Tweaking Safari

I’ve happened across a fair number of applications and utilities that enhance Safari of late:

• SafariStand

  This wee bundle adds some fantastic features. There’s type-ahead searching of bookmarks and history, a ‘shelf’ where you can store links (or, better yet, groups of links to be opened in tabs), syntax colouring when viewing source, a host of configurable command key options, and it even saves state on quit. The user interface is a little clumsy, but, in effect, this extension lets you have all the drool-worthy features offered by Omniweb. It’s free, too.

• SafariExtender

  This adds a contextual menu item to Safari that lets you save and load a set of tabs, move tabs around, quickly email URLs and web pages, change the User Agent string Safari sends (handy for sites that deny access to Safari even though the browser can handle them), turn off images (great when you’re on dial up) and, as they say, much, much more. I have a feeling I’ll pony up the measly $10 shareware fee once my 15-day trial period is up.

• SafariNoTimeOut

  I’ve been using this for as long as I’ve used Safari - it does what it says on the tin, resetting the browser’s request timeout (to ten minutes) so that sites that are slow to load actually load, rather than returning a timeout error after 60 seconds. Essential, and free.

• AcidSearch

  Adds ‘search channels’ to the Google search field, which you can switch between using command key combinations. You can define your own sites to search, but I’ve just been using the Google This Site option and the built-in dictionary and thesaurus searches. Handy, but I find it’s easy to forget to reset the search field to Google after using it for something else. Your mileage may vary according to the state of your short-term memory. Again, this is free.

• Whiteout

  This utility rids your Mac of all that distracting brushed metal, giving 10.3 Finder windows and iApps the pinstripe look of 10.2. Even though it’s a system-wide thing, I’m including it here as I just can’t believe how much better Safari looks after the Whiteout treatment. Once again, a freebie, and, oddly enough, one made by Suicidegirls.com, a porn site for people who like looking at naked goths.

• SubEthaFari

  This improves on Safari’s naff View Source feature, opening up a site’s source in SubEthaEdit, giving you all the oomph of the wonderful text editor in place of a plain NSTextView. I’m not actually using this at the moment - it can be slow to load a page’s source, and fails to load some pages - but it’s worth trying out if you regularly rip off code learn new techniques by snooping around well-made sites. You guessed it: this too is free.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Posted at 4pm on 30/08/04 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, mac, osx, safari