Safari Tab Switching

My latest obsession is with improving my personal UX. Now that I spend most of my time on a Mac instead of bouncing between Windows and Linux, I’ve noticed a huge improvement in the pace of my work. When I do run into something inefficient, I jot it down and try to fix it.

Lately I’m frustrated with Safari.

I typically have several Safari windows open, each with a different group of related tabs. When I want to switch to a specific tab it’s a tiny awkward dance of flipping through windows and then CMD-Shift-Backslash to open the Safari tab overview search. It’s not a great experience, especially if I have a Safari window in another space.1

There’s a really nice solution to this problem with using an Alfred workflow. It’s some clever work that uses javascript to list all of the browser tabs. It also has separate triggers to search Chrome, Brave, Edge, and something called Vivaldi. I think I need to rig up an iCab extension but it’s a great addition that solves a problem Apple doesn’t.

Alfred Tab Search

I’ll throw in a bonus Alfred workflow for managing windows. It’s also clever and fits the command palette model I have for interacting with my Mac.

  1. A quick search of this site tells me that I’ve been writing about this problem since 2012. ↩︎