Plugins that bring Firefox-only features/add-ons to Safari
By Jonathan Schlaffer
You finally caved and bought a Mac and may be using Safari as your primary browser. I’ve tried using Camino, Opera and Firefox under Mac OSX Leopard but none of them now hold a candle to Safari 3.1 running under that operating system. The only problem is you are limited in the selection of add-ons/plugins. While some previous features that were left out are now included you will still find that it needs some.
I understand that with the release of Safari 3.1, you can now double click the tab bar to open a new tab, which is a new feature. Previously there were several add-ons that would have brought that functionality and consequently are not compatible with Safari 3.1.
Several other plugins such as anything made by Cooliris are not compatible with Safari 3.1 (thanks for putting that in the release notes), I had to learn that by trial and error.
But there are a few Firefox plugins such as the Session Manager and AdBlock Plus features that you may want for Safari.
The first is Safari AdBlock which works just like AdBlock Plus does in Firefox. It even automatically subscribes to the USA Easylist for ad-blocking and can be customized to your liking. I can’t understand people who actually like viewing ads on the Internet but to each his/her own.
Next is Safari Stand which is similar to the Session Manager feature of Firefox but is more limited. Safari Stand requires SIMBL to be installed first and will check for this during installation, if you don’t have it, you will be directed to install it. Among the other features of Safari Stand is its ability to restore your last browsing session when you open Safari again, even after shutting down the computer. The problem with Safari Stand is that it will only remember the last session where Session Manager in Firefox can remember multiple sessions.
This last one has no equal in the Firefox world. The Inquisitorx search plugin for Safari uses Ajax technology to make search suggestions as you type. It’s similar to Google suggest but like all things on OSX is prettier and more functional.
The bad thing about these ad-ons/plugins is that they are only available for the Mac OSX version of Safari and not the Windows version. So, if Safari is your browser of choice on Windows (why would it be?) then you will still be left in the cold dark “add-on-less” world.
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on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 9:29 am
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April 4th, 2008
Looks cool indeed. I was impressed with Firefox 3 giving a drop down list from your browsing history as you type.
It would seem a Google like auto-complete as you typed with paid sites getting priority (now being marked as such) would be a bit annoying. What were you saying about people liking ads?
http://www.newsfirex.com/blog/
I’m kidding, well mostly. I’ll no doubt check out the inevitable FF plugin.