If you do a lot of business on craigslist.org, it can be quite useful to monitor site activities related to your item(s) of interest. This can be done easily.

If you prefer HTML5 video to Flash, here is a method suggested by John Gruber to employ User Agent masquerading in Safari 5 to try to force sites to serve it to you.

If you turn on the Develop menu in Safari (Preferences » Advanced » check the box), you get the option to choose the User Agent string Safari will hand to a site to tell what browser it is.

From the Develop menu, Choose User Agent » Mobile Safari 3.2.2 - iPad and the site will switch to HTML5 if it supports it. You will need to refresh the page if you've already loaded it.

The setting will only last for the current browsing session. It can be made persistent using the following command (note that this is slightly different than the command linked to in the article; that one produced errors when I tried it in Terminal): This can be undone by: [crarko adds: Read Gruber's article for some caveats associated with making the permanent change. Remember it may make sites think you're using an iPad. It's possible the Windows version of Safari 5 can do this as well, but I haven't tried it. This hint discusses adding the iPad User Agent to the list if you are running a version of Safari that doesn't already have it.]

The Google Chrome browser, as of version 7, now comes with improved AppleScript support.

Looking at the Dictionary for it in AppleScript Editor, there is both the Standard Suite and the custom Chromium Suite. Documentation for the application-specific Chromium classes can be found here.

[crarko adds: This also opens Chrome up to Automator. It's a nice step for them to take, and hopefully it will continue until the Dictionary is comparable to Safari's.]

Online privacy is always a matter of concern. There are many tools around to help and a new one for Safari 5 is an extension called Incognito.

Download and double click the extension file to install it into Safari 5. It allows you to block:

• Google Adsense
• Google Analytics
• Google API (may break some sites)
• Facebook content
• Embedded YouTube videos

This doesn't necessarily block all the ads themselves, but rather the meta-information that is used to track your preferences and target the ads.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and as far as I can tell it works as described. It may be an interesting exercise to run Little Snitch before and after enabling Incognito and see what actually is being blocked.]

Google Street View had stopped working for me in Safari. It turned out ClickToFlash was the culprit. The ClickToFlash web plugin stops Flash objects on webpages from loading. Unless you add the pages/domains to its whitelist or temporarily allow them.

I had not realized ClickToFlash was stopping Google Street View because I did not get the usual blank Flash box where I could use the options to add a site to the whitelist or temporarily allow Flash to load for a page.

To resolve the issue, in Safari navigate to a different page that uses Flash. Doing so will place the ClickToFlash sub menu in the Safari menu. Go to the Safari Menu and select ClickToFlash » Settings....

In the Settings window that pops up, click the + (plus) button on the bottom left. A new entry field will appear at the bottom of the whitelisted sites. If you can not see it, scroll down. Double click the new entry field, and enter the top level URL (without the leading http://) of the site you want to add (e.g. maps.google.co.uk in my case).

Importantly, you MUST deselect the entry. Do this by clicking on one of the other entries in the list. Doing so will set the entry. Just closing the window without deselecting the new entry will not set it.

[crarko adds: I didn't experience the problem with the U.S. Google Street View site. Perhaps they are feeding alternate H.264 video here.]

I had a problem clicking the 'Watch now' button when I wanted to watch a live broadcast on my Mac from the BBC iPlayer website.

When I went to the site and selected the program to watch. A popup dialogue came up with a warning about you must have a TV Licence in order to watch a live broadcast from the BBC.

The dialogue had two buttons; one labelled 'Watch now' and the other 'I do not have a TV Licence...'

But I found I when I clicked either button they did not respond at all!. If anyone else has this problem, they can get around this by going to Safari Preferences » Advanced Tab and check the 'Press Tab to highlight each item on webpage' box.

Close the prefs window and use the Tab key to tab through to the button you want to click. In my case the button I wanted was the 'Watch now.'

Once I was tabbed to the correct button, I then pressed the Return key to get the button pressed. This worked in clicking the button for me. So far only needed to do this once, as it appears the BBC plants a cookie and you do not need to repeat this.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. It appears the BBC iPlayer television broadcasts are still available in the UK only.]

To the best of my knowledge, no third-party PDF plugin on the Mac allows for the inline viewing of PDFs in Google Chrome, fortunately there is a way. As of Chrome 6, Google bundles an experimental PDF plugin, which is disabled by default.

To enable it:

• Type about:plugins in the omnibox.
• You should see a disabled plugin called 'Chrome PDF Viewer;' click the Enable button under this plugin.

You should now be able to view PDFs in Chrome. There are a few rough edges to this plugin. The occasional PDF will not display properly (in particular, it seems to choke on PDFs that have restrictions in effect — printing, copying, etc), but the vast majority show up just fine. The viewer is very fast, and has resizing controls available in the bottom-right corner of the window.

Note that there is currently no loading indicator for PDFs, so if you click on a large document, it may seem like the tab has frozen, but it is in fact just the PDF loading silently.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. It was fine with the couple of PDFs I tried.]

Safari Reader is a new feature with Safari 5. There are several keyboard shortcuts you can use to bring up, navigate and close Reader.

When you see the Reader icon in the address bar, you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Command+Shift+R to enter Reader mode
• Arrow keys up and down to navigate page
• Spacebar or Page Down to page forward
• Shift+Spacebar or Page Up to page back
• Home (or Command+Up arrow) to go to the top of the page
• End (or Command+Down arrow) to go to the end
• Escape to dismiss Reader

[crarko adds: A quick roundup of shortcuts to add to your list.]

Safari will often get stalled out and need to be restarted. In many cases, this can be traced to the Flash plugin getting overloaded. You can quite simply restart just the Flash plugin and make Safari work properly again.

I accidentally stumbled on this one today when I mis-clicked a tab in Safari 5.

Double-clicking the empty space in the Tab Bar just to the right of an open tab in Safari will create and open a new tab. Not sure how new this is, but I can't believe I have never thought to try this method before!

This is an addition to the other well-known ways of opening new tabs:

• Command + T.
• Control + Click (or Right Clicking) the empty space to the right of your tab(s) and selecting 'New Tab.'
• Clicking the small '+' sign on the far right of the Tab Bar.
• Control + Click (or Right Clicking) a URL, and selecting the 'Open in New Tab' option.
• Command + Click a URL.

I'm sure there are probably a couple more ways to do this, but my most common are by far the first and last methods.

[crarko adds: I've seen all the other methods mentioned, but this one is new to me, too. It also worked in Firefox, and even in Terminal, but not in Chrome as far as I could tell. Post results for other browsers in the comments if you like.]