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Take Control of Safari 5
Become a Web-browsing wizard by learning all that Safari can do for you.
Go beyond basic Web browsing in Safari 5 with this definitive guide from Mac expert Sharon Zardetto! You'll find detailed coverage of new Safari 5 features like support for extensions and the Reader. You'll get essential advice on smart ways to customize your Safari environment, and learn key browsing techniques, including how to keep track of where you've been, load multiple Web pages at once, search both the Web and the content of pages you're reading, fill out forms automatically, keep track of passwords, download files, use RSS to keep up with your favorite Web sites, and manage your Web-browsing history.
- More Info
- Contents & Intro
- What’s New
- FAQ
- Reader Comments
- Blog
Read this book to learn answers to questions like these:
- How do I load six Web pages at once?
- Now that I've loaded six pages, how do I best work with them?
- How do I bookmark a page I want to return to?
- How do I import Firefox bookmarks?
- I'm a pack rat. How should I organize and access my bookmark collection?
- I forgot to bookmark a great page I saw yesterday. How can I find it again?
- How can I read a multi-page Web article without clicking to switch pages?
- How do I find the word "marshmallow" in the text of a huge Web page?
- How do I erase my history to keep my housemate from snooping through it?
- Where does Safari store Web site user names and passwords?
- Help! What do I do when a stored password stops working?
- How do I use Safari to read RSS headlines from different sites?
- How do I install the My eBay Manager extension?
- How can I turn Safari into a “clipping service” that grabs RSS headlines from different sites when they mention certain topics?
Book Info
iPad & KindleAn EPUB is available to purchasers of this ebook; log in to your account to download it. More info... A Mobipocket file is available to purchasers of this ebook; log in to your account to download it. More info... |
About the AuthorSharon Zardetto has been writing about the Macintosh professionally since 1984, including nearly a thousand articles in Macintosh magazines and over 20 books. She's best known for writing several editions of The Macintosh Bible, along with The Mac Almanac. |
Book Reviews
Author Interviews
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Table of Contents
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Read Me FirstThis book shows you how to make the most of Safari 5, a deceptively powerful Web browser with features you may have never even tried. The book was written by Sharon Zardetto, edited by Tonya Engst with an assist from Michael E. Cohen, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. |
Introduction
Why do you need a book about Safari? You’ve been using Safari for what seems like eons, and you’re doing just fine.
But you don’t have to settle for “fine.” In all likelihood, Safari does far more than you’ve been asking it to, and those things you have been doing with it you can do more quickly, elegantly, and efficiently when you know Safari’s ins and outs. I can vouch for that because when Safari 4’s beta version was released, I vowed to finally, finally, explore Safari thoroughly, in order to find the best way to organize bookmarks, give it another chance as an RSS reader, learn about tab options instead of using them in the most obvious way—oh, and deal with the pesky issue of having dismissed the offer to save a password for a site and never again being asked to do so.
So, when Safari 5 was released, practically under the radar because of the contemporaneous release of the iPhone 4, I was all set to probe the existing features for subtle changes, as well as explore the major new ones (Reader and Safari extensions).
Because I’ve devoted so much time to this, you don’t have to! You won’t have to learn bits and pieces from various sources, experiment on your own, or click your way through the not-exceptionally-helpful Help system to put together disconnected tidbits of information.
Whether you have been using Safari 5 for a while or are about to upgrade to it, this book is for you. No matter how you use Safari—for lightweight general surfing, or middleweight targeted browsing with (a probably disorganized pile of) bookmarks—this book will take you to the heavyweight division, with toned tabs, a buffed bookmarks bar, ad-free main-article reading, total control over RSS feeds, and more.
Safari 5 Quick Start
The material in this book is the least linear of any Mac book I’ve ever written: there are few interdependencies among the topics, so you can start with any one that piques your interest or is likely to answer the burning questions you have about using Safari—whether they’re of longstanding duration or specifically about Safari 5. Luckily, ebook links lend themselves to just that sort of approach!
On the other hand, if you don’t want to accidentally miss anything, just follow the advice given to Alice: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Download and install Safari 5:
- If you haven’t moved to Safari 5 yet, read Appendix A: Update to Safari 5. The appendix shows you how easy it is to do so, and it discusses the system requirements for the upgrade.
Check out Safari 5’s new features:
- If you want to hit the highlights of new features, use the links in What’s New in Safari 5. The two major new features are covered in Tune Out Page Clutter with Reader and Expand Safari’s Capabilities with Extensions.
