Safari Tabs Acting Strangely--Duplicating and Glitching When Moved

Hi OliviaLaWr,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities. This doesn't quite sound expected since duplicating a tab should take additional action as mentioned in Prevent or create duplicate tabs in Safari on Mac - Apple Support.

In this case, try isolating this a bit by testing in a private window. That will help to determine if this might be related to cache or cookies. In Safari, choose File > New Private Window. Then try duplicating the issue from there. You can open multiple private windows if needed for testing purposes.

It might also be helpful to make sure that no keys are stuck. For instance, if Shift or Command is stuck it may result in actions similar to that which you've described. The commands for tabs are mentioned in Keyboard shortcuts and gestures in Safari on Mac - Apple Support.

Take care.

It's stopped happening after I updated to Ventura 13.1 (22C65). It's been a while and I regularly tear off tabs and things are working as expected.

I've been experiencing this as well and it's super frustrating. The only way to get around it is to open a new window, copy paste the address from the tab you want to move into the new window and then close the tab... This is basic functionality and even it's still broken in 13.0.1 (22A400)

This seems like an emerging issue since the end of August. Apple must be aware of it, but they are not acknowledging it yet.

See this thread on Reddit for temporary work-arounds where tons of people are addressing the same issue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Safari/comments/xrrdm4/dragging_tab_to_become_new_window_duplicates_tab/

This has been happening to me very frequently too. Can confirm it still happens in private browsing mode, the only cure is to close and reopen Safari, and it sometimes happens very quickly again afterwards.

Right. It's not happening to me either anymore and I've updated to 13.1 aswell. Could very much be the reason.

The fact that the only solution is quitting Safari and restarting the app is troubling.

I dragged the tab out to move it to a new window, and when I released the mouse, the tab got stuck in a "floating" position on my screen. Even if I minimized the browser window, the tab wouldn't go away. Sat there like a ghost. Had to quit Safari. Lost all my tabs and had to log back into all of my websites.

Confirmed this bug on my end as well. Dragging Safari tabs outside Safari window does one of 2 things:

1) Close the tab so I have to seek for the page on History menu;

2) Create duplicate 'darker pages' - the dragged page gets duplicated, but with darker, dimmed colors.

I am experiencing the exact same problem as wagnercs. Running on an M1 MacBook Pro 14". Closing the original tab (the one that first got grayed out) will cause the "dubplicate" tab in the new window to become empty: both view and address field turns blank. I started experiencing it a few months back.

I am having this exact same issue. Is there a solution?

I am using an M1 Max MacBook Pro. When I try and drag my tab out of my Safari browser to another monitor or to use as a new window on one single monitor, Safari will duplicate the tab instead of moving it (see screenshots below).

It almost reminds me of how Safari treats PINNED tabs that are in two separate browser windows. Safari only allows one instance of the pinned tab to be open at one time; one pinned tab in one browser window will be greyed out / inactive while the other pinned tab in a separate browser window will be full color / active. I hate that feature (not sure if it is a bug or not) but can live with it with pinned tabs for the time being. What I can't live with is dragging regular tabs out of one window to a new one, and having the entire browser window go grey.

This issue is severely cutting into my workflow and needs to be addressed ASAP.

EDIT: I don't want to have to right-click or Command Click the tab and choose "Duplicate Tab". I want to be able to drag the tab out of one Window so that it is its tab in a new window, and use it in an adjacent window, side-by-side, without the original window going grey.

I suspect that this is a feature, somehow. The feature feels designed, not like a bug. I've been looking around but there are no configuration options that allow me to change this behaviour.

Apple, please address this. Browsers in 2022 shouldn't exhibit these crazy side effects. Definitely not meeting the quality bar that we have come to expect from Apple.

... And when I click one of the pages, it gets lighted up, and the other gets dark:

I don't see any solutions yet. Hoping for a patch in the next update, this is getting very annoying.

The same thing is happening to me. I'm assuming it is a bug in the operating system. I just submitted to feedback.apple.com when I saw others having the issue too.

It's getting worse and worse for some reason.

Started with a frequency of once a week. Now I would have to either restart Safari every hour, or use another browser. M1 Pro 14" here.