This hint explains one way create a bookmark in your Dock that will bring up the All Bookmarks page in Safari. In Safari, entering the URL bookmarks:// does the same thing as pressing the Bookmarks button in the Bookmarks Bar, or selecting Bookmarks » Show All Bookmarks. Confused yet? Good! The only trouble is that LaunchServices (the program that Mac OS X uses to open URLs) doesn't know how to open the bookmarks:// protocol. So here's how to create the Dock entry and make it fully functional:
Create a new Safari bookmark for the URL bookmarks://
Drag this bookmark to your Dock, which will create a springy ampersand.
Download and install the freeware MisFox. In the program, click the Protocol Helpers tab and press the New button. Enter the Protocol bookmarks, and for the Helper, choose /Applications/Safari.app.
Now the Bookmarks bookmark in your Dock will open your Safari bookmarks page.
If you use Firefox, and you Shift-Return a search in the Google search box, Firefox will perform an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search and show you the corresponding page. However this is not the case with Safari, but you can get a similar result using the free Safari plug-in Safari Stand's Quick Search feature.
In the SafariStand settings, enable Quick Search and add a new line called something like Google lucky. Set a shortcut (I use l) and define the URL as:
You can now perform a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search directly in the URL address bar by typing something like l osxhints. When you press Return, Safari will open up the first match from Google.
I love using Pandora Radio, but always hated having a separate browser window open all the time. As a solution, I discovered the excellent (and free) Fluid.app, which will make a free-standing application out of a web-app -- and even better, can convert your app to a menu-bar extra!
I just opened Pandora, clicked on the 'mini-browser,' and then copied that address into Fluid.app. After creating the program, simply click on the Fluid menu choose Convert to MenuExtra SSB. You can even go to Preferences in your program (prior to converting) and select window styles and transparency.
So I now have a small menu extra with a pop-up semi-transparent window that I can instantly open and play/pause Pandora without keeping a separate browser-window open. Of course, Fluid can be used to make apps out of any other webpage as well. I hope others enjoy this as much as I am.
I couldn't wait any longer for the Firefox add-on Snap Links to be updated for Firefox 3, so I changed the supported version number myself to make it work.
On your Mac, assuming you've installed Snap Links, quit Firefox and navigate to your user's Library » Application Support » Firefox » Profiles » [random].default » extensions » snaplinks@snaplink.net folder. In that folder, open install.rdf in a text editor. Change the MaxVersion number from 3.0beta number to just 3.0 and save the file. Now launch Firefox, and Snap Links should appear in the addon list as available now.
[robg adds: I hadn't installed Snap Links before, but was able to find an installable version for Firefox 3 on the Snap Links Version History page. I just installed the 0.0.4 version listed there, and it's working fine with my Firefox 3.0 installation. There are also some links in the comments to the plug-in to pre-modified versions, if you'd rather not edit the code yourself.]
Here's a little gotcha in Firefox 3.0 for web site designers. My website was incorrectly formatted in Firefox 3, but worked fine in Firefox 2. I had some JavaScript code that did the following:
Can you spot the problem? The first statement in my source has px; and the second one has px. That is, the failing statement had a semicolon at the end of the string. In Firefox 2 this worked OK. In Firefox 3, the assignment does nothing. So check your JavaScript for stray semicolons if you're having site issues in Firefox 3.
This was touched on in a comment from a prior hint, but I think it's worth a standalone hint: You can drag any text to Safari's dock icon to perform a Google search of that text.
This is useful for quickly checking up on things without going to the keyboard. I discovered this when, on a whim, I dragged a line from Console onto Safari, and it brought up a search of that Console error.
This hint is really just a link, but there have been several other hints dealing with PDF plug-ins for Mac browsers -- the Adobe plug-in only supports Safari) -- and this represents the first real solution for Firefox 3 I have seen.
There is now a Firefox extension named firefox-mac-pdf, available for Firefox 3 under OS 10.5 that utilizes the built-in PDF support in OS X to display PDFs in-browser. In my testing, it appears to work very well. It doesn't have the nifty fading bezel that the Safari PDF viewer does, but it supports all the same keyboard shortcuts and you get the standard Mac OS PDF contextual menu when you control-click on a displayed PDF.
[robg adds: This plug-in takes care of the only major complaint I had about Firefox; being able to view a PDF inline instead of opening it in Preview after downloading is a nice timesaver. I tested the plug-in this morning with about a dozen PDFs, and it worked great on all of them. The hint was submitted noting "Intel only," but the plug-in seems to work fine on my 12" PowerBook G4, too.]
[Updated 6/19: Removed 10.5-only restriction on hint.]
One of Firefox's niftier features is its full page zoom -- when you increase or decrease the size of page, everything on the page (text, images, etc.) zooms or shrinks at the same time. This helps keep the layout of the page closer to the original design when zooming; the end result (to me, anyway) looks nicer than when zooming just the text. The shipping version of Safari, on the other hand, only zooms or shrinks text, not images and other elements.
If you're running the WebKit version of Safari, however, you can activate full-page zooming using a simple Terminal command. Thanks to pamon for emailing me a pointer to this page on the Surfin' Safari blog that reveals the Terminal command. Quit Safari and WebKit, then enter this command in Terminal:
Launch WebKit, load a page, then experiment with Command-Minus and Command-Plus (technically, Command-Equals). You should see that all objects on the page are being resized, not just text. Note that Safari, because it uses an older version of the WebKit engine, won't be able to do full page zooming, even after running the above Terminal command. To reverse the settings, reverting WebKit to the "text only" zoom mode, repeat the above command, but change 1 to 0.
If you're a web developer on the Mac, you may be sick of everyone talking about Firefox add-ons that do seemingly everything. True, Firefox is a great browser that is very expandable, but I love Safari, and I want to do as much web development on Safari as possible. The Firefox add-on feature that I missed the most in Safari was Disable Styles and Disable Javascript, both of which are super-easily done in Firefox via the Web Developer Plug-in. With the advent of Safari 3, disabling CSS and Javascript can be done with a couple of (user definable) keystroke combinations.
To gain control over JavaScript and CSS in Safari, open its preferences, and switch to the Advanced tab. Check the box labeled 'Show Develop menu in menu bar.' You should now see the Develop menu; if you activate it, you'll see a number of options for disabling certain web features, including CSS and JavaScript. Now you can use the Keyboard System Preferences panel to assign keyboard shortcuts to anything in this menu, as you would with any other menu item. I assigned Shift-Command-S to Disable Styles, and Shift-Command-Option-S to Disable Javascript. Obviously, you can create shortcuts for anything else in the Develop menu using the same technique.
[robg adds: I extensively modified the above hint, shortening it quite a bit and rewriting the how-to section. If you'd like more details on precisely how to create the keyboard shortcuts, including screen shots of each step, you can read the original version of the hint in the author's blog entry.]
When the user single-clicks in the address bar in Firefox 3 (currently at RC1 -- download | end user features), the default behavior is to select the entire contents of the address bar. The expected behavior for most other OS X browsers, including Firefox 2, is to insert the cursor at the click location. To restore Firefox 3 to sanity:
Type about:config in the Address Bar and press Enter.
If you get a message warning you about changing advanced settings, click "I'll be careful, I promise."
Locate the preference named browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll and double-click it to change its value to false.
That's it. Firefox should be back to it's old behavior. Note that you can still double-click the Address Bar to select a word, and triple-click to select the entire URL.
