Omniweb can use regular expressions to filter banner ads, or even whole web pages. You can find it in the Preferences, in the Privacy section. There are a few examples to work from, but the gist of it is:

.*\/ads\/.*

The above will match any URL that has /ads/ in it. This should match a lot of advertisements. The .* means "anything." The \/ will match a "/", because just using a "/" has a special meaning for the regular expression. Be careful, though. You could block normal web pages with this feature.

You can read more about regular expressions on the web.

[robg adds: Regular expressions, or regex, are complex but extremely powerful ... here's a Google URL to get you started with some tutorials if you're interested in learning more. You can also use regex on Mail headers, as explained in this hint.]

Just as you can open a link in a new tab with a command-click, you can do the same with links in the Bookmarks Toolbar. Found this by accident today; saves doing Cmd-T and then clicking the link.

Using OmniWeb 4.5, you can set up a shortcut in the Preferences to easily validate the HTML of web pages. Go to the Preferences and select Shortcuts. Add a new shortcut (click the "+" sign) and then double-click the "somewhere" name and rename it to validate@. For the "Destination URL," enter http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=%@.

To use the shortcut, just type validate www.somesite.com, hit return, and watch it use the w3c validator to validate the page.

[robg adds: A cool trick, but please, don't flood my inbox telling me how badly the macosxhints' page fails the validation check ... I know, and there's not a lot I can do about most of it myself! For fun, check microsoft.com!]

I personally don't like to use File -> New Tab, right click and select New Tab or Command-T to open a new tab. I prefer one click of a button to open a new tab. If you don't use the Home button you can use it to open a new tab (you'll need to have the Dev Tools installed, too).

First, back up Safari. Then control-click on Safari, select Show Package Contents. Open Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj -> Browser.nib in Interface Builder. Click on the third button from the left in the browser window. Press Command-Shift-I. In the NSButton Info window that opens, select Connections from the pulldown menu. Click on "target" under Source, then click the Disconnect button. Select "newTab" from the list of Actions and click the Connect button. Save and close.

Now the Home button will open a new tab.

[robg adds: I haven't tried this one myself; command-T is my preferred method of adding a new tab.]

So you know that the Safari bookmarks are kept in ~/Library -> Safari -> Bookmarks.plist. And if you move machines, you can always move the file to the new machine. But what if you want to merge the two bookmark lists? Well, there's the .Mac sync option - but quite a few folks don't have the day-to-day need or money for that. So what do you do? The following requires some knowledge of XML ...

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one, so if you're going to do so, make sure you back up your Bookmarks file first!]

With personal web sharing enabled, it always had frustrated me that Safari (v85, 10.2.6) was unable to access local URLs of the form http://localhost/.... Mozilla could load those just fine, but I had to resort to using http://mymachine.mydomain.com/... in Safari, which of course would only work when I actually had network access.

It turns out that my proxy settings were interfering with Safari. After adding localhost to the 'Bypass proxy settings for these hosts' box in the Proxies tab of all relevant ports in the Network system prefs, Safari can now load http://localhost/ URLs, with or without network access.

Apple's Sherlock buttons didn't offer the functionality I missed most, from MerriamWebster.com's old javascript dictionary button. Written for older versions of Netscape or MSIE, the freely available button doesn't work with Safari. The nice thing about the button was that you could either highlight a word in a page and punch the button for lookup OR just punch the button and enter a word into a dialog box.

Some slight tinkering with that javascript produced the following -- enter it as one long line with no added spaces (just remove the line breaks):

javascript:x=escape(getSelection());if(!x)%7Bvoid(x=prompt
('Word?',''))%7D;window.location='http://dictionary.reference.com/
search?q='+x

Of course, you can replace the URL with your preferred dictionary site--but you may have to change the syntax a bit.

Ever since upgrading to Safari 1.0 I have noticed more and more "missing images" icons showing up on web pages displayed in Safari. This may be because I am also running PithHelmet - but it never occurred with the Safari betas. It occurs many times on items I am not even filtering and should not be missing the images. Anyway - I got sick and tired of pages peppered with the little blue icon indicating a missing image. So I looked around and found the icon and just replaced the image file with a one-pixel blank image. Worked perfectly - no more blue "missing image" icons!

The image you need to replace is located at /System -> Library -> Frameworks -> WebKit.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources -> missing_image.tiff.

Read the rest of the article for the how-to on replacing the image (the process in short)...

[robg adds: There's a script in the remainder of the article with some wide lines, so consider yourself warned about the width of this hint...]

This is an offshoot from the Safari JavaScript Bookmarklets hint. If you like to hide the Address Bar in Safari, you can create a bookmarklet that will allow you to enter a web address into dialogue box (shown on two lines; enter as one without a space between the quote and the comma):

  javascript:location.href='http://'+(q=prompt('Open%20Location:'
  ,%20self.location))

Here's a bonus tip - if from the above code you remove the 'http://'+, you can enter any protocol and hostname that you want into the dialogue box. For instance, you could then use any of http:// ssh:// https:// ftp:// telnet:// itms:// sherlock:// afp:// nfs:// smb:// mailto:// aim://, and cool stuff will happen. Of course, you can use all of those protocols directly in the Address Bar, if you use the Address Bar.

I had a problem where Safari 1.0 v85 was crashing every time I visited a page with Flash graphics on it. For some strange reason, deleting the com.apple.quicktime.plugin.preferences.plist file from my user's Library -> Preferences folder fixed the problem.