When you click on the fav icon on the location bar in Safari (the icon next to the URL), the whole address gets selected.

Simple, but nice.

If you have a non-US keyboard, you'll find impossible to use command-[ and command-] for Back and Forward functions in Safari. The following instructions will change those keyboard shortcuts. Before messing with Safari's inner parts, be advised that alternatively you can use Delete for Back and Shift-Delete for Forward.

If you haven't done that already, you should install the latest Dev Tools (mine are not the latest; they're marked July 2002 but they worked).

1. Quit Safari (if running).
   
2. Control click or right click on the Safari icon and choose Show Package Contents.
   
3. Find your way through Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj and open MainMenu.nib
   
4. It will launch Interface Builder and you should have a small window called "MainMenu.nib - Main Menu" with the menu bar.
   
5. Click on History, double click each keyboard shortcut and type your desired key combination for that specific shortcut.
   
6. Close the MainMenu.nib document, save your changes and start Safari.

Enjoy!

[Editor's note: Obviously, you could use this same method of changing the other keyboard shortcuts as well. I would recommend working on a backup (or having the Safari installer around), just in case something doesn't work after making your changes.]

I am a bit surprised that no one has mentioned the freeware application Safari Enhancer. For all of those who wish to fiddle with Safari's hidden features without editing files themselves, this is the application.

It can reveal the debug menu, set the minimum font size, underline links and import bookbarks from other browsers.

[Editor's note: The features in Safari Enhancer can be enabled through the command line, but Enhancer certainly makes it easier!]

You can set Safari to remember your favourite window size and position. Simply move and re-size a browser window in Safari to your preference, then Quit the app. Every time you start up, the first window will appear where you want it!

Here's a useful little feature in Safari. A command-click on the title bar reveals the full path for the URL where you're at in a site. So we can have instant access to any level of the site, just like Finder windows behave with the same command-click.

See this screenshot as an example...

As someone with very bad eyes, I was quite angry that Safari did not include a minimum font size option, meaning that many fonts appeared too small for me to see.

Taking a wild guess, I added the following lines to the com.apple.Safari.plist file located in the User preferences folder:

<key>WebKitMinimumFixedFontSize</key>
  <integer>13</integer>
  <key>WebKitMinimumFontSize</key>
  <integer>14</integer>

To my surprise, it worked, and Safari will no longer display fonts at any sizes lower than those specified.

For those who would like to search Google and other websites from the address bar in Chimera, try this excellent tip from eFritz.net. According to the site, it only works with the latest builds, and the Chimera team recommends that the Dec 20th, 2002 nightly build should supercede earlier versions. This is a direct quote from eFritz:

Make a new bookmark, give it a name, and change the URL [to] http://www.google.com/search?q=%s in the Bookmarks Sidebar. Type a keyword like 'g' or 'google' into the keyword field. Now you can search Google by typing in 'g [search terms]' or 'Google [search terms]' or whatever.

In other words, select the bookmark you want in the bookmarks drawer and name it something descriptive (like "Search Google"), press command-I, and in the "Location" field of the Get Info panel, append the search string "/search?q=%s" (without quotation marks) to the URL, so "http://www.google.com" now reads "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s". Enter any keyword you like in the "Keyword" field, now when you type that keyword, followed by a search term in the address bar, you'll be auto-magically transported to the Google results page for that term, without first having to go to the Google page. For instance, I can type "goog Macintosh" to search for Mac-related stuff. Very cool.

[Editor's note: There's a previous hint on Google and Chimera, but this hint offers a different method, and expands on it, as you can see if you read the rest of the article, so I felt it was worth posting on its own merits.]

While playing with Safari, I was disappointed that the promising-sounding "Rendezvous Bookmarks" (in the Bookmarks window) didn't find websites on my local network. Happily, there's no need to wait for updates as Eric Christopher Seidel has whipped up an apache module, mod_rendezvous, that enables this feature. It is distributed as a .pkg and takes about 30 seconds to get running.

[Editor's note: I haven't installed this package yet, but will look at it this weekend. Note that any time you're modifying your Apache installation, you could be compromising your security (although I have no bad reports about this package); the installer automatically backs up your existing httpd.conf, which is a nice touch.]

I wanted to remove the underlined links from Safari and found that if you go to /Applications -> Safari.app -> Contents -> Frameworks -> WebCore.framework -> Versions -> A -> Resources -> html4.css, then you can edit the stylesheet near the bottom where the CSS Selectors are located. For instance, here's what mine looks like:

 <--
 a:link { color: blue; text-decoration: none; }
 a:link:active { color: black; outline: gray 1px dotted; }
 a:visited { color: navy; text-decoration: none; }
 a:visited:active { color: black; outline: gray 1px dotted; }
 a:hover { color: red; text-decoration: underline; }
 -->

Of course, you can edit it how you want to, or use your own.

[Editor's note: I haven't tested this myself, but it seems like it might be easier and/or safer to just create your own style sheet, and then set that as the default using the Appearance section of Safari's preferences. This way, you won't be changing something that's likely to get overwritten when Safari is upgraded ... after I catch up a bit this weekend, I'll try to test this theory!]

I saw a complaint over on VersionTracker that when you put a folder in the bookmarks bar, and then try to access it quickly by clicking and then dragging down, Safari thinks you want to drag the folder off the Bookmarks bar instead of accessing one of the items inside the folder.

I wasn't having that problem, and here's why: if you actually click on the arrow to the right of the folder name, Safari will always assume that you want to access an item inside the folder. But if you click on any other place on the button, you'll have to wait for about half a second for the menu to open before dragging to an item in the list.