Mac OS X El Capitan – How to disable autoresizing tabs in Safari 9

As you probably remember we have blogged before on how to change Safari behaviour to not auto resize tabs in Safari 8 on OS X Yosemite. You might also remember our fix for Safari FavIcons in Safari 8. Both solution worked fine on OS X Yosemite by using EasySIMBL or later on by using older but somewhat more reliable SIMBL app. Unfortunately with introduction of SIP (System Integrity Protection) in OS X El Capitan things get a bit more complicated. Fortunately there's a way to work it out.

Just as in our last post on how to get missing favicons in Safari on Mac OS X this method requires disabling SIP for the duration of installation only. After installation it's safe to enable it again.

Following procedure requires 5 steps:

1. Disabling SIP (System Integrity Protection)
2. Installing SIMBL
3. Enabling SIP (System Integrity Protection)
4. Installing Cosy Tabs plugin for SIMBL (it may say Yosemite but works just fine in Mac OS X El Capitan)
5. Enjoying Safari with Favicons

Below you can find step by step instruction how to disable autoresizing in Safari 9 by using SIMBL-0.9.9 with Cosy Tabs plugin on OS X El Capitan (version 10.11)

1. Disable SIP: enter Recovery OS, run csrutil disable and reboot OS X El Capitan.

2. Download SIMBL, at least version 0.9.9.

3. Open command prompt aka Terminal Window

4. Run following commands on terminal to install SIMBL-0.9.9 at /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/

sudo installer -verbose -pkg Downloads/SIMBL-0.9.9/SIMBL-0.9.9.pkg -target /
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/SIMBL.osax
sudo mv /Library/ScriptingAdditions/SIMBL.osax /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/
sudo cp -p /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/SIMBL.osax/Contents/Resources/SIMBL\ Agent.app/Contents/Resources/net.culater.SIMBL.Agent.plist /System/Library/LaunchAgents/
sudo sed -e "s/Library/System\/Library/" -i "" /System/Library/LaunchAgents/net.culater.SIMBL.Agent.plist

5. (Optional) Enable SIP again: enter Recovery OS, run csrutil enable and reboot.

After executing above steps, Plugins placed at /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins or /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins will be loaded by SIMBL.

11. Download and unpack plugin CosyTabs (currently 1.4.2 released for Mac OS X Yosemite but works just as well on Mac OS X El Capitan)
12. Copy plugin (it's enough to copy only CosyTabs.bundle file) into /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins.You can find the path similar to the screenshot above. Just find it in Finder and follow the path.
13. Restart Safari.
14. After restart of Safari autoresizing tabs should be disabled by default.

15. Enjoy Safari without autoresizing tabs 🙂