Haven't quite decided to take the plunge on Panther yet? But still want to see some of what it offers? Here's a homepage replacement that will display a new Panther feature each time you open a new Web browser window. Copy and paste the following text into an editor, save it as a some_name.html, and set it as your browser's page to display when a new window opens.
[robg adds: Yes, I agree this is a mostly trivial hint ... but we're about 12 hours from Panther's official launch, so I thought it'd be fun to run this morning. It also demonstrates a little bit of what you can do with JavaScript for those who may not be familiar with the language.]
This might be obvious to many, but it wasn't to me. I wasn't able to get Flash movies from certain sites to work in Safari until I unchecked the Flash box in the QuickTime System Preferences panel -- click on the MIME Settings button, then look in the Miscellaneous section and uncheck Flash.
Some talk on this subject can also be found on the Apple Discussions site; search on "quicktime flash safari" to see a thread on the issue.
[robg adds: An older hint discusses a different (but related?) issue with Mozilla and Flash movies.]
I use Safari and jEdit to develop my HTML and PHP websites. Some hints and tips I have found that help make me work efficiently:
Dual Screens
I put my editor on one screen, with Safari on the other. Flicking between them is much faster. Also it's great to have my database (mysql in Terminal), designs I'm working from (Freehand) and the resultant page (Safari) in view while I'm typing code.
Use click-through for faster developing
Switching between text editor and web browser is often repeated many times when developing a web page. I use "click-through" to refresh my web browser page, without bring Safari to the front. Hold Command and use the mouse to click on the refresh icon. The advantage is the caret remains active and in place in my editor and there is no delay bringing windows to the front.
Assign "Command Click" to a button on mouse
I have attached "Command click" to my scroll wheel button on my mouse for several benefits. The "click through" mentioned above is even easier. A middle click on a link will open it in new tab. Moving, resizing and even scrolling windows around behind other windows is handy.
Leave Cookies view open
When developing Cookies, I have found Safari will let you leave the cookies panel open while working. Find Safari->Preferences->Security and choose "Show Cookies". I normally clear out all cookies before starting so I can see the ones I am working on. This panel is dynamically refreshed, so its so easy to see if cookies are being set or not, and what to.
I hope this gives other developers ideas.
robg update 10/27: At the author's request, I changed the original references to "option clicks" to the correct "command clicks."
I have Safari set to remove downloads upon completion. Every so often, I'll start a download and cancel it right away, so I can just reload it when I have time. That's a good thing, but sometimes I'll click a download twice, or click on a bad link, and those entries are cluttering up my downloads!
So here's how I keep those downloads I want for future use while removing the dead/bad entries:
Start downloading (click the Reload icon) every download that you want to keep.
Hit the small "Clear" button at the bottom of the Downloads window.
Click the Cancel icon next to all of the in-progress downloads.
Voila! Now I have a list with just the downloads I want to keep for future use.
Sometimes, a JavaScript button in my favorite browser doesn't want to work. I can push it a hundred times, but the page won't go further. An example is in MSN group's web pages when you want to participate in a group or send a message (website from Micro$oft Corp., humhum). But I have found a way to go further.
Control-click on the JavaScript button, and choose to copy the link (the JavaScript command) and then paste it in the URL address bar and push Enter.
I noticed that if you disable Javascript in Safari (on the Security panel in the Preferences), it will load pages much faster. There is quite big difference even with my 512kbps cable connection. Of course, when pages contain some Javascript applications or links, they won`t work. Also, if you have saved some Javascript as a bookmark (mail URL or window rezise, for example), those won`t work. So for these kinds of pages, you need to enable Javascript again.
[robg adds: After this weekend's work on the G5 review, I'm all benchmarked out, so I haven't tested this one much -- I tried a couple of pages with it set both ways, and may have noticed a small speed increase, but I'm not sure ... so I thought I'd throw it out for general conversation.]
A friend asked me if she could save a QuickTime movie from the web to her desktop, even though the "Save As" option was greyed out.
