Chapter 9
Browsing the Web with Safari
Lion includes the latest version of Apple’s own web browser, Safari. Safari is a fast, standards-compliant web browser loaded with lots of useful features for getting the most out of the Web. This chapter will take a look at Safari and its capabilities, including the following:
- Safari basics
- Adding and managing bookmarks
- Tabbed browsing
- Downloading content from the Web
- Viewing PDFs
- Auto-filling form data
- Security
- Advanced browsing features
- RSS and syndication feeds
- Plug-ins and inline content
- Web clippings
Safari Basics
Safari is Mac OS X’s default web browser, but you can install and use any other available Mac web browser as well including Chrome, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb, Opera, and others. (Later in the book you’ll see how you can even whip up your own in Xcode without writing a single line of code!) However, most people who start using Safari tend to stick with it. Like most Apple software, Safari packs in a lot of useful features while still providing a clean, easy-to-use interface.
The Basic Interface
Safari (Figure 9–1) appears and works like most other popular web browsers, with a few twists that set it apart from most other browsers (even previous versions of Safari). By default, its toolbar is sparse yet functional, with only a handful of items (Back, Forward, and Add Bookmark buttons; an address field; and a web search field). Below the toolbar is the Bookmarks bar, which provides easy access to your favorite bookmarks or bookmark collections. It also provides buttons to open your Collections (Figure 9–2) and Top Sites (Figure 9–3). Below the Bookmarks bar is the Tab bar (when it is shown), and below that may be the Find Banner (which only appears when you use the Edit > Find > Find... (or Command-F) command). Finally, at the very bottom is the Status bar (if enabled, which by default it is not), which provides information about the progress of loading pages as well as displaying the location of links in a page.
NOTE: The Find command searches for content within the current page. This is not to be confused with the Search field in the menu bar that will utilize your default search engine to search the entire Web.
Figure 9–1. A typical Safari view showing open tabs and web pages
Figure 9–2. Safari’s Collections view is where you can view and manage your browsing history, bookmarks, and more.
Figure 9–3. The Top Sites view dynamically presents small representations of the web sites you visit the most. (Clicking one of the small windows loads the site.) Clicking the History tab will present you with a Cover Flow–like view of your recent browsing History.
NOTE: By default, only the toolbar and Bookmarks bar are shown. You must select View > Show Status Bar (or Command-/) to activate the Status bar. The Tab bar will open automatically when more than one Tab is open. Many of these default behaviors can be overridden by the options in the View menu.
Like many applications we have seen so far, Control-click the toolbar and select Customize Toolbar... from the shortcut menu to open a dialog containing other buttons and items that you can drag to your toolbar (Figure 9–4). Some popular items that users add are the Home and Print buttons. From the Customize Toolbar dialog, you can add, remove, or reorganize any of these items on your toolbar. At the bottom of the Customize Toolbar dialog is a default toolbar, which you can use to return your toolbar to its default state.
Figure 9–4. You can customize your Safari toolbar in a number of ways to suit your needs.
Besides the options viewable in the window, like most applications, there are many menu items in the various menus provided. Table 9–1 provides a list of Safari menu items that are unique or particularly useful to Safari.
NOTE: Many menu items (as well as their keyboard shortcuts) are common among all Mac OS X applications. Occasionally, though, even common items have unique behavior in for specific applications and situations. For Safari, we will go over all the default options, but as we progress through the book, we will only cover options that are unique to the product or that haven’t been covered previously.
That covers the basics of the interface, including the menu items. Now we’ll take a closer look at how to perform certain tasks in Safari.
Setting Your Home Page
Your home page is the default web page that Safari goes to when it is initially launched. Out of the box, this is set for the Apple Start page (www.apple.com/startpage), which provides Apple news and links to other Apple products and features. If, however, you’d like to open a different page (or no page) when you start Safari, then open the Safari preferences (Safari > Preferences… [Command-,]), and with the General tab selected (Figure 9–5) set a few options:
New windows open with: This drop-down list allows you to select what will initially appear in new Safari windows. The options include Top Sites, Homepage (set below), Empty Page, Same Page (i.e., the page that was last opened in Safari), Bookmarks (will show you book mark collection), Tabs for Bookmark Bar (will open every bookmark in you Bookmark Bar collection in its own tab), or Choose tabs folder (this option will let you select any folder in your collection and have each bookmark contained within open in its own tab).
Homepage: This text field allows you to enter the URL of any web page that you’d like to use as your homepage.
Set to Current Page: Clicking this button automatically enters the URL of your current web page into the Homepage text field.
Figure 9–5. You can select your own home page on the General tab of Safari’s preferences.
Searching the Web
If you are searching for something on the web, Safari provides a Web Search field on the right hand side of the toolbar where you can directly enter your search. By default Safari will perform your search using Google, however under the General tab of Safari’s preferences you can choose to use Bing or Yahoo as alternates to Google as your default search engine.
NOTE: Clicking the magnifying glass icon on the left side of Safari’s Web Search field will provide a menu that will allow you to alter your default search engine without going to Safari’s preferences. It will also display a list of possible refinements of your current search and a list of previous searches.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks provide a way for you to keep track of the web sites you visit that you’d like to return to (or keep track of for some other reason). Safari has a very nice bookmark system in place that allows you to keep an extensive collection of bookmarks well organized in folders and collections.
