Dearest gentle reader, this author opens new Safari windows with an empty page, like a proper member of The Ton.
A new private window normally appears as below, untitled.
Back in April, I posted on Mastodon about a bug introduced in Safari Technology Preview version 192 that caused the start page rather than an empty page to be shown in new private windows. Although a later version of Safari Technology Preview fixed this bug, it nonetheless made its way into Safari version 17.5 and continues to plague Safari 17.6.
I thought the purpose of Safari Technology Preview was to find and fix bugs before they affected Safari?
Oddly, the wrong private window appeared on my Mac mini but not on my MacBook Pro. Naturally, then, I decided to diff the output of defaults read com.apple.Safari from the two Macs. After some experimentation, I discovered the culprit: the Safari defaults included the key PrivateBrowsingExplanationState on my MacBook Pro but not on my Mac mini. You can use the following Terminal command to work around the Safari bug and restore the empty page to new private windows.
defaults write com.apple.Safari PrivateBrowsingExplanationState -integer 1Remember, gentle reader, you heard it first in these pages!
Yours Truly,
Jeff Johnson
(not a pseudonym)
