Take Control of
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