See Safari Tabs From Your iPhone on Mac (iCloud Tabs)

The article you were reading on your phone over lunch is still open there — and your Mac knows it. iCloud Tabs shows every tab currently open in Safari on your other devices, right inside Safari on the Mac, ready to open with a click. It's already on for most people; the trick is knowing where Safari hides it, and how to revive it when the list goes stale.

Where iCloud Tabs live on the Mac

Two places, both easy to miss:

1. The start page. Open a new tab (⌘T) and scroll down: sections headed From iPhone (and iPad, and other Macs) list each device's open tabs. If the section is missing, click the customize button at the start page's bottom-right corner and tick iCloud Tabs. (Untick to hide it again — that checkbox is the whole on/off for the start-page section.)
2. The tab overview. Click the grid icon at the toolbar's right end, or press ⇧⌘\. Below this Mac's own tab thumbnails, each of your other devices gets a titled list of its open tabs. Click any to open it here.

Opening a remote tab doesn't close it on the phone — it just opens the same URL on the Mac. To actually close a tab on the other device (the "why is my iPhone still holding forty tabs" cure), right-click it in either list and choose Close Tab: it closes on the iPhone within moments, remotely.

What it needs to work

• Every participating device signed into the same Apple ID.
• Safari syncing enabled on each device: on the Mac, System Settings → your name → iCloud → Safari on (on Sequoia it's inside Saved to iCloud → See All; on iPhone, Settings → your name → iCloud → Show All → Safari). A device with this off neither shares its tabs nor sees anyone else's.
• The other device has actually been awake and online recently — an iPhone dead in a drawer stops reporting.

The same Safari sync also carries bookmarks, Reading List, and Tab Groups — groups appear in the sidebar on every device, live, which for many people replaces iCloud Tabs entirely: park work-in-progress in a group instead of forty loose tabs.

When tabs vanish or go stale

1. Nudge the other device. Unlock the iPhone, open Safari on it, wait ten seconds, then re-open the Mac's start page. Tab lists update on activity, not on a schedule you can see.
2. Check the Safari toggle on the device that's missing (path above) — an iOS update or storage crunch occasionally flips things off silently.
3. Toggle Safari syncing off and on on the misbehaving device. On the Mac you'll be asked about keeping local data — keep it. This re-registers the device and refreshes the list.
4. A ghost device in the list (the iPhone you sold last year) means it's still associated with your Apple ID. Remove it in System Settings → your name → scroll to the device list → select it → Remove from Account; its tab section disappears with it.
5. Still stale everywhere? Confirm both devices show the same Apple ID and the Mac's clock is automatic (General → Date & Time) — then restart both, the closer for all sync features.

Tabs you want to keep aren't tabs

iCloud Tabs shows what's open right now — it's a window, not a filing system. For pages you want waiting for you regardless of what's open where, use the Reading List (⇧⌘D saves the current page), which syncs the same way and even works offline. Here's how to get the most from it.