Mastering Safari, using the ’snapback’ feature
Written by: Scott Haneda on Tuesday March 04th 2008, 8:19 am
Filed under: Applications, OS X 10.4, OS X 10.5, Safari
Safari seems to be riddled with small features that go unnoticed at times. One such feature is called “SnapBack”.
If you find yourself frequently pressing the back button in Safari, the SnapBack tool may save you a bit of time. Users that frequent large sites, such as Amazon.com, or Apple.com, or perhaps Ebay.com will find snapback to be valuable.
What does SnapBack look like?
Snapback presents itself to you as a small orange icon, with an arrow on it. You can see it in two places, either the far right of the URL bar, or the far right of the search box.
The snapback icon does not show up at all times, instead only under certain conditions. If you visit a site, perhaps our very own OS X Help, and then click on any link within the site, the orange icon will appear.
Clicking on the snapback icon in the URL bar will take you back to the first page you visited on the site.
SnapBack in use
Imagine you learn of OS X Help, and start reading it. You have clicked a few links, and are now several pages deep in the site. In order to get back to the first page you visited, most would click the back button a few times. While the back button does indeed work, it is slow.
Clicking the SnapBack button once, will take you back to your first visited page in an instant.
SnapBack for search results
Safari also will show the snapback icon at the far right of your browser, in the Google search box. It works the exact same way, with the exception that it applies to searching only.
For example, if you were to search for “OS X Help” in the search box, Google will show you a page of many results. Clicking on any of them will take you to that website. If at any time you want to get back to the main listing of search results, just click the orange snapback icon.
Force marking a page for SnapBack
It is also possible to force a page to be marked as your snapback page. Simply go to your History menu, and select “Mark Page for SnapBack”. While I rarely use this method, it may be useful to some of you.
Snapback is a small feature, and one that may go undetected to the casual user. In the beginning, I rarely used it. While I do not use it all the time, there are times I find it speeds up my web browsing a great deal.
Next time you notice the small orange icon, give it a click, it is one of the simpler Safari features to learn.
This seems like a godsend for navigating out of a large picture gallery
Comment by halfeatenfish 03.04.08 @ 9:02 am@halfeatenfish, great point, graphics heavy sites like picture galleries are a perfect case for SnapBack. I never thought if using it under those conditions. Rather than backing out of a page that has 100 images on it, waiting for the previous page of 100 images to load, snapback would take me back to the main page.
Great idea, thanks.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.04.08 @ 9:07 am 
You are right~I guess I never really paid attention to that, and I do “click back” a lot to get to a first page.
Thanks
Comment by JimB 03.04.08 @ 2:19 pmNifty. I like the sound of this feature. I’ll have to give it a try since I also click “back” many times.
Thank you!
Comment by Donna 03.04.08 @ 9:51 pmeh….you can use open apple + [ also instead of using a mouse but this would be good for a big picture gallery though
Comment by james 03.10.08 @ 12:52 pm@James, just to clarify for our users, command-[ is for back, and is quite different that the snapback feature.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.10.08 @ 1:24 pmDear Scott,
I’ve got one Safari-related question I can’t seem to find an answer to.
Is there a way to UNBLOCK pop-up windows selectively (for a chosen website)?
Sometimes it would definitely be great to use such option, if it does exist.
Thanks a lot!
@MacRussian, as far as I know, the best you can do, is select the menu in Safari and tell it to stop blocking for that site. Then you have to remember to turn it back on. Not the best option, but most sites should be able to pop open a pop up, as long as you click something to make it happen. Blocking pop up windows only can not happen if the site tries to make it pop open without your permission.
Comment by Scott Haneda 06.13.08 @ 7:58 am
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