Safari—the macOS browser—has some truly awful default settings
You know what some of the worst “features” are?
Number 1: automatic text substitutions
Safari will automatically change things you’re typing in the browser, including in the address bar, based on what it thinks are correct spellings or your substitution preferences.
One way this manifests is the shortcuts I made for iOS get triggered (e.g., type “ty” and it expands to “thank you”) and they’re hard to decline.
Another way this manifests is it tries to fix your spelling in all kinds of text fields but without warning. But worse, when I’m at a full, touch-type keyboard, don’t intervene.
To turn these off, go through:
Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement
and
Edit > Spelling & Grammar > Correct Spelling Automatically
Number 2: Safari suggestions
I don’t know what this really is or what it is for, but I know it’s awful.
I first discovered it when I found the solution for this issue that for the longest time foxnews.com would get suggested and auto-completed in my address bar (and thereby auto-downloaded “in the background”) when I typed “new…” in the address bar, despite purging foxnews.com from history and cache and blocking it as a suggestion in Google. When I type “new…,” 9 times out of 10 I am trying to navigate to news.google.com.
I tried finding a fix for this for months and kept giving up. But I finally found it. And I realized how truly annoying it is.
It also randomly fills in a suggested website when you are typing a query that is intended for Google and then automatically selects the suggestion sometimes.
For instance, the inspiration to finally write this article came just a few moments ago when I started typing a question to Google in the Safari address bar, and when I thought I was ready and pushed enter, Safari had just swapped out what I was looking at before hitting enter, which was indicating that I was about to search Google, swapping in some suggested website that turned out to be less trustworthy and answering my question specific to Canada, though I am in the United States. (I hate user interfaces that change sizes, layouts, or order while you’re typing because I type fast. Apple does this a lot in apps across all of their OSes. I’m in the process of clicking when it swaps out what I found for some new “top hit.” Infuriating.)
So, a few moments ago when that happened, I realized that either I had forgotten that I had not configured important settings since buying my new MacBook a few months ago (because I was using Chrome and Arc browsers) or it was upgrading to macOS 15.2 that reset the configuration to defaults.
Regardless, the solution is in
Settings > Search > Include Safari Suggestions
With that off, the only things your address bar input can map to are your own browser history and Google (or your default engine’s) search suggestions.
As an aside, this is so the Apple way. There are software or user interface defaults that are just awful, but extremely compelling integrated features across their tools that you just have to live a life of suffering, if you’re slightly obsessive-compulsive.
