Some Mac users have content blockers installed into Safari, which are designed to prevent a part of a webpage from loading, things like preventing a remote javascript that tracks cookies or loads ads, or something that places a cookie into your browser, etc. However, content blockers can cause interference with certain webpages, and it’s not unusual for content blockers to completely break a website or webpage from functioning.
Problems with content blockers are particularly common with finance and banking sites, wi-fi captive portals, and video sharing sites, so you may find yourself wanting to disable content blockers for a specific site as you browse the web in Safari on your Mac.
It’s not unusual to need to disable content blockers for certain websites to work properly, so here’s how to do that:
• Navigate to the site you want to disable content blockers for in Safari on the Mac
• After the webpage has loaded, right-click on the website URL in the address bar, and choose “Settings for DomainName.com”
• Uncheck the box next to “Enable content blockers” to disable content blockers for this particular domain
• Refresh the webpage, and content blockers will now be disabled
Notice that you can even change other settings for a specific website in the same popup window.
With the content blockers disabled, the website should now load and function as intended. There are also sites that you choose to not run content blockers on for other reasons, maybe so they function properly, maybe to support them, or maybe to even load them at all, since there are some examples where content blockers prevent a site from accessible at all.
Sometimes when you share a webpage link with someone, you just want to bring their attention to a specific passage or sentence to make your point, rather than have them read through the entire article.
To copy link with highlight in Safari visit a web page and simply highlight the text you want to create a link to, then right-click and choose Copy Link with Highlight from the dropdown menu.
This will generate a special URL that includes a hash (#) symbol and "text" element, followed by a few words that bookend the selected text. All you need to do is share the link with someone, and when they click it they'll be sent directly to that part of the webpage with the specific passage highlighted.
Bear in mind that the look of highlighted text can differ depending on whether the page author has styled it to look a certain way. Also, text fragment linking does not work in PDFs.
One of the useful Apple Intelligence features that is available in Safari is the webpage summarization feature. With Apple Intelligence Summarize in Safari, you can have an AI summary of an entire webpage, whether it’s a long article, a general website, or anything else on the web, giving you a nice summary of the page contents. This can help you quickly determine information and save time, and it’s really easy to use in Safari on the Mac.
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac with MacOS Sequoia, you can use the great Summarize feature on any webpage, here’s how it works:
• Open Safari on the Mac and navigate to whatever webpage you wish to summarize
• After the page has loaded, look at the address bar and then click on the Reader button to the left of the URL, it looks like a box with a few lines under it
• Click on “Show Reader”
• Once in Reader mode, wait a moment and you will see a “Summarize” option appear at the top of the screen
• You will soon see a summary of the webpage you are reading
Summarize works great on long articles, short articles, complex webpages, simple ones, and just about anything else on the web, and it can really save you time, or help you determine if a particular webpage or article is what you are interested in.
Say you want to look up a topic online, so you type a search word or phrase into Safari's address bar. The first link in the returned results looks promising, so you click it. On the site you're sent to, you see another link about a related topic, so you click that, too. Then another link grabs your attention, and you decide to check it out. Soon you're distracted by some other tangential subject, and before you know it you've fallen down a rabbit hole of clicks and links without finding out much about what you were actually looking for in the first place.
If that sounds familiar, the "Return to Search Results" feature in Safari can help. It saves having to tediously click the previous page button multiple times to return to your original search results, or start rooting through your web history to locate where your latest online meander began. You can find it in Safari's menu bar, under History > Return to Search Results, or even better, use its Command-Option-S keyboard shortcut.
Note that this feature only works if your wayward browsing occurred in the same tab that you used to initiate the search, so if a link you clicked on opened a new tab and you continued browsing in that, the "Return to Search Results" menu option will be grayed out. Also, the search needs to be performed from Safari's address bar or from the website of the search engine that Safari is set to use.
If you are tired of pop-ups and banners interrupting your web browsing experience, it's worth getting to know Distraction Control, a new Safari feature that helps you focus on the content that matters by minimizing intrusive elements on webpages. While it's not designed as an ad blocker, Distraction Control can significantly improve your reading experience by hiding static distractions.
To nix a distracting item on a webpage, click the Page menu icon in the address bar and select Hide Distracting Items. Then simply hover your pointer over the item in question, whereupon it will be auto-selected for removal. With another click, the distraction will disintegrate before your eyes. When you're finished, click Done in the address bar. If you're on a webpage where you've hidden items, a crossed out eye icon will appear in the address bar, indicating that you can make them visible again by revisiting the Page menu and selecting Show Hidden Items.
