Update (3/19/10 – 3:20pm): Sorry about the formatting earlier. I am having issues with MarkDown and this blog. For some reason, I can’t get the plugin I installed to work correctly.
Command-Option-Delete ( 
):
Remove topmost webpage from “Show the previous page” history
So, I came across this keyboard shortcut totally by accident while I was trying to remove podcast subscriptions from within iTunes. In iTunes, you use Command-Option-Delete to unsubscribe to a podcast and remove the files from iTunes and your hard drive.
Well, I didn’t know it at the time but Safari was my active application when I was attempting to remove a podcast. Sometimes iTunes doesn’t become the active application even if you click on it with the mouse. Not sure why that is, but I hope its a bug that is fixed when the new Snow Leopard (10.6.3) is finally released to the public.
Nothing happened in iTunes, but I noticed an update in Safari’s window. I didn’t think much about it at the moment, and attempted to delete the podcast a second time. Again, I saw an update in Safari’s window. So this time I paid attention to Safari and noticed that when I pressed Command-Option-Delete, the current webpage went away and Safari animated the page zooming back to the Top Sites page.
Well, at that point, I realized that the key sequence was actually doing something constructive. I went to a website, clicked on a few links to build up the back page history and pressed Command-Option-Delete again. This time, the browser went back to the previous page. When I looked at the back page history, I saw that one less entry was in it.
So to explain a little better, take the screen shot above that shows:
- Safari: Browser Window and Menu Shortcuts
- safari keyboard shortcuts – Google Search
- topsites://
Now I press Command-Option-Delete and the top most entry is removed and the web browser shows the Google Search results page and the back page history showing:
- safari keyboard shortcuts – Google Search
- topsites://
Press the combo again and the Google search results page goes away and the browser shows Google and the back page history showing:
- topsites://
One last time and the browser animates the Google page going back to it’s position in the Top Sites page:
- topsites://
I attempted to find this keyboard shortcut documented somewhere, but I couldn’t. So here you go. I hope you find it as useful as I have!
Dave M.
October 11th, 2010 at 7:37 am
Found this by accident while looking for a shortcut to force Safari to cancel a prev command, anyway isn’t an even shorter shortcut for what you have explained here just to hit the delete button?
From any page on Safari if you hit the delete button it returns you to the previous page on the same tab. So not only is there no need ever to use the “back button”, but you dont even have to use “command-opt-del”.
Just hit delete.
October 11th, 2010 at 8:10 am
Bex, thanks for that info, but I think it’s pretty well known that when you hit the delete button, the browser will go back a page.
The difference between hitting delete and hitting Command-Opt-Delete is that with the Command-Option-Delete, the webpage is removed from the stack of sites you have traveled by clicking links. Hitting delete just move you down that stack and leaves the last web page in.
In other words, with Delete you can us the forward arrow to go back to the page you were last at, were with Command-Option-Delete, you can not go back to the last page you were at, because it has been removed.