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How to Disable Tab Previews in Safari on Mac

I think that out of memory thing has something to do with safari maxed RAM per tab setting so one tab don’t eat away, say, 6GB of RAM due to memory leak or whatever. This can also be a nice selling point over Google Chrome.
 
ksec said:
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.
Click to expand...
Pinch to zoom is a good thing.

The way I usually trigger it is that I use the trackpad to zoom in on something, then pinch to get it back to normal size, but do it too much and end up with the tab overview. I wish we could make it stop at normal size.
 
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synp said:
Pinch to zoom is a good thing.

The way I usually trigger it is that I use the trackpad to zoom in on something, then pinch to get it back to normal size, but do it too much and end up with the tab overview. I wish we could make it stop at normal size.
Click to expand...

Yes. But Tab Overview is so annoying I am willing to give that up. I wish someone could tell me if there are any other solution.
 
Finally! I was curious about how it is done. This safari tab feature was rather annoying for me.
 
What I really want to do is to remove the delay between mouse hovering and the preview poping up. The default 2 seconds delay makes this feature useless, it’s always faster just click and see inside the tab.

Does anyone know how to do that?
 
Or just enable Debug menu in Safari through Terminal:
Code: 
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1
and uncheck/check Show Tab Preview on Hover in Tab Features
 
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the3ye said:
Or just enable Debug menu in Safari through Terminal:
Code: 
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1
and uncheck/check Show Tab Preview on Hover in Tab Features
Click to expand...
STP, doesn't have that option in "tab features"
 
This doesn't work on 11.3. Did they disable it or am I doing something wrong? I looked at the actual plist and the flag is set correctly, but the tabs still show the annoying previews when I hover. It doesn't surprise me that Apple didn't include a toggle for it in the Safari preferences since they still haven't added a toggle for the stupid sidebar on the left when you mouse to the left edge.

Edit:
UPDATE TO THE COMMAND:

Still need to go to terminal, but instead enter "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1"

Restart Safari and there will be a Debug menu. Go to Debug>Tab Features and uncheck "Show Tab Previews on Hover"
 
Last edited:
Unfortunately, I was unable to get it to work. I went into System Preferences, copied-pasted your command string into the Termina, hit Enter and then relaunched Safari, but to no avail.

This is a MacBook Air bought only a few weeks ago. Strange.
 
Any solution for Safari 15?
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugDisableTabHoverPreview 1 or Debug>Tab Features and uncheck "Show Tab Previews on Hover" no longer work.
 
bogdanw said:
Any solution for Safari 15?
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugDisableTabHoverPreview 1 or Debug>Tab Features and uncheck "Show Tab Previews on Hover" no longer work.
Click to expand...

Confirmed, still not working in Monterey 12.1. Sigh. Come on Apple, this is such as obviously annoying thing that people should be able to disable, should be a checkbox right in Safari Prefs in the Tabs section.
 
Still not working in Ventura 13.5.1 / Safari 16.6

What is the loss to Apple of keeping this in?
 
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