Safari won't open new links in new tab

@stilltrell, I am having this issue too in Safari 15. This only seems to be happening in Tab Groups, not in the main tab area.

Here's what I see happening ... if you go to Safari > Preferences > 'New tabs open with' there are 4 options:

• • Start Page
  • Homepage
  • Empty Page
  • Same Page

I am finding that in Safari 15 Tab Groups (new feature), ALL new tabs open with whatever you have set above.

When you click the carfax link (or any link that opens in a new tab), watch the address bar. It looks like it opens the link and then quickly redirects to your new tab setting above. From what I can tell it's a bug and I do not have a solution.

The work around is to right click on the link, 'Copy Link', and paste it into the new tab to open.

Here is the Reddit Thread on the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Safari/comments/ps4l7z/open_link_in_new_tab_taking_me_to_my_start_page

So I figured out how to fix one of the bugs!

When I would use the Tab Groups, very randomly when I clicked a link it would go to my Start Page. I had my setting under General/New tabs open with: Same Page. I changed it to: Empty Page, and now the link opens in a new tab just fine.

Hopefully this works for you guys, it was driving me insane.

I am having problems with links consistently opening an empty page or briefly opening and closing the target page.

I did discover a couple of additional work-arounds.

• Control-click or right-click and choose Open Link in New Window. If you want it in a tab in the current group you can Control-click/right-click the location field and use Move to Tab Group before closing the extra window.
• Deleting and re-creating the tab groups also fixed it for me. After doing that links are opening it tabs fine.

Note that I have it set to "Open new tabs with: Start Page" and "Open pages in tabs instead of windows: Always".

I hope it works for other people. It got me past a very irritating problem.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one having this issue. thought I was losing my mind.

thanks for the suggestion, coolbluefrog. I also found right clicking and selecting open in new tab group works. And, even more baffling, successive links opened in that new tab group open fine. C'mon Apple, test your software.

Safari 15 on the Mac M! is a real disaster, and there re no signs of it getting fixed anytime soon. It's really depressing. Links opening empty tabs, bookmarks causing the browser to crash immediately... Tabs that make it impossible to figure out which one is active.... how did this browser ever get released past alpha?

Same here, if I have a tab group selected and click to open a link from e.g. Reminders it will open in a new window completely, regardless of my settings.

If I move away from the tab group to the "default".. "group" then opening links will happen in the same window in a new tab.

Tab groups are pretty neat though!

Safari 15 works well on iOS but it doesn’t look like they will ever fix the one on the Mac. They had months to do it and it’s crashing with problems all the time on the new M1. My solution eventually was to switch to brave and chrome . I can’t keep using safari when I can’t even add bookmarks without crashing it

I was still having the issue with latest Safari so thanks for asking the question so that I could find @Milomami's great answer!

That did it for me too. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. I agree that Apple has to get with it a stop screwing up updates and new versions.

Works!

This is a bug that happens only in Tab Groups for me. Hopefully they fix it. Very frustrating, though I'm starting to really really on the Tab Groups functionality. It is very helpful.

Right-click and select "Open Link in New Tab," or whatever, also seems to work as expected when this bug is bugging me.

Thank you! Having to right click -> open in new tab was an annoying workaround, but this worked.