So Apple released the first beta of their Safari browser today. Unfortunately, like all their other recent iApps, it uses the "brushed metal" look introduced with QuickTime Player 4. This use of the metal appearance actually violates Apple's own Jaguar Human Interface Guidelines:
Avoid using the textured window appearance in applications or utilities that are unrelated to digital peripherals or to the data associated with these devices.
Well, it turns out that Safari looks a LOT better without the silly brushed metal look! Here's how to turn off the heavy metal in the browser. Make a backup of your Safari before trying this!
Control-click on Safari to bring up the "Show Package Contents" contextual menu.
Navigate into Safari -> Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj
Open Browser.nib; You will need the most recent MacOS X Developer Tools package to do this!
In the window marked 'Broswer.nib,' select 'Window' and hit Shift-Command-I to bring up the Inspector. The last item in the Inspector is a checkbox labeled "Textured Window." Uncheck that, save, and quit.
Now start up your modified Safari. Now it looks like it should!
[Editor's note: I haven't tested this yet, as I don't have the December Developer Tools on the iBook. However, it's consistent with other hints regarding disabling the brushed metal look. I trimmed the quoted Human Interface Guidelines blurb down to just the last key line; you can read the full text of the comment on textured windows on this page of the online Human Interface Guidelines.]
This tip I credit to Dr. Dave Garaffa (Thanks Dave!). To finally drop Internet Explorer permanently in favor of Chimera, I needed to gain access to my Citibank site which requires 128 bit encryption (which Chimera has), but the site refused to recognize the browser. Citibank has claimed for the past 6 months that they are working on it, but hey life is finite.
To change the user agent in Chimera, which effectively allows you to masquerade as an "accepted" browser, you need to add a line to the prefs.js file located in your user's Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> XXXXX.slt folder, where the X can be anything. First quit Chimera if open and then open the prefs.js file in your favorite text editor and add the line
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0[space] (compatible; MSIE 5.2; Mac_PowerPC) - Internet Explorer 5.2, Mac");
This should be all one line, spaces as written here (convert the "[space]" insert to an actual space character when you remove the line break). Save the file, open Chimera and you can now gain access to the Citibank site (and presumably others that demand a known (yet inferior!) browser.
[Editor's note: As other hints have explained, you should probably place this command in a user.js file in the same location. There's a chance that your modifications to prefs.js may be overwritten by the program, but the user.js file should remain untouched.]
Both Mozilla and Chimera keep their master settings in a file called prefs.js. It's well known that one can insert certain settings from Mozilla's prefs.js into Chimera's prefs.js, and have it actually work. As far as I can tell, the cache location setting is one of those certain settings.
Here's what my setting looks like when I change my cache location to a folder called Downloads in my home directory from within Mozilla (all one line, no spaces after the ","):
Don't just use the above string, though! Launch Mozilla, change your cache location, and then copy the actual user_pref line from your Mozilla prefs.js to your Chimera prefs.js. Chimera's prefs.js can be found in ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> random, and Mozilla's prefs.js is in ~/Library -> Mozilla -> Profiles -> default -> random, where random is something like "fesm4ts2.slt".
[Editor's note: Instead of editing prefs.js directly, which risks having your custom code overwritten, create a new file (pure text) called user.js in the same location, and paste the line in that file instead. This file will never be overwritten by Chimera, and it should work just the same as though you edited prefs.js directly.]
If you use bluefish to edit your Apache web sites, here's how to customize bluefish so that it displays a currently edited page in Chimera.
Open bluefish, go to menu Options, Preferences, choose the External tab, and change the browser command with this line:
open -a 'Navigator' `echo %s | sed 's; ^Library/WebServer/Documents/\(.*\)$; http://www.yourdomain.com/\1;'`
(This is shown on three lines; enter it as one line without any spaces between the lines). The above assumes that your pages are located in /Library -> WebServer -> Documents, your web site is accessible via http://www.yourdomain.com, and you want to display the page with Chimera.
You can easily change the browser with open -a 'NameOftheBrowser', the location to suit your needs, and use a fixed IP in place of a domain name.
[Editor's note: I have no experience with bluefish, and I haven't tested this hint myself.]
I really liked the grouping feature of the toolbar links in Chimera but accidentally deleted them. I couldn't modify the bookmarks file using Chimera's pref panes, so instead I went into the bookmarks.xml file in ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> Default -> whatever.slt -> bookmarks.xml to modify it.
