Safari 9 (El Capitan): General pane of Safari preferences

Specify the page that appears when you open a new window or tab, how Safari should handle downloads, and more. To set these options, open Safari, choose Safari > Preferences, then click General.

Safari opens with

Choose how each Safari session starts: with a new window, a new private window, or all the windows from your last session.

This option isn’t shown if “Close windows when quitting an application” is turned off in the General pane of System Preferences.

New windows open with

Choose what a new Safari window contains.

  • Top Sites or Favorites: See your favorite websites or websites you visit most often (the option changes based on which view was previously selected).

  • Homepage: The homepage you set in the Homepage field below.

  • Empty Page: An empty Safari window with no page address or content.

  • Same Page: The webpage you most recently viewed.

  • Tabs for Favorites: All the bookmarks in Favorites as a set of tabs.

  • Choose tabs folder: The bookmarks in the bookmarks folder you choose.

New tabs open with

Choose what a new tab contains.

  • Top Sites or Favorites: See your favorite websites or websites you visit most often (the option changes based on which view was previously selected).

  • Homepage: The homepage you set in the Homepage field below.

  • Empty Page: An empty Safari window with no page address or content.

  • Same Page: The webpage you most recently viewed.

Homepage

Enter the URL of the webpage you want to use as your homepage, or click Set to Current Page to use the current active page.

Remove history items

Choose when to remove items from the history.

Favorites shows

Choose the bookmarks folder whose bookmarks you want shown on the Favorites page and in the Favorites view that appears below the Smart Search field.

Top Sites shows

Choose how many websites Top Sites shows.

File download location

Choose where to save items you download from the Internet, or have Safari always ask where you want to save downloads.

Remove download list items

Choose when to remove items from the list.

Open “safe” files after downloading

Have Safari automatically open the listed types of files, but not software.

Last Modified: Sep 30, 2015
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