Customize your experience:
- From top (the toolbar) to bottom (the status bar), you can tweak Safari’s looks and basic behavior—see Customize Your Safari Environment. For more advanced customization, find out how to Organize the Bookmarks Bar and how to Expand Safari’s Capabilities with Extensions.
Set your Safari preferences. Its various preference panes are covered in their topic areas, such as:
- Define Font Parameters
- Set Your Tab Preferences
- Override a Page’s Default Window-Opening Settings
- Know Your Link-Opening Options
- Set Your Bookmark Preferences
- Define Your History Range
- C is for Cookie
- Turn on AutoFill Sources
- Set the Download Preferences
- Set Your RSS Preferences
- Install Extensions
Learn key browsing techniques:
You know the basics, but you can learn their details in:
- Navigate to and within Web Sites
- Track Your Downloads
- Use AutoFill for Forms and Passwords
- Scan Site Highlights with RSS Feeds
See how you can read an “article” without ads distracting you or having to click from one page to the next when it’s split across several pages in Tune Out Page Clutter with Reader.
Juggle multiple sites with finesse by learning how to Handle Multiple Pages with Window Tabs.
Read about the differences in the ways your previously visited Web sites are stored automatically or manually in Go Back to Where You’ve Been. Explore the details for each of the methods in Manage Your Top Sites, Set Up and Use Bookmarks, and Retrace Your Steps through History.
Protect your privacy: Store and Edit Your Passwords, and learn about Stealth Browsing and how to Erase Your Tracks with the Reset Command.
Optimize your search techniques in various areas with:
- Use the Web Search Field
- Search within a Page
- Search Your History and Bookmarks
What's New in Safari 5
As happened with Safari 4, many of Safari 5’s new features are background improvements—such as increased page-loading speed—that can enhance your browsing experience but don’t require any action (or learning) on your part. And, from a user’s point of view, Safari 5 is so similar to its predecessor that you can transition to it with neither fuss nor muss.
Yet Safari 5 does offer new features that, if not revolutionary, are evolutionary in Safari’s development.
What’s “new”? Sometimes “new” is in the eye of the user. The features described here were introduced in Safari 5, but some (notably absent: Reader and Extensions) were also added to the Safari 4.1 update, released at the same time as Safari 5 for users of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. So, if you worked with Safari 4.1 before moving to Safari 5, some items won’t be entirely new to you. In some places in this book, when I say “new in Safari 5,” the feature may also have been incorporated into Safari 4.1.
The invisible new features:
- The Nitro Engine: One day guys will run out of ways to describe souped-up engines: turbo-charged, super-charged, nitro… whatever! Safari 5’s under-the-hood browsing power is called the “Nitro Engine,” and it is supposed to provide a 30 percent increase over Safari 4’s page-loading speed. We can assume that our mileage will vary.
- Prefetching and caching: Yes, it sounds like a Letterman “Stupid Pet Trick,” but “prefetching” is a clever way to increase your perceived page-loading speed as you go from one page to another. While you’re looking at one page, Safari scans it for links and looks up the DNS entry (the actual location of a page) for each, in case you click one. Improved caching (storing the pages you visit) should get you back to a previous location more quickly than in Safari 4.
- New HTML support: This isn’t exactly invisible, since it’s all about seeing content on a page, but neither is it something you control or tweak. It just is—as long as Web pages use it. There’s support for new, cutting-edge HTML5 features for typography, video, and graphics (transitions, gallery options, and virtual-reality viewing). Check out the mouth-watering examples at http://www.apple.com/html5/. These samples are proof that the Web can be an incredibly visually rich place without Flash, but until other browsers also fully support these standards, you might not be able to enjoy anything except examples.
The visible new major features:
The main new features in Safari 5 are:
- Reader: By far my favorite new feature, Reader lets you see the main article on a Web page, relegating annoying ads and other distracting material to a darkened background. “Read” all about it in Tune Out Page Clutter with Reader.
- Extensions: Yess! I know so many people who opt for Firefox or Chrome as their main browser solely because previous versions of Safari didn’t provide for “extensions”: add-ons that tweak Safari’s capabilities. Learn how to add extensions with Expand Safari’s Capabilities with Extensions.
- Choice of search engine: While the search field still defaults to Google, you can change the default to Bing or Yahoo, and you can easily switch from one to another at any point in a search. Get the details from Know Your Search Options.
Other new features:
Safari 5 has many small improvements, some of which are subtle and therefore all the more pleasant to run across, such as:
- For the address field: A more wide-ranging suggestion list for the address field and the return of the blue progress bar, described in Use the Address Field.
