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.