A few good Safari extensions

One of the big attractions for Firefox is the huge number of add-ons available to extend its functionality. It’s impressive, yes, but not enough to take me away from Safari. Still, the recent addition of extensions for Safari is intriguing. Here are seven I like, and one I wish I could like.

JavaScript Blacklist: This one is essential, as far as I’m concerned. There are few things I hate more than hovering over a link only to have an ad pop up. Owners of websites that allow this must have contempt for their readers. The blacklist nips out annoyances such as this from tynt.com, intellitxt.com and snap.com. Plus, you can add others.

Daring Fireball With Comments: This one was fun while it lasted. It transformed Daring Fireball into a blog where you could leave comments — this on a site where author John Gruber is famously opposed to them. When last I checked, though, the comments were not working so I presume Gruber has found a way of blocking them. I can’t blame him. If you’re going to have comments on your site, you should at least have a way of controlling the spam and offensive remarks. Update: My mistake. This extension does work.

Shut Up: Many is the time I have read a well-thought-out opinion piece only to have it ruined by an ignorant comment that followed it. And what follows gets worse because other people respond in kind. Meanwhile, people with something intelligent to say are turned off and head elsewhere. This extension puts a button in the toolbar that lets you toggle comments on and off. I’ve been defaulting to off, so that I’m not even tempted to read what people have to say about, for example, immigration.

Translate: This one is just darned handy. If you’re at a site where the language is other than English, you can press a button in the toolbar to have Google translate it. Just one problem: the button is butt ugly.

Google Search Cleanup: Judging by the number of extensions that purport to clean up Google services, the message should eventually get through to them: Hire some designers, for god’s sake! This extension is one of the more subtle of the bunch, simply taking away the clutter.

Google Reader Snow Leopard: Apps such at NetNewsWire on the Mac or Reeder on the iPad are essentially front ends for Google Reader with added features. One of the things these programs do is show how pleasant it can be to read RSS feeds — if it’s done right. This extension goes straight to the source with a valiant effort to make Google Reader itself presentable.

The New York Times: The novelty might soon wear off, but for a news junkie like me it’s very cool indeed to have the latest headlines tastefully displayed in a bar at the top of the browser. Hovering over a headline gives you a tooltip with details so you can decide whether you want to commit to clicking on it.

MeasureIt: I currently use an old Mac program called Free Ruler to measure things on-screen, so I definitely wanted to give this extension a try. Here is what it is supposed to do: “Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.” Well, I got the button in the toolbar, but precious little else. I’ve clicked and clicked to no available. I tried installing it in Firefox to see how that would go and didn’t even get the button. Dang — I really wanted to like this.

date posted Posted Friday, August 13, 2010 in

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  1. FYI, safari is the only Mac browser that supports Mac OS X Services. MACOSXAUTOMATION.COM has free ones for Safari you can download.

    http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/download/index.html#SafariServices

    Services do things that browser extensions just can’t do, like transfer data from the browser to other applications.

    Here are a few on the free ones at the site:

    Add to Web Clips — A great tool for doing online research. This action will write the text, selected in the Safari browser, to a log file in your Documents folder. Other data added with the clipping includes: date stamp, URL of the current webpage, title of the webpage, and user-added comments. In addition, there is an option to open the log file after writing the text.

    New Event for Selected Date — This service will create a new event in iCal for the selected date, and incorporate the current Safari page title as the event summary, and the current Safari URL as the event URL.

    Pages Pie Chart from 2-Column Selection — This service will create a new pie chart, on the current page in Pages, using the selected text in Safari as the source data. The text selection must contain two tab-delimited columns of data: the first column is the titles; the second column the corresponding numeric data.

    Create Formatted Link for Front Document — This service will create a link, in Rich Text Format, to the URL of the front browser window, and place the results on the clipboard.

    Wanda de Countryside

  2. How about some links, and maybe credit for who made the extensions.

    Yeah

  3. The link in the first graph takes you to Apple’s extensions gallery, where you can find more information, including names of developers. They all install directly from there.

    Mark





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