After comparing this to the default XML bookmarks file in the app, I found that adding the following to each XML attribute within the 'folder=' created a clickable group of links:
group="true"
Just add this to any folder to create a clickable group again. For example, to create a folder of news sites that you have named "News" into a clickable group, make the folder entry look like this:
<folder name="News" group="true">
[Editor's note: Although it's been discussed here before, as a quick reminder, you can create groups in Chimera by first opening new tabs with each site you want as a member of the group, then (on any tab) selecting Bookmarks -> Add Page to Bookmarks, and checking the "Bookmark all tabs" box.]
Here's a useful tip to keyboard enthusiasts who use Mozilla. If you've used Windows versions of Mozilla (and most other browsers for that matter), you know that you can tab through all of the input elements on a web page - links, forms, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc. With the Mac version of Mozilla, though, you can only tab through text entry fields on a form - drop down lists, buttons, links, etc are all inaccessible via the keyboard. Even if you set "Any control" in the Keyboard Preferences pane, you still can't access these other fields. Fortunately, there is an answer - if you add the following to your user.js file:
// Enable tabbing to all fields in a form, // as well as links. user_pref("accessibility.tabfocus", 7) ;
Restart Mozilla, and you will now be able to access all links and form controls by just tabbing through the selections. The user.js file can be found in ~/Library -> Mozilla -> Profiles -> LOGIN -> RANDOM.slt, where LOGIN is your profile name, and RANDOM is a random string of 8 characters assigned by Mozilla.
[Editor's note: You may not have a user.js file if you haven't added any of your own customizations yet; just create it if it doesn't exist. This hint worked perfectly on Mozilla 1.2b when I tested it.]
On the same subject as the image blocking hint that was just recently posted, quite a while ago I opened an enhancement request for Chimera to support image blocking (bug report here).
It seems to have stalled a bit, but luckily a very industrious fellow named Prachi Gauriar created a preference panel for Chimera that allows you to add and subtract servers to block, as well as toggle GIF animations and block 3rd party image requests completely. I've been using it for over a month with the nightly builds and it's worked great!
MultiZilla is a Mozilla enhancement group who originally came up with the tabbed browsing concept now seen in Mozilla. It was mentioned on this site way back in 2001, but you may wish to check it out again.
What it is:
Multizilla is a toolbar and preferences pane that allows you quick access to things like changing user-agent strings and turning off referrer headers. It also has a lot of customization options for tabbed windows, such as "Close other tabs," "Show LED status lights on tabs," and "Show tab bar at bottom of window," among others.
Installation:
Just click on the installation tab of the above site and then on the install link for the Mac version. You need to have a recent version of Mozilla (I'm using 1.2b and it worked fine). Warning: Don't Install the "Google" thing.
Un-installation:
Follow these directions on the MultiZilla FAQ page
While holding down the Apple (Command) key, you can select table cells in Chimera. Just click on any non-link portion of the cell. You can select multiple cells (using the Shift key) if they are in the same table. Once selected, you can use copy and paste just like you would on a text selection.
[Editor's note: As with most Chimera hints, this also works in Mozilla and should work in Netscape.]
I received the following hint via email from Dan, which repeats a hint he posted on his blog. Here's how Dan removed Flash banner ads in Chimera (and Mozilla and probably Netscape as well). Please note that "I" in the following section refers to Dan, not me!
I managed to disable those annoying Flash banner ads in Chimera (I most often see them on Wired.com). Since you probably don't have one, create a file called userContent.css in your Chimera user chrome directory, which is located at ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> default -> random -> chrome. Replace 'random' with the name of the directory, which is usually a string of random characters followed by '.slt'. In the new userContent.css file, enter the following:
/* this hides the usual 468x60 Flash banner ads */ embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][width="468"][height="60"] { display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important; } /* this hides the not so usual but very annoying 728x90 Flash banner ads */ embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"][width="728"][height="90"] { display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important; }
Now restart Chimera and it should work.
I (Rob again now) have shortened and slightly edited Dan's email; you can read the full text of the original post on his blog site. I tested this hint with Chimera and cnn.com, which runs a highly annoying vertical Flash ad down the side of the main page, and it worked perfectly! Thanks Dan!
