The Tab Sprawl
Safari on macOS handles links differently depending on how the underlying website is coded. Often, when you click a link within an article, Safari will automatically force that link to open in a brand new tab, rather than loading the new page within the current tab. While this ensures you don’t lose your place on the original page, if you are doing heavy research on Wikipedia, a single browsing session can quickly spawn thirty open tabs. This clutters your workspace, drains battery life, and consumes massive amounts of RAM, turning the top of your browser into an unreadable mess of tiny icons.
Enforcing Single-Window Browsing
To maintain a clean browser interface and stop macOS Safari from automatically creating new tabs every time you click an external link, you must force the browser to respect your current window.
Open the Safari browser. In the top-left corner of the menu bar, click on Safari and select Settings (or Preferences). In the settings window, click on the Tabs icon at the very top. Look for the dropdown menu labelled Open pages in tabs instead of windows. By default, this is usually set to “Automatically.” Click the dropdown menu and change it to Never. By selecting “Never,” you are telling Safari to strictly load clicked links within the active, currently open tab, allowing you to use the standard “Back” button to navigate, rather than forcing you to constantly close spawned tabs.