Some users have issues displaying PDFs in their web browsers. In some cases, when clicking on a link to a PDF, they get a blank black or white page. These issues can be caused by certain PDF browser plug-ins.
Michael Cohen has written an article for TidBITS discussing this issue, and explaining which plug-ins to remove.
I haven't seen this issue myself, but for those having problems, this is a simple fix. It's worth noting that, over time, you may have browser plug-ins that you don't need, so it's worth having a look in ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins and /Library/Internet Plug-Ins to see what's there.
Safari displays emoji perfectly: on web pages, in tabs, and in the titlebar (if emoji are used in a page title). This makes it unique amongst the main OS X browsers: Firefox displays them in the title bar but not in tabs or on the page, while Chrome displays them in tabs but not on the page. There's a screenshot on my blog where I discuss this in more detail (the blog posting is an example that can be used to test browsers).
I played around a little with encoding settings in Firefox and Chrome but couldn't fix it. Maybe others will have more luck.
One issue I'm not clear about is what's required on the web backend to display emoji. UTF-16 encoding? Does anyone know?
[kirkmc adds: It even works here, with Geeklog. 😄]
Have you used your keychain to store your passwords? Do you wish there was an easy way to see what the password for a specific site is? Here are two different ways to accomplish this task without leaving your browser!
Both of these methods utilize the same functionality: they change the type of text box a password is entered into from a "password" box (masked with asterisks or •) to a "text" box, displaying its contents.
The first method can be done in Safari or Chrome (since they're both WebKit). Right-click or Control-click on the masked password field and select Inspect Element. Within the Inspector, you'll find the input HTML tag is highlighted. One of the attributes there will be type="password". Simply clicking on password will allow you to change it; type in text and, without closing the Inspector window, look at the password field to see your password revealed.
The second method is even easier, and does what is described above, just using Javascript. Drag the text below to your Bookmarks bar or menu. Whenever you're on a page with a password field whose text is hidden, click on it or select it to reveal the password.
[kirkmc adds: A couple of points. First, you can find your passwords in Safari 6's Passwords preferences. Check Show Passwords, and enter your user account password, and the'll all display. However, sometimes you're on a website where you have several logins, and it can be useful to see which one is getting entered by the keychain.
Second, bear in mind the security risk here. Assume you add this bookmarklet to your Safari bookmarks toolbar; anyone who comes to your computer could eventually click on it if they're on a page where your keychain has entered a password. Of course, they'd already have access to the page, if your keychain was unlocked, but them seeing the password could be more serious, if you tend to use the same password on multiple sites.]
Before Safari 6, you could navigate to a URL with having to type ".com". The same can be done in Safari 6 with one extra keystroke.
Entering "apple" in the location bar of Safari 6 will yield you Google search results for those terms. However, including a trailing slash will cause Safari to add the .com TLD to a logical location in the address, and take you to that URL. So, "apple/" will take you to apple.com.
[kirkmc adds: This is fine, if you're trying to get to .com sites. If you're in a country and want to get to local sites, it won't help you. It's worth noting that you can enter any number of slashes and still get this to work.]
Update: As per a comment below, here's how to make it work when you type a /. For example, if you type "apple/ipod/" Safari will go to www.apple.com/ipod, if you do the following. Go to System Preferences > Network, click on Advanced, then DNS. In the Search Domains section, click on + and add .com. Click on OK, then on Apply.
If you use Camino 2.1.2, you'll see warnings about it being an "out of date" browser or that there are incompatibilities with code, even though it uses a recent version of the Firefox Gecko engine. GMail notably displays these warnings. This fix solves the problem without "spoofing" the user agent to look totally like Safari or Firefox.
We want websites to know that we use Camino so they'll continue to support it. There's a simple change that will let you keep "Camino" as the user agent while enhancing compatibility.
In the Camino address bar, type "about:config". If necessary, click OK to be allowed to edit the settings.
In the search bar at the top of the settings list, type "user". This will shorten the list.
Double-click the setting called "general.useragent.extra.notfox". At this point, it probably has the value "(like Firefox/3.6.28)"
Edit that value, changing it to say "(like Firefox/13.0)"
Save, quit and restart Camino.
On my machine, this changed only the last part of the browser's agent string, from:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120308 Camino/2.1.2 (like Firefox/3.6.28)
to
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120308 Camino/2.1.2 (like Firefox/13.0)
This fixed our problems with GMail and Blogspot.
This works because Camino 2.1.2 truly has the same core version of the Gecko web browser engine as Firefox 13.0. And Firefox 13 is modern enough for nearly every site on the Internet today, while Firefox 3.6.28 looks ancient.
Hopefully the maintainers of Camino will address this soon. But if you're having trouble with Camino, try this fix before switching to Safari or Firefox.
[kirkmc adds: I didn't test this; I don't use Camino.]
In Safari 6, when you type into the omnibar - what Apple calls the "address and search field" - the autocomplete menu that shows suggestions for what you typed may be very long. If you want to select your bookmarks or history with the keyboard, you have to press the down arrow many times to get to them.
You can skip sections by holding down the Command key while pressing the up- or down-arrow buttons. So if you've typed something in the address and search field, you can press Command-down arrow to skip past the search engine suggestions, and then use the arrow key alone to select the item you want.
Google introduced a custom print dialog to Chrome a few versions ago. This adds a step to saving a PDF or using any of the other standard options. Until recently, this could be disabled in chrome://flags/. They have since removed the flag, but they did leave the command line option to disable it.
A workaround is to create an AppleScript applet that launches Chrome with this option. The following script does exactly that, assuming Chrome is located in your applications folder:
Open AppleScript Editor, paste the above into a new window, then save it as an application. If you run this applet to launch Chrome, you'll get a standard Print dialog (though interestingly it's a dialog window, not a sheet).
I've been wondering when the 'skip to top' functionality that is now a staple in so many iOS apps would appear on OS X. It seems to be here now, albeit in a limited fashion. As such, this hint only seems valid for Firefox.
In order to skip to the top or bottom of a web page, simply swipe up or down on your trackpad using three fingers.
[kirkmc adds: Yes, this works in Firefox, and in Opera, it moves about 4/5 of a screen.]
It seems like Apple disabled the "Press Backspace to go back a page" feature in Safari 6 due to users having complained about losing text entered in text fields when they accidentally pressed the backspace key. If you liked this feature, you can enable it again using this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add Back "\U232b"
If you ever want to disable it, there are two possibilities. The first, if you don't have any other shortcuts for Safari, is to run this command:
The second method is a bit more time-consuming. You need to first create a keyboard shortcut for Safari, for the "Back" command, in the preferences. Then, if you apply the first command above, you'll be able to delete it. If you don't have a shortcut set up for the Back command before running the first command above, it won't display in the Keyboard Shortcut preferences, and you won't be able to delete it from the preference pane. It seems like using the defaults command to set up a shortcut only displays that shortcut in the preference pane if you already have a shortcut created.
The Activity window can be extremely useful for quickly finding resources for a web page, identifying which ones failed to load, etc. However, with a lot of pages open, it often shows too much information by default, as each web page's disclosure triangle is expanded. This takes longer to view the page and requires you to scroll to find the site you want to check, if you have multiple windows or tabs open. Fortunately, Safari has a setting that controls this behavior, although it isn't accessible via the GUI.
Simply type the following in Terminal to make the Activity window open with all sites collapsed by default:
defaults write com.apple.Safari ActivitiesStartExpanded -boolean NO
Quit and relaunch Safari for this to take effect.
To reverse the setting, simply invert the last argument:
