Safari tab close button disappears in macOS Tahoe 26.2

If they appear on the left of your tabs, it sounds like you may have inadvertently "pinned" the tab. You can either:

• Select the Tab and go to the Window menu in Safari and choose Unpin Tab.

or

• Right Click (Control-Click) the Tab and choose Unpin Tab.

or

• Drag the tab off of the Tab bar and it will revert to an Unpinned Tab.

Four months in and nothing has changed.

BUT: On my machine, there ist a quicker workaround than clicking on another tab and then re-clicking on the tab with the missing close button:

1. Just hover over the tab with the missing "x".
2. Then swipe with two fingers to the left as if you wished to scroll through the tabs towards the last tab. As soon as Safari registers you swiping, the button appears.

Still annoying but vastly less cumbersome.

This seems like a Safari 26.2 bug to me (I'm seeing this issue) -- I'm not inadvertently pinning tabs, nor are my tabs set to "compact" view, etc. It's like the "X" simply doesn't reveal itself when you hover over the selected tab as it should. One easy workaround to close the tab with a missing "X" is to make sure the tab is selected, then use the Command-W key command that's been around forever to close just that tab.

Same here on Tahoe 26.3. The description of @bgoggin is spot-on. Currently, almost every new tab lacks the close button, even on hover or a click on the tab. However, once another tab had been activated, the "no-close-button" tab will now have the close button. Definitely a bug.

Same problem for me, Safari version 26.3.1 (21623.2.7.11.7), Tahoe 26.3.1 (25D2128). No 'close' option appears on newly-created tabs, but when I switch to an inactive tab then back to the new one, the close box reappears.

Super annoying little glitch. screenshot attached. This tab (the one I’m using to report this bug) is the active tab but there’s no 'x' on it.

Seems much better in 26.3 in my experience — but not 100%. It was fully reproducible with 26.2, now only rarely do I get a new tab that doesn’t show the “X” to close. Very random — I can’t predictably reproduce it now — whereas in Safari 26.2 it happened every time a new tab was made.

My experience is the same as CraigDay. I am not inadvertently pinning tabs, but the close button is disappearing. If I click on another tab and go back, it re-appears. I know I could command-w to close, but my habit is to click on the close button and this is an annoying bug.

I agree re. MacOS, though to be fair iOS has seemed a bit shakier than usual lately too. The modern OS platforms are getting bloated... maybe stripping down and some new foundational code is warranted like when Leopard went to Snow Leopard -- one of the last great super stable Mac operating systems released on the X/ Unix platform?

Same prolem here, too. And it has not been fixed in macOS 26.3/Safari 26.3

I'm seeing exactly the same thing, the X just disappears randomly

Same here. It really feels like macOS has become the neglected middle child of the Apple ecosystem.