Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How to Disable Tab Previews in Safari on Mac

MacRumors

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
67,805
38,416


In Safari 14, Apple introduced a new feature called tab previews, where hovering your mouse pointer over a non-active browser tab shows an image preview of the tab's contents.

safari-tab-previews.jpg

Apple doesn't provide an option in preferences to disable tab previews, which isn't great if you find the feature less than useful or downright distracting. Fortunately, there's an undisclosed but fairly simple way to disable tab previews, which we're going to explain how to do here.

The following steps guide you through the process. Note that one of the steps involves inputting a simple Terminal command, so you'll need to be comfortable using Terminal command line interface to follow through to the end.

  1. Quit Safari if it's running on your Mac.
  2. Launch System Preferences ( menu -> System Preferences...) then click the Security & Privacy preference pane.
    sys-prefs-privacy.jpg

    Select the Privacy tab, then click the padlock icon and enter your password or use Touch ID to make changes.
  3. Select Full Disk Access in the sidebar.
    Scroll to Terminal in the app list and check the box next to it to enable the app to have full disk access. (Note that you can disable this access later by unchecking the box after you've followed all the steps.)
    privacy-tab-terminal.jpg

    Next, launch the Terminal app (found in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal).
    termina-app-utilities.jpg

    Enter the following command and then hit Enter:
    defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugDisableTabHoverPreview 1
    disable-safari-tab-previews-terminal.jpg
Launch Safari, and you should find that page previews no longer appear when you hover your mouse pointer over a non-active tab.

How to Re-Enable Safari Tab Previews

re-enable-safari-tab-previews.jpg

To revert the change at any time, simply repeat the steps, except in step 7 be sure to replace the "1" at the end of the Terminal command with "0". After hitting Enter and relaunching Safari, your tab previews will be re-instated.

Article Link: How to Disable Tab Previews in Safari on Mac
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/disable-tab-previews-safari-mac/
  • Like
Reactions: planteater, peanuts_of_pathos, minik and 1 other person
Does anyone know if there's a defaults command to disable the extremely annoying and useless "This tab is using significant memory" warnings? They serve no purpose (I have plenty of RAM) and are extremely persistent; sometimes I dismiss it and it comes back FIVE SECONDS later. The site (usually Twitter) is working just fine, too.

It's sad because this is really the only major problem I have with Safari; I don't want to use a different browser over something THIS stupid.
 
zorinlynx said:
Does anyone know if there's a defaults command to disable the extremely annoying and useless "This tab is using significant memory" warnings? They serve no purpose (I have plenty of RAM) and are extremely persistent; sometimes I dismiss it and it comes back FIVE SECONDS later. The site (usually Twitter) is working just fine, too.

It's sad because this is really the only major problem I have with Safari; I don't want to use a different browser over something THIS stupid.
Click to expand...
Yes, please if anyone knows anything about this I could use the help too. It seems to happen when i’m watching a video that’s not in YouTube. It will come up with a warning and then totally reload the page, then I have to find where I left off in the video.
 
I just noticed that this morning. Glad there’s a way to disable it. Hopefully Apple doesn’t remove it as it looks to be a debugging flag.

Is there a similar way to disable the sidebar that pops out from the left? That has been a complete pain ever since they added the “feature” years back without an option to disable, especially since I’m in full screen in Safari 99% of the time.
 
People are annoyed by this? I didn't even realize it was a thing. I guess I click my tabs too quickly? Not enough time to trigger the hover state.

Does anyone know if it's possible to reduce the hover delay? I'd like it to be instant, or perhaps nearly instant. I'm a bit of a tab hoarder so this is really handy for when I'm trying to remember what a certain favicon is. I manage hundreds of websites and am always jumping around between them. Is it also possible to make the tab preview larger? I wonder if it would be possible to develop an extension that does this...
 
  • Like
Reactions: BulkSlash
Neat trick.. What else can it do ? :)

I was expecting a dialog to pop up to grant access if you never give Full disk access to Terminal, or at least an error message or indication it didn't work, but the command just silently fails. Just to point out... Any other app would probably ask you otherwise.
 
Jodeo said:
RELATED QUESTION...
How do we disable web searches from Spotlight Search?

Over the years many of us have grown accustomed to Spotlight being a local search. Adding even a 1-line, top of the stack option for Web search is an annoyance. Is there some way to disable that too?

Thanks.
\
Click to expand...
Disable Siri Suggestions under Spotlight settings:

Turn off Siri Suggestions for Spotlight on Mac

You can turn off Siri Suggestions for Spotlight on your Mac, as well as Location Services for Spotlight.
support.apple.com
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jodeo, amartinez1660 and ksec
What I've been wanting to disable forever in Safari is the pinch to see all of the tabs as mini windows. I can't stand it - I constantly accidentally trigger it. Sine I'm a heavy tab user, when it does get triggered it makes my Mac's fans spin to sound like a jet plane and freezes things almost every time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: laszlo182, ocanalix, synp and 1 other person
This should be a Safari setting just like there is an option for disabling the annoying ‘favicon instead of text in tab’.

To be able to disable ‘enhancements’ that shouldn’t even have made it as default. :confused:
 
  • Like
Reactions: Minimum91, Stormz and 123
myrtlebee said:
What I've been wanting to disable forever in Safari is the pinch to see all of the tabs as mini windows. I can't stand it - I constantly accidentally trigger it. Sine I'm a heavy tab user, when it does get triggered it makes my Mac's fans spin to sound like a jet plane and freezes things almost every time.
Click to expand...

Yes. Pinch will activate Tab Overview, Which will reload every tab you have for a preview image on your tab windows, and causes CPU Fan spinning as well as Heavy Disk Write if you have lots and lots of tabs, which could be hundreds of GB of write for paging.

I wish they provide a feature / option where only a List of Tabs are shown and not a preview of Tabs. Unfortunately after years of feature request and bug report I guess they dont think it is a problem.

For now I just disable Pinch to Zoom. You can do that in
  1. System Preferences from the  Apple menu
  2. Click on “Trackpad” and choose the “Scroll & Zoom” tab
  3. Uncheck the box next to “Zoom in or out”
That should do the trick.
 
Interestingly, this doesn't seem to work for me on Safari 14 on Mojave.

Edit: Nevermind. Even in Mojave you have to explicitly give your terminal (iTerm, in my case) full disk access. I hate silent failures like that, though - it's very user-unfriendly.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Minimum91
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back