OS X El Capitan Beta: Pinning Safari Tabs

One of the new features in El Capitan’s version of Safari is the ability to “pin” tabs to the left side of the Tab Bar.

Pinned sites in OS X El Capitan's SafariWhy would you want to do this, you ask? Gosh, hold on, Captain Impatient, I’m gonna tell you. First of all, this’ll let you keep sites you visit frequently in an accessible location that’s also kinda out of the way. Secondly, pinned tabs update in the background, so if you’re wanting to keep an eye on a particular site that changes frequently, this is a good way to do it. Finally, pinned tabs are persistent, so if you quit Safari and reopen it, your pins will remain (even if the program isn’t configured to resume where you left off). Whew! 

So there are a few different ways to take advantage of this feature. First, you could click on the Window menu and choose “Pin Tab” from there:

Pinning a tab from the Window menu in OS X El Capitan's SafariYou could also right- or Control-click on the tab and select the option from the contextual menu:

Control-clicking to pin a tab on OS X El Capitan's Safari

Or you could drag the tab you want to pin over to the far left of your toolbar, where you’ll see it sort of collapse into an icon. Release the tab there, and it’ll be pinned:

Dragging a tab to pin it in OS X El Capitan's SafariTo unpin a site, just reverse any of the actions I mentioned above—drag a pinned tab to the right, right-click on it and choose “Unpin Tab,” or pick from the Window menu:

Unpinning a tab in OS X El Capitan's Safari from the Window menu

Oh, and here’s one more note: If you’re not seeing anything like what I’m talking about above (and you’re running the El Capitan beta!), be sure you don’t have the Tab Bar hidden. If so, you can turn that back on under the View menu.

Use the View menu to show Safari's tab barAlong with new Safari-tab-mute thing that I wrote about recently, this is one of my favorite El Cap features! What about you guys? Will you use these pinned tabs yourselves?