If you’re a heavy OS X user like I am, chances are your Safari browser is often filled with tabs you want to save as bookmarks for future access. Now if you were using Google Chrome, that wouldn’t be such an issue since your primary bookmarks are displayed on the top of your browser. But with Safari’s minimalistic design, you have to open the Bookmarks section every time you want to open up a bookmarked website, and that can be a lot of times, considering your bookmarks are frequently opened pages.
In OS X 10.11 El Capitan Apple offers a better solution: Pinned sites. A pinned site appears as a tiny square icon, located to the left of your tabs. The best part: it never goes away, keeping the site open and up to date.
Pinning a site in Safari is easy; the browser itself doesn’t tell you how to do it, but we’re here for that. Chances are you might have stumbled on it yourself mistakenly. To pin a site, all you need to do is drag its tab to the far left side of the tab bar and drop it there. And you’re done!
The small “M” logo in the top left corner of the browser shows an MTE-pinned website in Safari.
You can easily click on a Google doc, Wikipedia page, or anything else you need regular access to without crowding the tab bar with so many sites you can’t read their full names. If you decide to unpin a site, just drag its icon back to the right of the tab bar to turn it into a regular tabbed page, then click the “x” to delete it as usual.
The downside to this is that Safari doesn’t show the website favicons of its pinned websites (a favicon is the small logo of a website that usually shows up next to the website name in a tab). Only some sites show favicons; it’s most likely an issue with Apple’s implementation. We should be seeing more websites update their favicons according to Apple’s specifications.
This is an easy and efficient way to manage your Safari workflow. Do you have any other tips you’d like to see featured on MakeTechEasier? Let us know in the Comments section below.
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Shujaa Imran
Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube
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