There are tons of methods to sync your Safari bookmarks: free apps/plugins like xMarks, and paid services like MobileMe. Unfortunately, none of them met my needs/criteria, which are: free, private, and secure. This hint is a combination of information gleaned from many locations, and is not actually a sync. Instead, you will have one single set of bookmarks that you use on all computers. Oftentimes, I learn as much from the comments as I do from the hints -- so if you have a better way, please feel free to post a constructive comment.
I use three Macs: one at work, and two more at home. Having access to the same bookmarks on all machines is really useful to me. I considered MobileMe, but it was not free. I considered xMarks, which seems to work well, but I'm concerned about the privacy of my bookmarks / passwords (read their privacy policy). I have my own server, so this solution is available to me. If you do not have your own server, then you will probably want to consider xMarks or MobileMe for keeping your bookmarks in sync. Also, if you don't have your own server, it is likely that you can more easily justify the expense of the MobileMe account (and therefore, this hint does not apply to you).
You can make all the text on any web page temporarily editable right in the browser. All you need is a browser that has a JavaScript console, which is pretty much all of them nowadays. In Safari, the JavaScript console is accessed with the Show Error Console command in the Develop menu. If you don't see the Develop menu, you have to enable it in the Advanced tab of Safari's preferences.
To make a web page editable, open the console and enter the following statement:
document.body.contentEditable = true
Now, when you click on a text element on the page, you will see a standard text cursor. You can add and delete text to your heart's content.
To make the page uneditable again, enter this in the console:
document.body.contentEditable = false
Note that any edits you perform with this trick are strictly temporary; if you reload the page, your edits will vanish. However, you can save the page locally after editing it, if you need to preserve a copy of your edits. Be sure to save it as a 'web archive,' not as 'page source.'
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]
This is a trick I've used for a while now, but I don't know if it's so obvious to others.
First what you need to do is enable the Safari Develop menu, simply done in Preferences » Advanced or via the command line, whichever you prefer.
Then, click Show Web Inspector, and it'll pop up a web inspector pane below your content.
Then, you can go through the HTML (when you mouse over a section the portion on the page will highlight so you know you're in the right place) and find the text you want to edit (you may have to go pretty deep). You can then double click on the area you want to change, replace the text with your own, and hit enter.
Great trick for sending funny screenshots to friends.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]
Safari lets you zoom the contents of a web page in two ways: you can zoom everything on the page uniformly, or you can zoom just the text. Neither option is ideal, for a number of reasons. I wrote an extension called Rightsizer provides a third way that you may find better.
The problem with full page zooming is that when you zoom in, pretty soon the page is going to be too wide to fit in the browser window without resizing (which may be undesirable or impossible on smaller screens). It also makes graphics blurry.
The problem with Safari's text zooming is that it zooms all the text indiscriminately, so text in narrow, fixed-width containers (such as sidebars) can break in ugly ways or even overflow the containers.
And another problem with both types of zooming is that Safari only preserves your zoom level for the life of the current tab. When you open a new tab, your zoom level is forgotten.
Rightsizer helps in two ways. First, it lets you resize text in specific parts of a page, such as the main article body on a news site, without affecting other parts.
Second, the extension will remember your preferred sizes for each site and reapply them automatically when you revisit them.
To use Rightsizer, you click a representative sample of the text you want to resize and, without releasing the mouse button, press A to enlarge the text, Z to reduce it, or Q to reset it. You can also set text in your favorite font and size with the F key. The change will affect all similar text elements on the site.
To specify a parent container for resizing, select (highlight) some text across multiple child elements before clicking.
To apply changes to just the clicked element without affecting similar ones, press X before any other key.
Normally, the extension will save your changes automatically. This can be disabled in the preferences. To prevent autosaving for a single change, press T before any other key.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I do like this one. This previous hint refers to some other useful Safari Extensions from this author.]
