Safari 16: Anybody else seeing this silly open in tabs bug?

I have a couple bookmark collections set to open as tabs (“Automatically Replace Tabs”) for stuff I usually review multiple times a day.

Ever since updating to Safari 16 I observe that clicking on such a tab collection in my favorites bar will open the right set of tabs, but it will not also put focus on the first tab and show it loading. Instead I get a blank browser window with a bunch of tabs at the top (the right tabs, just no content). I then have to manually select that first tab to get it to start loading its content. If I flip through the other tabs (shift-cmd-]) they will start to load too. OTOH if I don’t flip through them, they won’t load until I later select one or it becomes selected because I have closed all previous tabs.

At first I thought this might for some reason be desired new behavior.

But then this morning I noticed that when I initially launch the tab group and then hit the Show Tab Overview button in the toolbar, I get nothing. Not blank tabs or anything. Just no reaction whatsoever. Only once I select the first tab and get it to load, does that button start to display tabs.

So this must obviously be a bug.

Turning off my two Safari extensions made no difference. Anybody else seen this bug?

I think my tab groups are set up as you describe, but I cannot reproduce what you’re seeing. When I click on a saved tab group, all my current tabs disappear, the five in the group I selected appear, and the last tab I was viewing at the time I switched tab groups automatically loads. I’m using Safari 16.0, macOS 12.6.

Thank you for checking.

I’m also on 12.6. This is on Apple Silicon.

But maybe this is the difference. I’m not using tab groups. This is a bookmark folder set to open tabs (right click on a bookmark folder in your favorites bar and select “Automatically Replace Tabs”). Subtle difference (as we recently discussed).

Safari acts the same way here. I noticed if I choose any of the tabs, the last one appears to load in the background, but the rest don’t load until I select the tab.

With the Show Tab Overview button, hitting it does seem to cause the pages to load in the background because if I go to a specific tab, the content is rendered instantly. (I may be wrong about this. I just tried it again, and it might just the pages loading very quickly.)

Curious that it only seems to have affected you recently. I’ve had that exact behaviour ever since macOS12.0 Monterey came out last year. Only difference is in my case it does focus on and load the first tab (others show in the tab bar but won’t load till I flip to them).

I’ve always thought it was some sort of power saving thing for laptop users and a nuisance for desktop users.

I’m seeing the same issue on a MB Pro and Safari 16.

I don’t usually replace tabs, but I have a few bookmark pages where I click the bottom to open about 10 tabs by clicking “open in tabs” top open the tabs to the right of my last tab. For several versions now (since Catalina?), I’ve seen that probably 3/4 of the time that most of the tabs don’t actually start downloading until I activate them. It’s still happening now on an M2 MBA and has been since before Safari 16.

So, this sort of behavior really isn’t new to me.

The bug does not appear to exist in the Safari Tech Preview – I just tested it and the tab group worked fine.

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The delayed/deferred loading of tabs, until switching focus, has been there a while.

I think it may have arrived around the time that restarts (after updates, logouts, etc) began automatically using the “reopen all windows from last session” feature.

Generally I find it to be a good thing: I usually have a lot of windows and tabs open and it would take a long time to load them all before Safari (or the entire machine) was usable.

I also have a bunch of tabs that all require authentication to the same service, and the deferred loading lets me log in the first one and only then switch to the others in turn.

Well, it hasn’t appeared on this 14" M1 Pro MBP since the update to 12.6.

Perhaps some people find this useful, but to others it introduces unnecessary lag in their workflow, see also @Gobit’s post above. I didn’t spent $3k on a beast of a CPU to wait while Safari loads a 60 kB webpage just because it thinks another 60 kB webpage needs to load first.

IOW, at the very least a user-selectable option would be in order.

Hmm. I have not experienced it until recently (ie, last month or so), and I’ve been using tab groups for decades.

Good news is that Safari 16.1 update fixes this (at least on Monterey). :slight_smile: