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Safari User Guide

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Change General settings in Safari on Mac

In the Safari app 👁 Image
on your Mac, use General settings to choose the webpage that appears when you open a new window or tab, to choose how to handle downloads, and more.

To change these settings, choose Safari > Settings, then click General.

Open Safari for me

Option

Description

Safari opens with

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

Some options are shown only if “Close windows when quitting an app” is selected in Desktop & Dock settings.

Open Desktop & Dock settings for me

New windows open with

Choose what a new Safari window contains:

  • Start Page: See websites you marked as Favorites, a Privacy Report summary, your Reading List, and webpages open on other Apple devices where you’re signed in to the same Apple Account.

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

  • Empty Page: An empty Safari window with no webpage 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:

  • Start Page: See websites you marked as Favorites, a Privacy Report summary, your Reading List, and webpages open on other Apple devices where you’re signed in to the same Apple Account.

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

  • Empty Page: An empty Safari window with no webpage 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 webpage.

Remove history items

Choose when to remove items from the history.

Start Page Favorites

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

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

Open the listed types of files (but not software) in Safari automatically when a download is completed.

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