreds of your activities: any cookies (web page preference files) you’ve accumulated, your list of past downloads, the cache files (bits of the web pages that a browser stores on your hard drive to save time when you return to the page they came from), and so on. This is good information to know; you might be nominated to the Supreme Court someday.

Private Browsing

Of course, that’s a lot of work just to cover your tracks; it also erases a lot of valuable cookies, passwords, and History entries you’d probably like to keep. Is all that really necessary just so you can duck in for an occasional look at the Hot Bods of the Midwestern Tax Preparers’ Association website?

No, it’s not. Private browsing lets you surf without adding any pages to your History list, searches to your Google search suggestions, passwords to Safari’s saved password list, or autofill entries to Safari’s memory. (Apple says this feature is intended for use at public Macs, where you don’t want to reveal anything personal to subsequent visitors. Ha!)

The trick is to choose File → New Private Window before you open the naughty site. (Your other Safari windows can stay open, in non-private mode.) A banner across the top of your new private window explains what’s happening: Within this window, Safari records nothing while you surf. When you’re ready to browse “publicly” again, just close the window.

In other words, what happens in Private Browsing stays in Private Browsing.

Cookie Control—and Privacy Control

Cookies are something like web page preference files. Certain websites—particularly commercial ones like Amazon.com—deposit them on your hard drive like little bookmarks so they’ll remember you the next time you visit.

Most cookies are perfectly innocuous—and, in fact, helpful, because they let websites remember your tastes, your name, and so on. But fear is widespread, and the media fan the flames with tales of sinister cookies that track your movements on the web.

To take some control, choose Safari → Preferences → Privacy tab (Figure 18-23), where your cookie preference settings await. “Block all cookies” means no cookies can come in, and no cookie information can go out. You’ll have to reenter your information upon every visit to every web page.

Figure 18-23. Cookies: the web’s mysterious double-edged sword. Here, you can specify whether or not you like them, although blocking all of them makes the web a pretty miserable experience.

If you don’t use that checkbox, then Safari works as though you had the old “Only from websites I visit” option turned on. That is, you get cookies from sites you want to open, but not cookies deposited on your hard drive by sites you’re not actually visiting—cookies that an especially evil banner ad gives you, for example.

The Manage Website Data button here reveals the complete list of all your cookies, and you can delete any scary ones. While you’re in there, notice that there’s other stuff websites have dumped onto your Mac. There are things like cache files and local storage files (data that web applications leave behind on your hard drive—a bit like cookies, except that websites can’t retrieve this information later). All of it is available for your removal with a click on the Remove All button.

Also while you’re in this box: “Prevent cross-site tracking”doesn’t affect how many ads you see—but it does prevent advertisers from delivering ads based on your interests (as exhibited by your other web surfing). You’ll just get generic ads.

“Ask websites not to track me” signs you up for an online “Do not track” program. The problem is that this program is voluntary—so the sleazy operators just ignore it.

Finally, “Allow websites to check if Apple Pay is set up” appears only if your Mac has a Touch ID fingerprint reader, or if you have an iPhone or Apple Watch that works with Apple Pay. It permits shopping sites to show the Pay with Apple Pay button on product detail pages only if you do, in fact, have Apple Pay set up.

Stifle Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders

The world’s smarmiest advertisers inundate us with pop-up and pop-under ads—nasty little windows that appear in front of the browser window or, worse, behind it, waiting to jump out the moment you close your current window.

If this kind of thing is driving you crazy, choose Safari → Preferences → Security → Block Pop-Up Windows. It’s a war out there—but at least you now have some ammunition.