There are plenty of hints here involving Safari's excellent Activity window, like this one.

I managed, however, to find one more way to use it. I was downloading mp3's from my friends' alternative band music site. The player is in Flash, so I went to the Activity window and copied the first download file, which was at this URL: http://www.nonitz.ic.cz/mp3s/mp3-0.mp3. When I went to copy the next one, I noticed that the only difference was the sequential number at the end (i.e. .mp3-1.mp3, .mp3-2.mp3, etc.)

So I created a text file and copy and pasted multiple lines, edited the numbers, selected all, copied, and then pasted into Safari's Activity window. No surprise here -- it just worked!

I was working on a video project a while back, and needed to show a URL being typed into the Firefox 3 URL bar. However, the (usually very useful) auto-complete drop-down messed up the capture; each time I started typing www, a long list of URLs appeared in the drop-down. I tried to clear it out by using the Tools » Clear Private Data menu item, but alas, even after wiping everything, the drop-down list still appeared.

After some Googling, I found the solution in this article in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base: The secret is the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults key in the Firefox about:config screen.

To remove the auto-complete drop-down in Firefox 3, type about:config in the URL bar, then press Return. You may see a warning about how this may void your warranty; if so, click the "I'll be careful" button to proceed. In the search box on the screen that opens, type browser.urlbar.maxRichResults, then double-click on that entry when it appears. In the pop-up dialog, change the 12 to a 0, and click OK to banish the auto-complete drop-down.

To get the drop-down back, just change the 0 back to 12 (or whatever number you'd prefer).

I need to connect to a specific proxy server to access my university library services. I find it convenient to keep Safari for direct connections to the Internet, and another browser configured for access to the library via the proxy.

Firefox allows manual proxy configuration, but doesn't handle PDF downloads correctly from all journal suppliers' sites. Chrome handles the PDF downloads correctly, but there is no obvious way to specify a proxy in its preferences.

Extrapolating from a published hint for Windows, I found that launching Chrome from the command line while passing it --proxy-server=host#:port# works. There is nothing I could find in Chrome's help pages, or on the web, that addresses this issue, so it may be useful. In Terminal, the final command looks like this:

open -a /Applications/Google Chrome.app --args --proxy-server=host#:port#

Replace host# and port# with the host and port numbers that you need to use.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

Just a quick note to mention that Firefox version 3.6 brings Firefox's 'Full Screen' feature for the Mac for the first time -- try it out by selecting View » Full Screen. Once enabled, it actually goes into true full screen mode just like its Windows counterpart: the menu bar disappears, the toolbar and URL entry area vanish, as does the Dock. Cool!

[robg adds: To exit full screen mode, just press Shift-Command-F again.]

Google Chrome for Mac (in beta) doesn't yet give you a way to mass edit bookmarks in your Other Bookmarks folder. (You can click the yellow star next to a bookmarked page once it's loaded to edit each bookmark one at a time, but that's tedious.) As a workaround, you can do mass edits in TextEdit (or most any other text editor).

1. Turn off Bookmark Syncing If you have the developer build of Chrome (which allows you to sync your bookmarks to Google Docs), turn off Bookmark Sync by going to Chrome » Preferences » Personal Stuff, and click Stop Syncing This Account. You can turn sync back on after you've edited your bookmarks, but it will add back your old ones (the edited version will be kept, but the old one will be added as well).
2. Quit Google Chrome
3. Find the file to edit Go to your user's Library » Application Support » Google » Chrome » Default folder. Open the Bookmarks file in TextEdit -- this is the one with no extension, not the Bookmarks.bak file.
4. Edit your bookmarks To edit things in your Other Bookmarks folder, scroll down to where a slightly less-indented line than the others says "other": {. I used the Find command (cmd-f) to find that section quickly. Now, find the bookmark you want to edit within that section, and edit it as follows:
   
   Change the name: Find the line that says, "name": "Gmail",, for example. Change the Gmail part to the name you want the bookmark to have.
   
   Change the URL: Find the line that says "url": "https://mail.google.com/mail", for example. Change the https://mail.google.com/mail to the URL you want the bookmark to lead to.

Things like Date Added, Date Modified, Type, and ID are not things that I know how to change. To delete a bookmark, remove all of the info about it, from the first { to the ending } (or }, if it's the last bookmark). Good luck, and happy bookmarking!

I had always thought that Chrome's method of private browsing, which allows you to intermingle private and normal browsing in separate windows/tabs, was better than Safari or Firefox, which are an all-or-nothing proposition. Now Firefox, at least, can emulate Chrome's behavior.

With the Firefox add-on Private Browsing Window, the user can have private and normal browsing windows simultaneously. This can be used for things other than simply secure browsing, too. You could, for instance, log into two Gmail accounts simultaneously, or test a web app using two different accounts in one browser.

Safari has a nice feature to zoom in (or out) on a webpage, which is great for large monitors. Unfortunately, you're not able to set a default zoom level for new pages. CSS hacks exist, but zooming via CSS doesn't seem to work as well as the native zoom function in Safari. The AppleScript in this hint zooms in on any new web page using Safari's own zoom function.

The script is quite a hack -- it checks every tenth of a second to see if the currently active tab isn't zoomed in. If it's not zoomed in, the script activates the corresponding keyboard shortcuts to zoom the page. You can edit the script to change how often the zoom-check should be made, and what level of zoom should be made. With a delay of 100ms, the scripts gobbles 1% of the CPU time on my system. One idea is to make an application from the script, and launch that instead of launching the script directly from the AppleScript Editor. Any suggestions for improvement are welcome!

[robg adds: I tested this in 10.6.2 on a MacBook Pro, and the script used about 5% of the CPU. It did, however, work as described.]

I like to keep a weather page from Wunderground on my Opera speed dial. The monthly summary page contains the information I'm seeking (moon phase and sunrise/sunset). However, the URL contains a date, and the page displays information for that date. I was changing the date manually once a month, but this method doesn't show accurate daily information. So, I wrote a perl script that changes the date every day. I use cron to run the script at midnight every day (I hate launchd; it's overly complicated).

Opera stores information about Speed Dial links in a text file located at ~/Library » Preferences » Opera Preferences » speeddial.ini. This script closes Opera and changes the date in the URL in the speeddial.ini file.

While reading a recent hint submission by cooter, I realized that Safari on my Mac Pro wasn't capable of zooming just the text on a web page -- regardless of the setting of the View -> Zoom Text Only menu item, Safari would always zoom both the text and the graphics. This didn't happen on my MacBook Pro, so I suspected some previously-tested hint was interfering with Safari on the Mac Pro.

After a bit of searching, I found the culprit: Implement full page zoom in the WebKit browser. A quick check in Terminal...

defaults read com.apple.Safari | grep WebKitDebugFullPageZoomPreferenceKey

...confirmed that this value was set for Safari on the Mac Pro, and not on my MacBook pro. The solution was simple -- quit Safari and delete the troublesome key in Terminal:

defaults delete com.apple.Safari WebKitDebugFullPageZoomPreferenceKey

On relaunch, Safari once again respected the setting of the Zoom Text Only menu item. (This key causes the same problem in Safari in both 10.5 and 10.6, though I'm not sure if the key survives an upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 -- my Mac Pro is still running 10.5.8.)

This bookmarklet will convert "cold-links" (i.e. URLs which do not link) into clickable hotlinks. This is from the krapplack.de collection of bookmarklets, where you can find a number of other potentially useful bookmarklets.

Create a new bookmark with a name like Linkify, and use the following text as the address (or whatever your browser labels the URL field): I added this to my Safari bookmarks bar at the far left, so I can invoke it just by hitting Command-1.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]