How to Use Safari’s Keyboard Shortcuts
If you hold down the Command key and press a number from one to nine, you can switch between the different tabs currently open on your browser. Before the launch of Safari 9, these shortcuts were used to access websites saved to your Favorites. For example, Command + 1 brought up the first site on the left in the Bookmarks toolbar; Command + 2 accessed the second site from the left, and so on.
How to Enable Safari Favorites Keyboard Shortcuts
If you want to use keyboard shortcuts for your favorites instead of your tabs, you need to change how they work in the browser’s settings. Here’s how:
Organization Is the Key
Safari’s keyboard shortcuts let you access up to nine URLs. Before you give them a workout, though, take some time to look at your Favorites and rearrange or organize them if necessary. Keyboard shortcuts only work for individual websites, not with any folders that contain websites. For example, let’s say the first item on your Favorites is a folder called News, which contains your preferred news sites. That folder and all of the bookmarks within it would be ignored by the keyboard shortcuts. Consider a Bookmarks toolbar that looked like this:
News (folder)Apple (folder)Google Maps (site)About Macs (site)Banking (folder)Facebook (site)
Only the three bookmarks that directly point to a website are accessible via keyboard shortcuts. The three folders on the Bookmarks toolbar are ignored. With this in mind, you may want to move all of your individual websites to the left side of the Bookmarks toolbar, while moving your folders to the right.
