When I found Safari, I loved the new speed, the features, the whole experience. I was particularly pleased with the way it handled bookmarks -- both importing them from other browsers and then managing them once it imported them. I spent quite a bit of time organizing all my bookmarks. So much time that I thought -- I wish I had this organized list of bookmarks on all my machines.
At first, I played around with the idea of writing a shell script or apple script to copy the files over (the Safari bookmarks are in ~/Library -> Safari). Then, I thought about just pushing them over using file sharing or iDisk. All of these things would work, but I think I have come up with a more elegant solution. This only works if you have a .Mac account, but with that proviso...
I have created a new rule in Apple's Backup software that backs up the Safari bookmarks every day at noon. I have a "dominant" machine that I depend on (my laptop), and subsidiary machines that I use from time to time. The subsidiary machines can restore from the backup when I want to bring the bookmarks back in line.
The first time I used it, and then launched Safari on the new machine, I was so thrilled to have my "familiar" bookmarks there. With some tinkering you could probably bring over your cookies files, too, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And, of course, the FTP / applescript / shell script version would be nice to have, too. I have also submitted a request to Apple for them to include the bookmarks files in their iSync list of things that can be sync'ed. That would be a great thing to share... wouldn't?
[Editor's note: There's another hint in today's hints regarding using .Mac and the Address Book to synchronize certain bookmarks ... this method handles the entire file.]
An annoying bug in Safari is that dll files that don't start with the tag <html> don't work properly. The reason for this is that dll is not one of the formats that Safari recognizes. As a result some sites, like Wachovia online banking, download to the desktop.
To fix this, control-click on Safari and select "Show Package Contents," and then navigate to Safari -> Contents -> Frameworks -> WebFoundation.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources. Open the file "types.plist". Scroll down to where it says <key>text/html</key> and add a return after the next line which says <array>. Type <string>dll</string>. The resulting block of text should look like this:
In addition to finding bookmarks on your network with Rendezvous, Safari also searches your Jaguar Address Book for URLs you have entered in contact info. If you have .Mac, you can sync your Address Book info between multiple computers.
So what I did was make a new Group in Address Book called Bookmarks. In this group, I made cards for a few of my favorite websites. For instance, I made a contact called Mac OS X Hints and set the homepage to http://www.macosxhints.com/. After syncing with .Mac via iSync, I now have my favorite bookmarks available to my other Macs that have Safari.
I know there are already apps and web services that let you use your bookmarks among multiple computers, but I thought this was a neat hint for those who would like to do so within Apple's iLife.
Safari does not support server-push, a Netscape hack using Content-type: multipart/x-mixed-replace. Bugzilla, a bug tracking system, uses it in the query interface to display a "Please Wait" message. You can test that it does not work at bugzilla.mozilla.org. If you need to make it work, as I did in my internal Bugzilla, it only takes a small modification in Bugzilla source code:
Edit the buglist.cgi, and search for 'multipart/x-mixed-replace'
A couple of lines above that, you'll see an if statement. After the exists $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}, insert && $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} !~ /Safari/ so that the line reads:
[Shown on two lines; enter as one with a space before the $ENV...]
Save and exit. If you are using mod_perl, restart your webserver.
I already reported this bug to the Safari development team and I hope they'll support this feature sometime in the future. I've also opened a bug with the Bugzilla folks.
To create hover underline links in Chimera, create a file called userContent.css in ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> !random! -> chrome/. In the file, you can put in any number of CSS commands. To enable hover underline links add the following:
A { text-decoration:none; } A:hover { text-decoration:underline; }
Enjoy!
[Editor's note: Since there are literally hundreds of CSS commands you can use to create your own customized browsing experience, I could literally run customized CSS file hints forever ... but I won't, as that's not what the site is about! So consider this hint as a jumping-off point for further CSS file exploration; what you learn from here on is up to you. I won't run many other hints regarding customizing CSS files, as the scope is just too broad, and there are many other hint topics to cover...]
Not sure if other people are having this issue, but I've noticed Safari leaves 'csmount' processes lying around unused even after unmounting the ftp server from the desktop.
Doing a 'ps -axww | grep csmount' reveals them, they look something like this:
xxxx ?? Ss n:nn.nn /System/Library/Filesystems/ftp.fs/csmount -m /Volumes/SITENAME ftp://SITENAME/PATH/
Where xxxx is the PID and n:nn.nn is the CPU time used (and the display is on one line, not two). I've run diskutil repairPermissions disk0s# and it doesn't see anything wrong with the the ftp.fs directory. Anyways, since Jaguar has a functional 'killall' command, killing them is quite simple:
% killall csmount
It's conceivable that some people may need to run this as sudo killall csmount, for instance if they're launching Safari as root for some reason. All the dead csmount procs I've found were using my uid so far.
I just posted this as a link, but felt it worth mentioning as a hint as well. Dave Hyatt, who works for Apple on the open source WebCore portion of Safari, has a Surfin' Safari weblog online with all sorts of great Safari tidbits! You can read how they've fixed the CSS1 test suite rendering failure, sped up Flash animation, and other neat informational tidbits.
The site is only a week old (of course!), but there's already some great content there. Based on the published notes, it seems that the next rev of Safari will have even more bug fixes and neat features. Keep it up, Dave!
You can easily add any folder on your hard drive to the bookmarks menu of Safari, and it will open in the Finder when selected. Handy if you want to drag a picture from Safari to the Pictures folder or when you want to open your downloads folder without having to switch to Finder first. And very cool ... the bookmark menu will display the icon of the folder, even if it's a custom icon.
For example, for the top level of the hard drive, you would type 'file:///' and then drag the link to the bookmark bar. For your Documents folder, you would type 'file:///Users/yourname/Documents' and then drag it to the bookmark bar.
[Editor's note: The original hint specified using just ":///" as the URL, but I couldn't make it work unless the command started with 'file.' Also, do not hit return after typing the URL, as that will open the specified folder and then (at least on my two machines) blank the URL bar! Just type out the address, and drag the completed address to the bookmark bar.]
You can install an "Application Enhancer" called FullScreenSafari.ape that will prevent cascading windows in Safari. You will also need to download and install the Application Enhancer package from Unsanity. This will let you more easily use Safari in full-screen mode. Works like a champ!
You can open the bookmarks in the bookmarks bar by simply hitting Command-1, Command-2 etc. It will not work with bookmarks in a folder just single links. You can see the defined shortcuts in the Bookmarks -> Bookmarks Bar submenu.
[Editor's note: This, and many other keyboard shortcuts, are mentioned in the shortcuts file discused in this hint. For any future keyboard shortcuts, please refer to that file, as we won't be running a separate hint for each of them!]
