SPMUG 633 Safari and background window links
By Rob Griffiths

As you may already know, OS X lets you manipulate background windows by
holding down the Command key„you can drag them, resize them, and more,
as long as you hold down the Command key first. You can use this trick,
along with a quirk of Safari, to manipulate how links in background
windows open.

For instance, say you had two windows open, and noticed a link in the
background window that youÍd like to read. If you just click the link,
of course, the background window comes to the foreground, at which point
you have to click the link again to read the article.

If you command-click that link while itÍs in the background, it will (as
you might guess) load in a new tab. ThatÍs what Command-clicking a link
in Safari does, after all. However, whatÍs somewhat surprising is that
the new tab will appear in the foreground window, not the background
window„making it easy to read that story you were interested in. By way
of comparison, trying this in Camino or OmniWeb will open the new tab in
the background window. (In Firefox, Command-clicking on background
windows doesnÍt work at all.) Not necessarily what you might expect to
happen, but quite useful.

If, on the other hand, you want to open a background link in the same
tab of the background window, there is a way to do that, too. It does,
however, require a bit of mouse gymnastics to accomplish. First press
and hold Command, then click-and-hold on the background link youÍd like
to open. While still holding the mouse button down, release Command,
then release the mouse button.

If you did everything in the right sequence, the clicked link will open
in the current tab of the background window, leaving your focus on the
current foreground window. To be honest, I rarely if ever use this
technique, but I do often Command-click background links to read them in
the foreground window.