A collection of additional Safari 4 Beta hidden settings

Feb 25, '09 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: robg

In addition to restoring in-window tabs, it turns out that there are a number of other hidden preferences available in the Safari 4 Beta. In the interest of efficiency, I've chosen to list all of them that I know about (as of today, at least) in this one hint. As more are uncovered in the future, I'll run those as standalone hints. But for now, here's a list of seven (in addition to the one to move the tab bar) more tweaks you can apply to Safari 4 Beta.

Each of these are boolean variables, meaning they take a TRUE or FALSE argument. They also all default to TRUE, so to enable each one, you need to set its value to FALSE. To do that, use this command template in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.safari key_name -bool FALSE
Replace key_name with the variables as shown below. To disable any one of the hacks, you can either reverse the command by replacing FALSE with TRUE, or you can delete the key entirely:
defaults delete com.apple.safari key_name
When you change any of these values, make sure Safari is not running at the time. Read on for a list of each variable and a brief description of its function.

Here's what I've discovered so far:

As another hint submitter pointed out (in a hint submission which was a duplicate of the 'move tab bar' hint), it's quite possible all of these settings may disappear when Safari 4 goes final, given that their names begin with DebugSafari4.... I'm hoping that proves not to be the case, as at least a few of them are quite useful -- I, for one, despise the new 'tabs on top' feature, for instance.

If you discover additional hidden settings for Safari 4 Beta, please submit them as separate hints, don't list them in the comments. (Well, feel free to list them as comments if you want, but I'd really like to be able to run them as hints, too, so they get more visibility.)

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090225065338303