Those who have memorized the keyboard shortcuts for Safari on the Mac will find these to be identical to their OS X functions, except they’re in the highly mobile iOS world.
Safari Keyboard Shortcuts for iOS
- Command+L to go to the URL bar and go to a new location / site, or Search On Page*
- Command+T to open a new browser tab
- Command+W to close the currently active browser tab
- Command+R to refresh the contents of the currently active web browser tab
- Command+. (period) to stop loading the current tab
* The Command+L keyboard shortcut goes to the URL bar, but is also used to perform a “Search on Page†like you would in new versions of Safari without a keyboard attached. It’s a little quirky to get used to, going a bit like this: hit Command+L to visit the Safari URL bar, then start typing the text to search and match on the currently active web page for, finding the matched results below everything else on the list, below all the other keyword matches, found under the “On This Page†section. Search On Page is incredibly helpful and widely used, and this could use some improvement in upcoming versions of iOS, whether you use an external keyboard or not.
The first thing you need to do is to create a new keyboard shortcut. To create a new keyboard shortcut, open System Preferences, and click Keyboard > Shortcuts. Once there, click App Shortcuts in the left-hand pane, and click the ‘+’ sign down below to add a new application to your list of custom shortcuts.
Next, select your application, which is Safari.
Normally when creating a keyboard shortcut, you want to type the exact menu tile that’s in the menu bar. In this case it would be: Private Browsing…
But since the menu title contains an ellipsis, it’s a special case scenario. In this case you want to omit the ellipsis and just type the following: Private Browsing