- For the toolbar: You can Define “Permanent” Buttons for Narrow Windows to keep your most important buttons on the toolbar.
- For Top Sites: New buttons at the top of the Top Sites window (Manage Your Top Sites) and another option for adding something to that gallery (Add a Page to Top Sites).
- For tabs: In the little-things-mean-a-lot department, there’s finally a way to reopen an accidentally closed tab, described in Reopen Recently Closed Windows or Tabs.
What’s New in This Edition
The last edition of this book was all about Safari 4, and now here we are in Safari 5. So, of course, all the links in What’s New in Safari 5 (the previous topic) point you to new material.
But this edition is almost 50 percent bigger not just because of the new-feature coverage, but also because I’ve expanded some topics considerably, and added some that weren’t in the previous version:
When there are many ways to do something: There are many ways to do the same (or very similar) things in Safari, whether it’s creating tabs or scrolling the window contents. I’ve added some new information and tables to cover multi-option procedures so you can more easily see the choices and decide what works best for you:
Table 3: Keyboard Shortcuts for Moving between Windows, Tabs, and Recent Pages
Scroll the Safari Window
Appendix B: Trackpad Gestures in Safari On a related issue, many items hide amazing multi-purpose functionality, as proved by Use the Back and Forward Buttons and Menus and Tabs, Tabs, Everywhere.
More about preferences: So many preferences, so little time! Sometimes it’s easier for someone to walk you through what’s-probably-best-for-you preference settings and then you can tweak them later to match your needs. I’ve expanded Set Your RSS Preferences and Define Your History Range with more info, and I’ve added Set Your Tab Preferences and Set Your Bookmark Preferences.
- More general information: A little background information never hurts, and it usually helps, so I’ve added C is for Cookie and Safari’s Page Cache, as well as expanded the basic information in:
- Reload a Page
- Cancel a Page Load
- Utilize the Downloads Window
What version of Mac OS X do I need to run Safari 5?
Safari 5 works with 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. (At present, we do not know if it will work with Lion.) If you are using 10.4 Tiger, I recommend that you look for help not in this ebook, but instead in Take Control of Safari 4. Safari 4 is compatible with Tiger.
Does this ebook cover the Windows version of Safari?
Although we think that a lot of the info in this ebook will apply to the Windows version of Safari, we've not tested it under Windows, and some of the content is Mac specific. If you were hoping for Windows coverage, please write in and let us know so that we can consider bringing Windows into the picture for a future version.
Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?
There are lots of great ways to read our ebooks on these devices. For more details, please read our latest Device Advice.
Ask a Question
Feel free to ask us or post on our GetSatisfaction site if you have a question about this book!
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From AUSOM News, published by The Apple Users' Society of Melbourne
My entire mess was due to the fact that I had not bothered to learn how to open new tabs where I wanted them, how to move tabs between windows, and how to move between tabs. Even my bookmarks were a mess... Sharon has obviously put a great deal of time into making the best use of Safari’s tab and/or window features. The description of the various options is clear and often in a table form, so different approaches are obvious at a glance. All I had to do was read a few pages of the book and I had a positive feeling that at last I understood this concept. —Pam
Safari 5.1 in Snow Leopard and Lion
July 26, 2011 --
Apple released Safari 5.1 along with Lion (Mac OS X 10.7), but it’s not only for Lion users: the 5.1 update is also for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) machines. Sharon Zardetto provides the details.
—Michael E. Cohen
MobileMe Going Away, Fate of MobileMe Syncing of Safari Bookmarks Unknown
June 8, 2011 --
On June 6, 2011, Apple announced a new service called iCloud that will appear at some point later in 2011 ("fall" in the northern hemisphere), and will replace MobileMe from Apple's perspective. Until then, MobileMe continues unchanged, except that Apple is no longer selling subscriptions or charging for renewals; all current members automatically have their accounts extended through the end of June 2012.
When iCloud becomes available, existing MobileMe members will be able to migrate to the new service, which will be free (albeit with optional paid features, such as iTunes Match and additional storage). So far, Apple hasn't released any details about the fate of Mac-to-Mac syncing of things like bookmarks and keychains.
In the meantime, you can learn more about iCloud and what it might mean for MobileMe users in the following places:
- iCloud Rolls In, Extended Forecast Calls for Disruption by Jeff Carlson (TidBITS)
- WWDC: Apple Introduces iCloud by Jonathan Seff (Macworld)
- iCloud: What You Need to Know (Macworld)
- What Does iCloud Mean for MobileMe Subscribers? by Jonathan Seff (Macworld)
—Tonya Engst
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