Solve an apparent 'stuck Safari' crash without losing work
Yes, I know, if you use haxies you get what you deserve. But to this day, Spotlight, enhanced custom keystrokes and all, and in spite of my overall hatred for the mouse versus a good keystroke combo, there are just a ton of things I find easier to do with a right-click and Contextual Menu action when I am in certain work (or leisure) modes, especially Web research and just plain surfing. But the price is getting higher.Summary of this hint: I was having a spinning beacbhall hang issue in Safari. After some work, I figured out that it was caused by FruitMenu's contextual menu support. Temporarily disabling the contextual menu support -- without quitting or logging out -- instantly ended the Safari hang-up and I was able to start using it again without losing any work.Read on if you'd like more background on the Safari problems I was having, and how I diagnosed and solved them... Background: So since around 10.5.6, and the later versions of Safari 3, I started having f...
published on Monday, the 29. June 2009, macosxhints
Quick history browsing in Safari 4 beta
I just accidentally discovered how to rapidly access the new 'Cover Flow' view mode for browsing history in Safari 4 beta.I have my windows set to open with the 'Top Sites' view. From here, hitting Tab will take the input from the URL entry box to the Google Search box. If you hit Tab again (i.e. twice in succession in a new window), the whole window will be replaced with the Cover Flow view of your browsing history.[robg adds: The reason this trick works is that the Top Sites page contains a search box at the lower right for history; it's two Tab presses away from the URL entry bar. Note that this only works if you've got the "Full keyboard access" setting (on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel) set to "Text boxes and lists only." If it's set to "All controls," the second Tab will move from the Google box to the URL bar. I also noticed that the history search box doesn't recognize Shift-Tab to move backwards out of...
published on Monday, the 6. April 2009, macosxhints
Change Safari's search box to search Google UK
Here's how to set Google UK as the search engine in Safari. You can use the following technique to change it to any location you prefer -- for example, France (.fr) -- but you must add (or remove) other characters to the string to keep it the same length. Please note you should not remove any of the URL, and you should also not remove or add %@ characters, as they are used as variables. Here's what to do: Control-click on Safari in the Finder and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate into the Contents » MacOS folder, and make a copy of the Safari file you find there. This is your backup in case anything goes wrong. Open the Safari file in MacOS with TextEdit. It will mainly look like a bunch of gibberish. Press Command-F to bring up the Find dialog, and then find this string: http://%@.google.com/%@?q=%@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8. Change...
published on Friday, the 20. March 2009, macosxhints
Safari 4 Released, Claimed "30 Times Faster Than IE7"
CNETNate writes "Apple has released the beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with claims that its Nitro rendering engine is '30 times faster than IE7,' and three times faster than Firefox 3. Other new features include 'Top Sites,' which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, 'Full History Search' for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself — something Opera has been doing for a while."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
published on Tuesday, the 24. February 2009, apple-slashdot
Use Safari to find things more easily in text files
You can use Safari 3.x to open Text files (they must have .rtf or .txt extensions), and then use Safari's Find feature to locate what you're looking for in the file. The advantage is that you get Safari's wonderful new 'find' UI instead of just plain old search results or filtered text. In context, This is how I use it. There are periods of time when I do a lot of searching through log files. In doing so, I'm often looking for a particular phrase, and I also need to see the log data around that time period. Using Console just doesn't cut it for me, because when I put the search term in, Console blocks out all other data in the file. Opening the log file in TextEdit will allow me to highlight each hit individually, which is better, but still not perfect. When I use Safari, however, it highlights all of the hits, and grays-out the other text. This allows me to quickly find associations between the search phrase and other things happening at that time. Of course, as ...
published on Tuesday, the 6. May 2008, macosxhints