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In Safari 6.1, under Mac OS 10.8, if I type a text in the address bar that matches the title of a page I have previously visited, that page is listed below. I select it and would then like to slightly edit the related URL. Instead, it only lets me editing the page title, and when pressing enter it performs a web search with the edited title. How can I change this behaviour?

This still applies in Safari 10.0 under macOS 10.11.6. Pressing the right arrow key after the page title matches only takes you to the end of the page title. The URL is displayed to the right of the cursor, but does not appear to be editable.

Here is a screenshot of a matched page title, before pressing the right arrow key:

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Here is after pressing the right arrow key. Note that further presses of the right arrow key do not affect anything.

enter image description here

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  • That is odd behaviour. I cannot replicate it on my side. Idk if it's a safari thing.
    – user14492
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 20:02
  • You can try what is suggested to do here if you think that the issue you are facing is not a normal behavior of Safari 6.1.
    – Louis Lac
    Commented May 26, 2018 at 11:07
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    I would like to encourage would-be answer providers to read this question very carefully. This behavior is odd, but is how Safari has behaved for years, now. (It's still true in Tech Preview 12.0 r58.) This isn't a "bug" or a user that is missing something, it's a design flaw.
    – gerwitz
    Commented Jun 13, 2018 at 7:10

3 Answers 3

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The answer might simply be: You can't.

Whether or no this is desirable could be debated, but having worked on a couple of these things in Mozilla/Firefox days, I think it is clear that someone (aka Apple) would create a browser location opener-thingie to do it this way.

Here's why I think this is Safari expected behavior:

The match you are looking is a match to a Bookmarks and History via the Title. The URL is being provided for your convenience (or if you come from a certain period of browser design and/or security orientation, its to mitigate more obvious versions of URL spoofing). It isn't trying to present TITLE PLUS URL... because if it were a mult-mode search /bookmarks+history / location interface, that would not make any sense. (You could argue it could support this, but that's yet-another input syntax, and a whole other round of feature development...)

The URL is not mean to be editable text in this context.

I do think there is a bug which could be either:

The auto-completion shouldn't be implied with a normal selection color, because you can't trigger completion to make the editable text appear in the location field. (Nor does cut and paste operate correctly on this string).

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-1

This may only apply to recent OS X & Safari; I can't test back to 10.8
This is using Safari 10.0.2 on El Capitan 10.11.6

Currently, you can do it by hitting the right arrow, which will take you to the end of the auto-filled line, from where you can edit as you wish

examples...

I type map

enter image description here

Right arrow

enter image description here

Then delete a few letters with backspace & type my new alternative

enter image description here

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    In your example, what you type matches both the URL and the page title. Safari chose to match to the URL. It therefore does not answer the question.
    – Michael Schmid
    Commented Dec 25, 2016 at 13:34
  • Then I have no idea what you mean. Editing your question to clarify might be useful.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 12:50
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    Safari 10.1 (on macOS 10.11.6 and 10.12.4) has the page title given in the small blue text and the URL in editable black, which is reversed from your screenshots and sounds like the behavior you desire.
    – Merlin
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 6:09
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    After the edit - best guess is 'you cannot do that'. You are in effect typing a search, not a URL - all you can edit is the search.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 6:28
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    This only work for Top Hits, which are URLs themselves. If you select a bookmark or history suggestion the title is edited, not the URL (which is completely useless as this just searches for the title)
    – Adam Lindberg
    Commented Oct 9, 2017 at 14:46
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Just use

Command (⌘) + Right Arrow (→)

You'll reach the end of the URL then you can easily edit it.

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  • I tried this and it didn't work for me on the latest stable macOS and Safari pair.
    – bb216b3acfd8f72cbc8f899d4d6963
    Commented Nov 10, 2017 at 22:44
  • This simply goes to the end of the auto-completed title. Read the question carefully, please.
    – Michael Schmid
    Commented Nov 13, 2017 at 13:23

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