MacOS: Safari: Full screen mode: bringing focus to address bar in a new window

keyboardmacossafaritabswindow-manager

When we open a new tab in Safari, it automatically brings focus to the address bar. But in full screen mode, after pressing alt-cmd-N(or the private mode counterpart), the new window that opens is completely blank due to my preferences, but neither is the address bar visible. I want to have focus in that by default instead of pressing cmd-L.

Safari 12.0.2 on macOS 10.14.2

Best Answer

In my limited testing this seems to be limitation in most apps when they're full screen. In Chrome when it's full screen it takes you to a new tab but disables the location keyboard shortcut.

ss1

I suspect this has to do with how full screen is actually implemented. Full screen is built on top of spaces and so applications can behave quite differently in spaces vs. in the normal view.

This Apple Insider article reiterates this point, titled:How to use Spaces, Apple's mostly ignored macOS Mojave productivity feature:

Whenever you take an app's window to full screen, your Mac actually creates a new Space and puts it in there. Full Screen and Split View are productivity features of the Mac that have a lot of rough edges and this blurring between them and Spaces doesn't help.

There conclusion in that article is mine as well. I use full screen and spaces sparingly because I find them a confusing mess of behaviors unfortunately.

The answer to this is to use Spaces but use it sparingly. Don't take up all 16 possible Spaces, just have one or two. Try to keep all the documents from one app in one space, at least until you're so used to moving around that it's second nature.