How do I stop my links from showing preview?

Safari on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac lets you preview a link without leaving your current page, just to see what lurks behind it. Although enabled by default, this feature can be bad for security. The preview loads as if you clicked the article, which could trigger a dangerous website.

Follow along to learn how to stop Safari browser from loading website previews on your Apple devices. With this disabled, you’ll be able to view the URL for links instead, to check they’re safe before loading them.

How to Disable Safari Previews on an iPhone or iPad

To preview a website in Safari for iOS or iPadOS, touch and hold a link to load a preview and open the contextual menu. From there, you can tap the preview to follow the link and navigate away from your current page.

Turning off website previews will ensure a potentially harmful destination won’t load unless specifically clicked. To do this, touch and hold a URL to preview it, then select Hide preview in the upper-right corner. (This option is easy to overlook as it doesn’t look like a standard button at all.)

This will hide website previews for all future links on this device. Touching and holding a link will now display the actual URL instead of the preview. To re-enable the preview, choose Tap to show preview in the menu’s upper-left corner. Toggling website previews is one of several tips and tricks to improve Safari.

How to Turn Off Safari Previews on a Mac

If your Mac trackpad supports the Force Touch function, force-click a link in Safari to preview it without leaving your current page. You can even scroll web content in the preview like you would in a normal Safari window! If your Mac doesn’t support this, you can preview links using the Look up data detectors shortcut, which is usually linked to a three-finger-tap.

Unfortunately, disabling website previews requires turning the off this shortcut. Launch System Preferences, choose Trackpad, and select the Point & Click tab. Deselect the box next to Look up data detectors.

If you want to view the URL for a link without previewing it, you can Control-click a link and choose Copy Link from the menu to copy the URL to the clipboard. From there, paste the link to Safari’s address bar or Spotlight to look at it. Alternatively, just hover over a link in Safari and the destination URL appears at the bottom of the window (you may need to turn on the status bar feature by choosing Show Status Bar from Safari’s View menu).

Why Website Previews Are Bad for Security

The security implications of website previews shouldn’t be overlooked. Seeing where a link takes you without leaving the current context saves you time, but it also introduces a dangerous new attack vector. And with that in mind, I wholeheartedly recommend you to increase your web-browsing security by turning off website previews in Safari. As always, you’ll need to determine for yourself whether losing that functionality is a worthy tradeoff.

If you're sharing several links in one message in Slack, it can get pretty cluttered and messy. Slack gives you several ways to remove those links and make it easier to follow what's happening in your channels.

Method 1: Manually Remove Link Previews

Manually removing link previews after you've posted your message is an easy task. Just click the grey X in the corner of the preview. A popup message will appear asking you to confirm if you're sure you want to remove the link attachment. Click Yes Remove.

Method 2: Disable Link Previews for Certain Domains

If you're an administrator of a Slack group, you can turn link previews for certain domains. You can only do this after a link has already been shared.

Go to the link shared in Slack and click the grey X in the corner of the preview, and in the popup message, check Disable future attachments from this website? And from the dropdown menu, select All links from [domain name].

Method 3: Disable All Link Previews Globally

If you want to declutter Slack just for yourself, you can turn off link previews globally in Slack with a setting. Go to Preferences > Messages & Media and scroll down to Inline Media & Links. Make sure that Show images and files from linked websites and Show text previews of linked websites are both turned off.

Method 4: Remove Link Previews With Formatting

You can also use text formatting to remove link previews. When pasting the link in use block quotes. When pasting the link into your Slack message, place it on a separate line and precede it with a single arrow bracket (>). It would look like this when you type it:

The specified language : markup does not exist'
Code generation failed!!
'

And it would look like this once posted:

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