Selecting Multiple Tabs in Safari
John Gruber (video):
Just like making multiple selections in a list view, Shift-click will select an entire range at once, and Command-clicking lets you select (and deselect) noncontiguous tabs. […] Once you have multiple tabs selected, you can drag them together to create a new window, or do things like close them all at once.
I had no idea that you could do this, and it apparently works in Firefox, Chrome, and Brave, too. This seems to be new in Safari 17, and I guess it relies on SPI because it doesn’t work in other apps that use the standard NSWindow tabbing.
My use case is to select those tabs I want to save as a group, right click one of those tabs to add them all to a new Tab Group (to keep things neat and tidy).
Jef:
Unfortunately, it also means you can’t select another tab in an inactive Safari window anymore by command+click. You could even (command+)click a button on a site while the window remained inactive. You can’t have it all…
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@Michael The tabs implementation in Safari is a custom one, and doesn’t use the AppKit view that were added for NSWindow tabbing. There are many nuanced differences between the two implementations (uncanny valley), but I guess it gives them more flexibility to implement things like this.
@Leo I know it started off custom, but I had thought it switched to the AppKit implementation when that became available. I guess not.
I thought this was something that came with Chrome on launch. I think it’s something you naturally discover once you accumulate 1000 tabs across multiple web browsers.
I first encountered this when trying to close a tab and got a weird error message:
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You have 2 tabs selected. Do you want to close 2 tabs?
[Cancel] [Close Tabs]
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I guess I had inadvertently command-clicked a tab and was unaware of this, though it seems weird I'd misclick in such a way. It has since happened several times and I discovered this as a feature.
I'd like a button to just close the active tab, since that is what was intended.
I also find it bizarre that there's no way to do this in the tab overview.
Aaaand, you'd think while they were at tab changes, they would have fixed the issue where there's no easy way to merge a single-tab window to another window, but I digress.