So I enlisted my pal, dicemaster, and developer extraordinaire James Thomson to help me figure out this puzzle.įirst, just to note: it seems that, having already had the Debug menu enabled on my iMac running Catalina, it’s persisted with the update to Safari 14. It seems that the trusty defaults write command does no longer allows users to enable Safari’s Debug menu. Thus far you’ve been able to change that setting in Safari’s hidden Debug menu, but Martin’s right that Safari 14 adds some additional complications. Great question! The tip in question deals with making new Safari tabs open at the end of the window rather than next to the active tab, a behavior that many users prefer.
However, the directions on how to get the debug menu no longer seem to work with Safari 14. Thanks for the great tip on fixing tab behavior. With new Apple software updates come new questions, and reader Martin has one related to an old tip of mine: In certain cases you can use defaults write in Big Sur-if you’ve granted Terminal access to your disk in the Security & Privacy pane in System Preferences. Developer Jeff Johnson has written a great blog post explaining exactly what’s going on here: it involves a combination of macOS sandboxing and System Integrity Protection.
Update 2 9/22: Oh, what a tangled web we weave… It turns out it’s a little more complicated than the post below makes it sound. Update 9/22: After further testing, it seems the standard defaults write command does continue to work in macOS Catalina with Safari 14, though the Big Sur beta may require the method mentioned below. Enabling the Debug menu in Safari 14 on Big Sur and Catalina