Essential Safari Tips & Tricks

While not every one will agree with this, I think as true Mac enthusiasts we can all agree that surfing with Safari really is the goods. I can remember once nearly spilling my Caramel Machiato as I screeched to a hault to peer at someone’s Powerbook one morning a few years back. “Wait a minute, why is it rendering it like that?”, I must have said.

Once you get over the polished interface and lightning fast render times, users often find themselves struggling to get more usability out of Safari. “Where’s the tabs”, is a common newbie gripe. Lucky for surfers Apple and its independent developers have a healthy supply of addons, tweaks, and plugins to stifle even the most devout Firefox, Opera, or [insert competitive browser here] fan.

Here comes some of my favorites tips to get more out of Safari.

1. Email a link. While shortcuts like this are pretty much rendered redundant with amazing uses of thisservice or other scripted hacks, I still find myself doing it. Press Command – CTRL – Iand Safari will open your default mail app and dump the URL of the page you were on smack into a new email.

2. Tabs! Thanks to the efforts of guys like these, Safari has tabbed browsing built in, right out of the box. I think to appease the long time proponents of this idea it is turned off by default, and requires a quick checkbox click in the Preferences pane. Here are some shortcuts for dealing with tabs:

Command click on a link : open a website in a new tab
Command + T : New tab
Command + Shift + [ or ] : Switch between tabs
Option + Tab close : Strangely this closes all tabs except the one you clicked

3. Webdev? With a plethora of killer extensions and plugins, Firefox really is the web developer’s browser of choice when hashing out layouts. Having said that Fox is more than a little crash happy and a serious memory pig when loaded up with 3rd party plugins. Just over a year ago the guys at Surfin’ Safari added the Web Inspector to their nightly builds of Webkit, the browser engine behind Safari.

It’s a bit of a pain to configure Web Inspector but what you get are some fairly handy tools for debugging and working with your HTML. The stand out feature is the ability to drill down into your code hierarchy with a handy node view interface. The same interface can be used to drill down into your CSS styles, or search your code for elements of interest. I’ll say right now that it is nowhere near as useful as Firefox’s Web Developer extension, but it’s a step in the right direction.

4. SnapBack. If you’re a web slob like me you surf hard and fast with a dozen tabs open at once. Even if you don’t it’s easy to forget just where you saw that special item you needed so bad only 5 minutes previous. Of course you could feverishly click the back button until it surfaces, or you could try History > Mark Page to set a SnapBack point. Then when you want to get back to where you were just hit the SnapBack button in Safari’s address bar, and presto your there.

5. Bookmarks. I found this thanks to a tip on the Apple Blog. Safari has a unique ability to move from sites in your Bookmarks by using Command + number. This really speeds up my daily browsing habits as I assign Command + 1 to open Gmail, 2 opens Google Reader, 3 opens my eBay auctions etc. The numbers are assigned automatically based on their position in your Bookmark Bar, with left being 1.

There is really tons of commentary on getting the best out of Safari. Hit Command + Option + F to quickly highlight the Google search box to search for more juicy tidbits. Also be sure to check out Apple’s official safari shortcuts page for more time savers.

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Right (cmd) click on the title bar

I accidentally found this feature while attempting to right click to customize the Safari toolbar. By right clicking (cmd-click) on the Safari title bar you can navigate within the hierarchy of a webpage (see below).

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Dragging Tabs and Favicons

While we’re on the subject of drag and drop, let me explain what you can do by dragging a tab or favicon (the small graphic to the left of the URL in the address bar). If you drag a tab by its name and move it to the left or right on the tab bar, the bar is reorganized. Not very exciting. But drag the tab away from the bar, and it changes into a tiny preview of the page it’s currently showing. When you let go, the image expands into a whole new window and removes the page from the tabs of the previous one. You can also do this the opposite way; drag a tab into the tab bar of a different window and it will be added to the second window and removed from the first.

You can do all of this when dragging the favicon of a page, except for creating a new window. If you drop the favicon onto an open tab, the page is replaced with the one you dragged over. You can create a new tab with the page by dropping its favicon on the tab bar, to the right of the already open tabs.

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Dragging in Files

Safari, like many Mac applications, supports dragging in files from the Finder or other applications such as iPhoto. If you just drag a file into a regular browser window, however, all it will do is display the file in a Safari window. The useful part comes when a website is asking for you to upload a file. Instead of clicking ‘Choose File’, you can drag the file you want to use and drop it directly on the button. A small green plus sign will appear next to your cursor, and the file is selected, no matter how deeply nested it is on your hard drive. This is a small thing, but it can save a lot of time if you have a file open in the Finder already before you upload it to a website.

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The Activity Window

For most, the Activity window (⌥⌘A) will be useless for day to day browsing, but it can be convenient to have at times. For instance, if a page is failing to load, opening up the Activity window will show you a list of resources on the page and highlight the ones which are throwing up errors.

You can also use it for opening up parts of webpages (JavaScript, CSS, QuickTime files, etc.) in their own window. If you were a budding web developer, for example, and you wanted some example of CSS from existing websites, you can use the Activity window to open up the CSS of a page. Just open up the window, and click the fly-out triangle for the site you’re browsing. Scroll through the list until you find the .css file, then double-click to open it up in its own Safari window for inspection. This works for any file on a webpage.

Another way the window comes in handy is as a quick and dirty way to download YouTube videos. While you can get specialized applications for this, the Activity window lets you do it right from Safari. Navigate to a YouTube video page, then open the window. The file you’re looking for contains ‘videoplayback’ in the URL, and is most likely the largest file on the page. You can download the video by selecting this file and ⌥-double-clicking. This proceeds to download the file. It’ll come down as a .flv, but it’s fine to play in QuickTime as long as you have Perian installed. You can then use QuickTime 7 Pro or QuickTime X to export the video in a more suitable format such as MP4.

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Folders in the Bookmarks Bar

While it may be simple to add single bookmarks to the Bookmarks Bar, it may not be obvious that it can handle folders of bookmarks as well. Right-clicking on the bar brings up a tiny context menu containing only one item, New Folder. Choosing this option brings up the same box you get when you add a new bookmark to the bar — with the text box for naming the folder.

Once you’ve typed in the name for your folder, what looks like a regular bookmark is added to the bar, with the addition of a downward-pointing arrow to the right. At the moment, clicking on it brings up a menu with just the word ‘empty’. To add new bookmarks to the folder, all you have to do is drag existing bookmarks on top of the folder name and they’ll automatically be added to the folder. You can also add new bookmarks when you create them by choosing the folder under the dropdown menu.

Bookmark folders aren’t just handy for organizing your web addresses; they can also be used as a convenience tool. Once you have some bookmarks added to your folder, clicking on the folder name opens a menu with the bookmark names listed. At the bottom of this list is the option ‘Open in Tabs’. Clicking this automatically opens up a new tab for each of the bookmarks in the folder and navigates to them for you. This could be useful if you have a list of resources you use regularly for something you’re writing, for example. You can also access this tabs feature by simply ⌘-clicking on the folder name.

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