Why doesn't Safari load website in background, jumps to active tab instead?

When I try to load a website on one tab (for easy reference, tab 1), then open a different tab (tab 2) to load a different website, the first website would load on tab 2 instead of tab 1. Safari never wants to load websites in the background. I seem to remember it wasn't so before. It's quite a nuisance because I often need to load a few tabs at once without having to wait one by one to load. I haven't found any reference to this anywhere so it seems I'm the only one having this issue? What can I do to fix this?