More on Safari shortcuts (or lack thereof)

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 4th, 2003 • 5:05 pm

I got a couple of comments on yesterday’s item on missing shortcuts in Safari. They mentioned cmd-backtick and cmd-shift-backtick for cycling through windows.

I am afraid I can’t find these shortcuts anywhere in Apple’s Knowledge Base article on Safari shortcuts. Granted, this article is dated (January 15, 2003), and doesn’t mention the shortcuts for cycling through tabs either… but the shortcuts for cycling through windows are nowhere to be seen.

More importantly, however, it shoud be noted that these shortcuts are specific to the US English keyboard layout. After much experimenting, I finally found what the keyboard shortcuts were on my French-Canadian (Canadian CSA) keyboard layout. They are cmd-ù and cmd-shift-ù. Phew!

I still think the keyboard shorcuts should be more intuitive (like the ones for cycling through tabs) and should appear as commands in Safari’s Window menu as well. It doesn’t make sense to force users to guess what these shortcuts might be.

It should also be noted that these shortcuts work in pretty unpredictable ways whenever the “Downloads” and “Activity” windows are visible. These windows are part of the cycle, but they also seem to screw up the cycle.

And finally, the cycling only goes through currently visible windows, not through minimized windows, which makes sense.


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