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Update: OK, I feel pretty darn stupid now. I found out why so many people are not able to restore closed tabs in Safari like I have been able to.
Turns out it's because I'm running an extension I found for Safari called Saft. Actually, I'm running a bunch of extensions for Safari. I liked a lot of the features I had in Firefox thanks to the extensions I had installed over there, but Safari doesn't really support extensions like Firefox does. However, it does support InputManagers or SIMBL programs. Saft can be run as an InputManager or as a stand alone application.
I run Saft as an InputManager so that it's around when ever I launch Safari. It does a bunch more things along with restoring closed tabs so head over to the programs website and check it out. It's not expensive at all and in my opinion, well worth what the developer is asking for it.
If you accidentally close a tab and want to reopen it, just type Ctrl-Z, or use the Edit menu and select "Undo Closing Tab".
I have no idea if this is a new Safari 3.1 feature or it's been in all versions of Safari since the beginning. I just had no idea it was there until today. Interestingly, it does not work in the Windows version of Safari 3.1. Can't say I understand why that is, they should be from the same build branch.
Here is why I'm posting this:
I just found a great feature of Safari totally by accident. Sometimes I close tabs I have open by mistake. It's pretty easy to hit Ctrl-W one too many times or just when you thought you were in a different application. At least for me it is. :shrug:
So I was working on an article I am going to post next when I accidently hit Ctrl-Z to undo something I had done in Snapz Pro X thinking I could undo something I had done. However, Snapz had completely gone away and Safari was the top app. I noticed that the page I was looking at had changed. I got a little worried since I had some text in a window I had typed and was afraid that I had lost it by closing the tab. So I looked at the tab bar and noticed that there were more tabs than should have been if I had closed it. I hit Ctrl-Z again and saw another new tab appear. I then realized that I was restoring tabs I had closed out earlier.
So I looked at the Safari menu bar to see if I could find out what Ctrl-Z did, not really thinking that it was Undo. I looked at the History menu first, then went over to the Edit menu and saw "Undo Closing Tab".
Now, at this point, I was saying to myself: Duh! Of course. Still, I wouldn't have thought to use Undo to restore a closed browser tab in a thousand years. Especially since Firefox and other browsers have other ways to restore closed tabs or no way at all.
So I pass this info on to others in hopes that it will make their decision to use one browser over another a little easier.
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April 23rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I was looking around to find a plugin that helps me do that Undo Close Tab function and bumped onto this. I’m using Safari 3.1.1, so of course I tried it out straight away, but no luck at all. The Undo in Edit menu is grey and cannot be used. Did you install any thing else that might have triggered that as a part of its effects?
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:17 pm
@Duck0: In order for the Undo item in Safari’s Edit menu to display you need to have had a tab closed recently and not done anything else afterword. Like right now, I’m typing this response, so when I look at the Edit Menu I see “Undo Typing”. If I click away from this editbox I am typing in, it still shows “Undo Typing”.
Now, if I click on a link to open a new tab, then close that tab, I see “Undo Closing Tab” in the Edit Menu. It’s a little touchy I suppose, but the idea is that you accidentally closed a tab you didn’t mean to close, so you do the Command-Z to bring it back.
I suppose Firefox has a better version of this by the fact that it doesn’t assign it’s re-open tab in the edit menu. It’s part of the tab bar in the browser.
So it looks like I’m going to have to add some text to this post to clarify this new information. Thanks for pointing out that this feature is lost after using the browser for something other than working with the tabs.
May 1st, 2008 at 3:54 pm
This doesn’t work for me, either. I’m running a from factory mac mini, software updated to the latest and undo is always grayed out for me (except in edit boxes). It never opens my recently closed tabs no matter what.
May 1st, 2008 at 4:08 pm
@Barrett: I see you are running the latest and greatest Safari. I can’t tell if you are running Tiger or Leopard. It’s possible that the feature is only available in Leopard, but that seems surprising to me. This is something in Safari, so I would assume it would work in either OS.
It works perfectly for me here with Leopard 10.5.2 and Safari (v5525.18). To test it, I simply type Command-T to create a new tab, go to google.com, then type Command-W to close the tab. Next I type Command-Z and the tab re-appears with Google.
It’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work, but it’s a nice feature that the developers added.
Let me know if you are running Tiger or an older OS. It’s possible that this could be the cause of the feature not working. Thanks!
May 1st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Using Leopard 10.5.2 and Safari 3.1.1…odd…
May 6th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Ya im using Leopard and safari 3.1.1 and the undo close tab option is never available either. Ive been searching google for an answer to this and cannot find one. any other suggestions would be amazing.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:00 am
OK guys, I figured out what is going on. Turns out the reason I am able to restore closed tabs with Command-Z is because I am running a Safari extension called Saft. I updated the post here to reflect that information and I put a link to the program up there as well in case you are interested in checking it out.
It’s a pretty cheap program as shareware goes and I have found it quite useful, if for no other reason than the undo closed tabs feature.
Thanks for putting up with my stupidity.