My Mac is graced with too many browsers. Too many because they have to be maintained and updated. But each browser– Safari, Firefox, Chrome, SeaMonkey, and Opera– get used. Each seems to have some useful features the others do not. For Safari, I’m growing an extension collection.
How Much Is That Extension In The Window?
Safari’s extension collections pales in comparison with those on Firefox. If it was baseball, the mercy rule would apply. Safari would lose in a blowout.
Many extensions available now for Safari are also available already on Firefox, so why bother with Safari at all?
Outside of issues with Flash, Safari is more pleasant to use. It’s less in-your-face than the Firefox clutter magnet. And it’s pretty compared to the troll-like interface in Chrome.
My latest kick is Safari extensions, and I’ve been adding one per week for awhile. Apple has an Extensions Gallery for Safari. Most extensions are free. Installation is usually a click or two, so they’re easy to try out.
Open Safari’s Preferences and click the Extensions tab on the right.
My examples include the great 1Password extension, which inserts login IDs and passwords to web site automatically. I also use Make It Short, which is an extension that works like TinyURL.com and creates short URLs which are great for Twitter and email.
Collecting extensions is easy. There’s AdBlock to block all the ads you see on web pages (don’t use it– it bites the hand that feeds you information). There’s Twitter for Safari; the official extension.
My latest find is LinkThing. It adds a few touches to how you open web pages in Safari.
LinkThing gives you new options for where web pages go when you right-click a link to open them.
Who knew you could have so many options for links in Safari. If there’s much keystroke savings going on here, I’m not sure where.
I’m a heavy right-click user so I appreciate extra right-click menu options. LinkThing also handles Instapaper. Click to send a page to Instapaper for later viewing.
From Facebook to weather and news, the hundreds of Safari extensions may prove useful and worthy. Many extensions come with their own Safari Toolbar buttons. Installation from the Safari Extensions Gallery is a click; similar to that of iPhone apps in the iTunes Store or the Mac App Store. Simple and seamless.
All extensions are not created equal. I’ve run into a few that sucked up memory with a voracious appetite and they had to be deleted. A few others had conflicts with other extensions. They, too, were deleted. As it is now, I keep five or six always running, with one or two in testing.
If this keeps up, by the end of the year Safari will become Firefox.
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