How to Open a Link in New Private Browsing Window in Safari for Mac

How to Open a Link in New Private Browsing Window in Safari for Mac

You can easily open any link found on the web into a new private browsing window on Safari for Mac, thanks to a helpful albeit little-known trick available in the web browser. For the unfamiliar, aims to protect private information and some degree of privacy by preventing websites from tracking search behavior, setting permanent cookies, and insuring that pages and websites you visit are not stored in typical Safari History. This is helpful for many situations, lets say you see a link on a webpage that you want to open but you dont want it to appear in your browsing history for whatever reason (or avoid the cookie situation because of a paywall), then you could open a link into the private browsing window. Heres how to open new links directly into private browsing windows on a Mac with Safari: You can try it out yourself quickly with this very article, just hold down the OPTION / ALT key on the Mac keyboard, then right-click on and choose Open in New Private Window. You must have a modern version of Safari to have this capability available to you. If your Safari version is outdated, you could use Safari Tech Preview instead, or just and then navigate to the link in question. And yes, that means this trick works with youd like with a keystroke (command+shift+N) or by going to the File menu (New Private Window), but being able to open a new link directly into private browsing mode is a nice feature to come to Safari on the Mac. Chrome for Mac also supports this feature, but you dont need to hold down any particular keystroke to access it, just a simple right-click or control+click will offer the same option in the pop-up menu of Chrome. As for iPhone and iPad, this feature does not (yet) exist in iOS Safari when , but you can via the Tabs section. One thing thats important to remember is that Private Browsing mode is an anonymous browsing tool or security feature, it just prevents local storage of browsing data under that session. Private Browsing does not offer any anonymity, IP obfuscation, or other capabilities that are typically associated with truly private sessions, like whats potentially offered through (or ), or a high quality anonymizing VPN service.