Can't get in to web page in safari in sequoia

By Studio Jay, 5 June, 2025

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Dear Friends,
I just did a clean install of Sequoia on my mac.
When I open safari, it comes up in a tool bar, when I press tab, I go to things like tab overview, then items like the search bar, then some collections like favourites etc. However, I can't seem to navigate into the main body of the web page. If I do a search by pressing command plus l, I can then tab into the web page, but this strange behavior seems to happen when I launch safari. In older os versions, you would be in the main body of the web page when safari launches. I want to bring back this behavior.

Also, can someone please tell me how to delete favourites in safari?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Kind regards,

Jay

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Comments

By Tyler on Thursday, June 5, 2025 - 22:54

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

By default, when launching Safari, the start page opens, showing favorites, website suggestions, and recent privacy events. To configure Safari to open a homepage of your choosing instead:

  1. Choose Safari > Settings (or press Command-Comma) and click the General button in the toolbar.
  2. Choose "Homepage" from the “New windows open with" popup menu. You can also choose this option from the "New tabs open with" popup menu if you'd like the behavior to be the same for both new windows, which is what Safari opens with by default when launching, and new tabs you create when browsing.
  3. Type the web address you want as your homepage in the "Homepage" field. That website should then open automatically whenever you launch Safari in the future.

To delete favorites, from the Start page, focus on the one you want to delete in the collection and choose "Delete" from the context menu (accessed by pressing VO-Shift-M). Alternatively, you can delete favorites and other bookmarks by choosing Bookmarks > Edit bookmarks (or pressing Command-Option-B), selecting the bookmarks you want to delete in the table, and pressing the Delete key.

By Studio Jay on Friday, June 6, 2025 - 00:20

Hi Tyler,
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
Jay

By Irma W on Friday, June 13, 2025 - 02:47

got the same issue and tried your steps, now everything is back to normal. thanks Tyler.

By João Santos on Friday, June 13, 2025 - 11:35

Tabbing for navigation is mostly a Windows thing. VoiceOver implements its own navigation controls which I will explain below, but before that, keep in mind that every time I mention VO in a key combination it either means Control+Option (default) or CapsLock, depending on your VoiceOver configuration.

VoiceOver has an official interactive navigation tutorial that is presented the first time you enable it. If for some reason you missed it, pressing VO+Fn+F8, or VO+Fn+8 on TouchBar Macs, will launch that tutorial again. To quit it, press Command+Q, which is the usual key combination to exit any application with or without VoiceOver. At any moment you can also press VO+K to start Keyboard Help, where you can press key combinations and VoiceOver will explain what they do, if they are assigned to anything at all, as well as VO+H, which will bring up a help menu that includes the full list of VoiceOver commands and the key combinations they are assigned to. All this can be configured in VoiceOver Utility which you can launch using VO+Fn+F8, or VO+Fn+8 on TouchBar Macs.

As for your own specific situation in Safari, pressing Command+L to move the input focus to the address bar followed by double-pressing the Escape key will move the input focus to the web view. Pressing VO+J might also do it, but this functionality has been broken in some earlier versions of Sequoia so I prefer the more standard Command+L and double-press Escape method which accomplishes the same. Before Sonoma, pressing a key combination to quickly jump to a web element like a heading used to do the job, but these days that's no longer the case so focusing the address bar and double-pressing Escape is the fastest way to focus the web view in Safari that I know of. This might not work if for some reason you have disabled VoiceOver's input focus following, which is generally not recommended but is useful sometimes, in which case you must press VO+Fn+Shift+F3, or VO+Fn+Shift+3 on TouchBar Macs, to re-enable it.

If you forget any of the key combinations that I mentioned, which is quite normal, all these behaviors can be configured in VoiceOver Utility, which in addition to the aforementioned shortcut key combination, can also be launched from Spotlight by pressing Command+Space, typing VoiceOver Utility in the text input field, and pressing Return.


Editing to add that some of the key combinations that I mentioned are likely to only work on the US keyboard layout. I only buy US ANSI keyboards and have all my systems configured to US English by default so I tend to forget that in other locales the key combinations that I mention are sometimes different. As far as computers go, everything is designed to work in the en-US locale first and later maybe in other locales as well but usually only as a half-baked afterthought.

By mr grieves on Friday, June 13, 2025 - 16:54

If you hold down VO then press H twice you will go to the VoiceOver commands help window. From here you can type in the name of a command. You can use up and down arrows and enter to select a command from here, but it will also tell you the keyboard shortcut. Really helpful if you can't quite remember what it is.