I thought it would work if she found the movie's URL and opened it from within the QuickTime application itself. Finding the URL for a movie on a webpage is not too hard. Using Safari or IE, open the page that contains the movie and pull down the View menu, where you'll find "View Source." Search that page for ".mov". That text string will likely be at the end of a web address in quotes. Copy that entire address, minus the quote marks.
We then pasted that address into QuickTime's "Open URL" dialogue and opened the movie in its own window. But without QT Pro, you still don't get an option to save it.
Just for kicks, we tried opening the URL in a new Safari window. After the entire movie loaded, we could save it under Safari's File menu. I don't know if this works in IE, but it's a great workaround for downloading movies that are meant to be streamed.
[robg's update: I changed the title, as it originally referred to streaming. As the comments clearly note, I screwed up in not changing this when I posted the original article.]
I'm not claiming this as the greatest thing since sliced bread but it is quite a nice side-effect of Safari's autofill function.
The annoying thing about sites like eBay is that you don't get an instant list of previous searches (I pick eBay because I first found this there, but it is of course generic). But if you have Safari's autofill switched on, then if you return to a page where you've already done a search, typing the first few letters of that search makes the whole text reappear.
And because Safari ties all this to the particular web page, the autofill doesn't turn up anywhere else.
Like I said, not earth shattering but it makes my life just that little bit easier. I'm running OS 10.2.6 and Safari 1.0.85...
There's a well-known and very annoying bug in Safari 1.0 (I don't know if it's been fixed in the 10.2.8 update) that results in new windows being opened offset slightly down and to the right. The only fix I've seen advertised so far involves installing the Application Enhancer panel, something I'm not overly keen to do.
On further investigation, it appears that windows are correctly positioned if they are smaller than the screen width (i.e. don't have a width greater than 1024 on a 1024x768 monitor like mine) but get confused if they are set to be any larger, or are positioned outside the screen boundaries (if they are dragged to the right, for example - something I often do by accident.)
My solution is to set Safari's prefs to always start more or less fullscreen (leaving room for the dock) by issuing the following command:
The first two zeroes tell Safari to open the window at zero pixels from the top and right (so no offset, as it should be) and the next two values tell it that windows should be 1024 pixels wide and 685 pixels long. Your usage will vary here depending on your display - the important point to note is that the Safari window size should not be greater than your screen resolution.
You can fiddle around with this command until you find a setting that you like, and then save it as an executable .command file to make a quick shortcut, as a command line alias in your .tcshrc or (as I do), include it in your .login script.
[robg adds: I don't think the window offset is a bug, I believe it's a feature -- when you open a new window, you can see both the old and new windows at the same time. However, if it annoys you and you don't mind using full-screen windows, this should fix the problem (though I didn't experiment with it extensively).]
There is an issue with Camino that also is present in other web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla: when requesting a page, the browser will take all available CPU time it can. This can be quite annoying for individuals like myself that do a lot of CGI scripting work (Lasso in my case), where developing a page requires constant reloading of a web page, only to have things slow down to a crawl because the web browser and web server on the same machine fighting for dominance.
The reason for the CPU usage is due to the status "barber pole" animating. Since it seems that this animation routine is built into OS X, the issue is not really an issue with Camino, but more with Mac OS X itself (you can see similar behavior in other applications which also use the barber pole animation).
To resolve the issue of CPU usage, all you have to do is remove the status bar from the BrowserWindow.nib file. This file is inside the Camino.app bundle (control-click on the app for the Show Package Contents pop-up), on the path Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj -> BrowserWindow.nib.
To edit this file, you will need to have the Developer Tools installed (or XCode if you are fortunate enough to have it). Once open, simply double click on the "Browser" icon in the BrowserWindow.nib window, and then select and delete the status barber pole widget.
Save, and restart Camino, and you should find it to be much quicker during page loads. This might also affect other areas of performance, such as browsing pages that contain Flash content.