Google Maps sometimes will take an interminably long time to load in Safari. I have found that changing Safari's User Agent to Google Chrome consistently fixes this problem, resulting in snappy loading of Google Map web pages.
Changing the User Agent is a cumbersome process, involving making sure the Develop menu is visible in Safari's menu bar, retrieving Google Chrome's User Agent string from the Internet or a saved file, and then entering the string in the User Agent dialog window.
This hint covers how to use AppleScript to simplify this.
Under Safari and 10.6, I've noticed an annoying problem: All too frequently, when I go to full-screen on a YouTube or other Flash video, the menu bar 'forgets' to disappear. It's really easy to fix.
Just click on the menu bar! Yup. That easy. Click on a menu, an app up there, or even (as I've found) just on the whitespace.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I don't really watch that much full-screen video on my Mac, so I don't notice this. If someone observes this in 10.5 or earlier, let us know in the comments, please.]
There are times when you hold Command+Q when you actually wanted to hold Command+W and all your tabs are gone and its really frustrating because Chrome doesn't ask you for a confirmation. Luckily Chrome has finally added this feature but you need to enable it first.
You can enable this feature by:
Going to about:flags.
Looking for 'Confirm to Quit' then click 'Enable.'
Then restart Chrome.
Now when you hold Command+Q you will get a bubble message that says 'Hold Command+Q to Quit.' Hold Command+Q again and Chrome will quit.
This feature doesn't apply if you click on 'Quit Google Chrome' from the menu bar.
This was tested on Chrome version 10.0.648.151.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. Same version of Chrome as the author.]
I've been using excellent tips found here to enhance Firefox performance including cache2ram.
I wanted to put not just the cache, but also the Firefox profile, and even other apps on the RAMdisk and some guides were a little too complex for my capabilities. So using a combination of portable apps, Esperance DV, and Carbon Copy Cloner, I'm able to easily run Firefox and VLC from a self-auto-restoring RAMdisk that I can simply eject if I need all of my RAM for work (e.g. CS5).
First download and install Esperance DV and set up your RAMdisk with the features you require. I checked 1GB, create on opening session, save in disk image (for CCC) and self auto restore. These setting can easily be modified later, thus Esperance DV is recommended.
Download your required portable applications (like Portable Firefox) from FreeSMUG and install them on the RAMdisk. Download the latest updates to the apps and install them on the RAMdisk as well.
On my RAMdisk the cache is separate from the portable app since I had already used this LifeHacker tip.
Lastly, use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup your RAMdisk to the same .dmg file that Esperance DV is on. Select RAMdisk as the source and for the target 'Choose Disk Image' and select the .dmg file initially made for Esperance DV. At this stage you may choose to make the backup a scheduled, background process.
On SSD-only systems, reducing disk writes is key, so on a newer MacBook Pro, I'd keep the backup on an SD card in the built-in slot; otherwise a tiny USB drive might be a good location.
A script to delete the FF cache on exit would be a great addition to this tip. It's possible that another cloning app may have an option to exclude files that I've overlooked.
I've also had success using the same process with VLC portable, for smoother playback of HD video.
When you close a tab in Safari, the one that gets the focus (becomes active) is the one that was to its right (unless you are closing the last tab, in which case the one that was next to last gets the focus). If you sometimes wish the tab on the left would get the focus, you can have that with the help of a free extension called Tabkeys.
The main purpose of the extension is to let you assign your own keyboard shortcuts to various actions involving tabs. One of the supported actions is closing the current tab, and Tabkeys has a setting that determines which tab will get the focus when you do that.
The only catch is, in order for the tab-focusing feature to work, you have to close the tab using your assigned hotkey. If you close it any other way, such as by clicking its close box or pressing Command-W, the feature has no effect. I use the W key for closing tabs, and this has become second nature to me. (Such unmodified hotkeys have no effect inside text boxes and other editable elements.)
[crarko adds: There was a previous hint about this author's Safari Extensions, but I've used this one myself and thought it was worthy of note.]
