Made by Elephant

Blog Make Safari even better

Install Inquisitor

Inquisitor is a little plugin made by David Watanabe that’ll expand the search options of Safari. When you start typing, a beautiful black dropdown will appear with the first x-numbers of search results by the search engine you want.

Here’s a great little hat trick: If you want to search for something inside a specific site, just type the name of that site in the beginning of your search query. A couple of examples:

• “imdb vantage point”
• “flickr elephants”
• “trailer iron man”

Enable single-window mode

2 weeks back, TAUW had a great tip for Safari users. Open Terminal and enter following code:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

This enables single-window mode. Links that normally open in a new window, will now open in a new tab. (don’t forget that when you click the empty space next to your tabs in the latest version of Safari, a new tab is created)

Get an Instapaper account

Instapaper is an online application with just 1 purpose (that’s how I like it!): Keep track of things you want to read. Yeah, you could just add a new folder to your bookmarks in Safari, but this little app keeps track whenever you’ve read an article.

After you’ve created your account, you have to drag the bookmarklets to your bookmark bar. One for adding a page to Instapaper, and another to go to your “To Read”-list. (I’ve used a fancy star) Clicking it will open a new window that’ll save the page, and close the window again.

Install PicLens

PicLens improves your experience when browsing through Flickr or Google image results. Whenever you hover over an image, a small triangle will appear. Clicking this triangle will let you browse fullscreen through the pictures.

Enable the Web Inspector

Go to “Settings” (cmd + ,) > “Advanced” and then select “Show Web Inspector in toolbar”. Now, you have something like Firebug for Firefox. It’s a great tool to check your loading times, Javascript errors,…

Install the Safari Microformats plugin

Info provided by Zappatic:

The Safari Microformats plugin notifies you when the author of the website has published Microformats and allows you to easily import hCards and hCalendars in Address Book and iCal. This plugin was inspired by the idea and mockup of Jon Hicks.

Don’t worry when it crashes

After a crash, relaunch Safari and go to “History” > “Open all the windows from the previous session”. This even works after you did a reboot, and you’ll be able to continue browsing where you left off…

Conclusion

There you go, we just made your favorite browser even better! For more plugins, I suggest you go take a look at Pimp My Safari. (check out their awesome alternative icon!)

Happy browsing!

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