jwdunn

Ten Reasons to Stick with Safari

Every few months I’ll open up Activity Monitor to see what is eating my RAM and notice Safari chilling at about 500 MB real memory usage. This is an outrageous RAM footprint for a web browser—most operating systems’ core functions can run speedily on half a gig of real memory.

Disgusted, I vow never to use Safari again and switch to some alternative browser, usually the lightweight Camino. After a few minutes’ worth of browsing, though, I begin to remember why Safari is worth its resource demands. This list is to remind me why I shouldn’t swear off Safari: because, if you can spare the RAM, it’s hands down the best web browser for OS X.

1. “Open Page With”

Many Apple applications have a hidden debug menu. To activate Safari’s debug menu, simply run the following terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

When you restart Safari, you should see “Debug” to the right of “Help” in your menubar. The debug menu has several handy features (another one of which is next in this list) but what I most often use it for is the “Open Page With” function, which will load the frontmost site in any other browser you’ve installed, with one click of the mouse.

This function is a huge timesaver for testing websites or making sure a certain page is loading properly in Safari.

2. The Web Inspector

Safari 3’s biggest improvement over Safari 2 is in a feature that most of its users don’t even know exists: the web inspector. Accessible from the debug menu, the inspector is a window into the code that makes up the frontmost page.

As someone who is attempting to learn CSS and HTML on the fly, I can tell you that the web inspector is invaluable for debugging. It’s compact and slick to boot, so give it a spin even if you’re not into webdesign. Sometimes it’s just interesting to reduce the internet to plain text.

3. The Activity Window

As I explained in a post about using Safari to download YouTube video, the activity window is simply a list of every file that composes the frontmost site. It can be opened from the Window file menu.

If you are having trouble loading a certain page, the activity window may reveal why. It’s also useful for identifying advertising sources and downloading hidden files.

4. Attractive, Windowless In-Line Searching

I’m a sucker for clean, flashy graphics, and Safari’s find function is a case in point. Unlike Camino or Safari 2, which pop find windows in your face, Safari 3 slides out a find bar in the frontmost window, Firefox-style.

Safari highlights results clearly and scanning between them with command-shift-G/command-G produces nice fade effects.

5. SafariStand

Safari wouldn’t be half as useful without SafariStand, the ultimate browser plugin. SafariStand can auto-hide your downloads window, apply custom stylesheets, and hook Safari up with an awesome tab preview sidebar.

I like SafariStand’s vertical tab preview sidebar so much that I’ve used it to completely replace Safari’s tab bar with some quick .nib file hackery. You can take a peek at my modded-up interface in this older post on SafariStand.

6. Microformat Support

Microformats are open formats for common data that can be “attached” to a website just like an RSS feed. The idea is that, when you visit someone’s website, their phone number and upcoming events are one click away from your address book and calendar.

I suspect the next generation of browsers will support Microformats by default, but until then there’s the Safari Microformats plugin, which will generate an icon in Safari’s address bar to access a page’s Microformats with one click.

7. PithHelmet

Safari Adblock, a plugin named after the popular Firefox extension, recently got a lot of attention as a method for blocking online advertisements in Safari.

However, Safari AdBlock is truly lame in comparison to PithHelmet, a powerful ad-blocking plugin that has been around since Panther and recently went Leopard-compatible.

PithHelmet is $10.00 shareware, but it has an indefinite trial period (I strongly encourage you to pay). It offers complete control over what Safari loads and what it doesn’t: you can literally eliminate any element of any page by using its simple rule editor. I wrote a tutorial for Macinstruct about how to locate and block certain .jpg ads, for example. It’s a snap.

Before you commit to blocking internet advertising, you might consider the economic implications of your decision. It’s also worth noting that, like SafariStand and the Safari Microformats plugin, PithHelmet is an InputManager and thus unsupported (but fully functional, so far) in Leopard.

8. Option-Click to “Save Target As…”

Number eight hardly qualifies as a feature, but its absence in other OS X browsers drives me nuts. In Safari, I can download any file by option-clicking on its link. Unlike in Camino, no dialog box pops up to pester me when I perform this action—the linked file just adds itself to my downloads queue.

Camino seriously needs to get its act together on this one. Why should I need to specify a save location when I already have a downloads folder assigned?

9. Cooperation with Other Applications

Safari does have something to gain merely by shipping from Apple with every copy of OS X: it’s the standard in browsing on the Mac.

This means that every script and third-party application on OS X that interacts with a web browser will support Safari. A small example that I use regularly is the Safari button in Adium’s toolbar, which copies the URL of Safari’s frontmost page to the IM field for sending. Of course it’s possible to write my own URL-fetching script for for any other browser, but the point is: if I use Safari, I don’t have to.

10. Resizeable Text Fields

A few members of this list are features that are available in other browsers, but to my knowledge no other browser (on any platform) offer resizeable text fields. Honestly, I thought this was a pretty useless feature when I saw Apple advertising it as new in Safari 3. That was before I realized that long forum posts and blog comments are really a pain to format and revise in a 2” by 3” box.

Of course, there’s still something to be said for conciseness.