Results tagged “safari”

If you inadvertently close a tab, merely hit ⌘-z and all is well with the world.

It’s the little things.

I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser recently. It’s fast - it feels faster than Safari, to me - and I love the lightweight interface. I’ve been lured back to Safari though, with the recent introduction of version 5.0.

• Safari has finally received native support for extensions, something that Firefox and Chrome users have enjoyed for a long time. They’ve implemented them nicely too; you just use HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build them, rather than the unfamilar XUL markup that Firefox uses. From Apple’s code samples, I was able to get a basic extension working within 10 minutes - it inserts the word “elephant” at the top of every page. Let me know if you’d like a copy.

• The “Reader” feature looks great - I particularly like the way it intelligently joins multi-page articles together. I won’t, however, be throwing out Instapaper any time soon; I love the idea that you can save an article for future reading.

• It’s speedy. Though it’s interesting to note that Safari runs Javascript runs merely three percent faster than Chrome. Seems pretty negligible to me.

• It has intelligent URL guessing. When you’re typing in the address bar, it performs a substring match on your bookmarks and your history, in both the URL and the page title.

• It’s more Mac-like. You can use OS X’s services, such as typing cmd-ctrl-D while hovering over a word to get a dictionary definition, something that Chrome doesn’t support.

All-in-all, a welcome upgrade. The fierce competition ‘twixt Apple and Google is great news for tech fans - long may the arms race continue.

For some reason Safari 4 Beta broke the CSS on our intranet’s Rails app. On closer inspection, it appeared to have been confused by the “cache killer” – the random number appended to external CSS and JavaScript urls. This tip from rubyonrails-talk seems to have fixed it up.

I’ve been trialling Safari 4 beta. It’s great! Although – I do find the tabs at the very top of the window a bit bizarre. That said, you can turn them off. Here’s a handy reference for all the hidden prefs. Tweak tweak.