Adding Bookmarks
To add a bookmark of a page you are visiting, you can select Bookmarks > Add Bookmark from the menu, use the Command-D keyboard shortcut, or click the Add Bookmark button on the left side of the location field in the toolbar. Any of these actions open a dialog allowing you to name and choose a location for storing your bookmark. You can also add a bookmark by selecting the URL from the Address field in the toolbar and drag it down to the Bookmarks bar, a specific bookmark folder, or a bookmark collection in the Collections view.
Managing Bookmarks
When you are in the Collections view, you can organize your bookmarks in a way that makes the most sense to you. To enter the Bookmarks view, select the Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks from the menu, use the Option-Command-B keyboard shortcut, or click the Show All Bookmarks button on the far left of your Bookmarks bar (the icon that looks like an open book).
NOTE: When viewing the items in the Bookmarks Bar collection, you may notice a column called AutoClick, which contains a check box next to each folder item. When the Auto-Click feature is selected, rather than providing a drop-down list of bookmarks contained in that folder, all the bookmarks contained in the folder open in individual tabs when you select this item in the Bookmarks bar.
In the left column of the Collections view, there are two areas: Collections and Bookmarks. Collections are special groupings of bookmarks or other related items. The Bookmarks Bar and Bookmarks Menu collections provide a place for you to store bookmarks so they are easily accessible from Safari; the contents in these two collections are fully customizable. Other collections provide access to links that are collected automatically. The Address Book collection contains all the URLs associated with contacts in your Address Book. The Bonjour collection contains a list of web sites on your network that take advantage of Bonjour. The History collection provides links to your browsing history. All RSS Feeds is a collection of links that lead to RSS feeds rather than traditional web pages.
Below the collections are your primary Bookmarks folders. Here you can add, remove, and move around folders, and store any bookmarks within them. This is a great way to store large amounts of bookmarks in an organized manner. It’s important to note, though, that the bookmarks stored here are only accessible from this view. If you need quicker access to particular bookmarks, it’s best to store those in the Bookmarks Bar or Bookmarks Menu collections.
NOTE: The Bookmarks Item under the Collections column will not show up until you add bookmarks to Bookmarks Menu that are not contained in the Bookmarks Bar. This provides a mechanism to archive bookmarks that you use infrequently but want to keep around just in case.
Bookmark Preferences
The Bookmarks tab in Safari’s Preference window (Figure 9–6) provides a few to customize how Bookmarks are handled in Safari.
Figure 9–6. The Bookmarks options in Safari’s Preference window
The Bookmarks bar and Bookmarks menu options allow you to select from a list of collections. Any selected collections then appear as items in the selected element. The Collections options let you choose whether to include the Address Book or Bonjour collections at all.
Tabbed Browsing
Safari fully supports tabbed browsing, which allows you to open up and view multiple web pages at one time all in one window. For those of us with a history of browsing many sites at once, this is a massive improvement over shuffling around many separate browser windows.
The ability to use tabs is always present in Safari—however, setting a few options in the Tabs tab in Safari’s preferences (Figure 9–7) can make using tabs more convenient.
NOTE: When you adjust the Tabs preference options, the actions associated with common keyboard shortcuts also change. At the bottom of the Tabs window, a list of the keyboard shortcuts and their resulting actions updates dynamically, depending on your selections.
Figure 9–7. The Tabs options in Safari’s preferences
Initially Safari’s Tabs preferences are set up to open all new pages in a new window rather than a new tab (or to never open pages in tabs instead of windows), you can adjust this behavior by choosing a different option on the “Open pages in tabs instead of windows” menu. Other options include Automatic, which will open new pages in a tab unless the page is specifically formatted to open in a new window; and Always, which will cause all new pages to open in a new tab. If you enjoy using tabs, then Automatic is probably the best option.
Creating New Tabs
To create an empty tab in a Safari window, select File > New Tab from the menu (or use Command-T). Otherwise, depending on your preferences, new tabs can be created when you Command-click a hyperlink in a web page or when you click a link in an external application.
Moving Tabs
Occasionally you may want to move the tabs around into a different order in the title bar (or even into a different browser window). To move a tab, just grab (click and hold) the tab, and then drag the tab across the Tab bar to reorder it. If you drag the tab out of the Tab bar, though, the tab will change into a thumbnail of a browser window. If you release the window in this state, you will have moved the tab into a new window. This works the other way around too; if you grab the shaded corner of a stray browser window, you can drag it into the Tab bar of another window to convert it into a tab. (And yes, you can use this to move a tab from one browser window into another as well.)
TIP: To quickly consolidate any number of open browser windows into tabs in a single browser window, use the Window > Merge All Windows menu item.
Closing Tabs
To close a tab, you can either click the small x located on the left side of any tab or use the Close Tab menu option in the File menu (or the Command-W keyboard shortcut).
Downloading Content from the Web
Besides browsing the Web, Safari can also download content that it encounters on the Web. When you click a link in Safari that leads to a file that Safari doesn’t display, Safari will automatically start to download the selected item. When the download begins, a small progress bar will appear on the Downloads button on the toolbar to track the download progress.
NOTE: Safari doesn’t support all the popular protocols used today to download files, including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and others. If you wish to utilize this type of file download, you will need to get a third-party application like Acquisition (www.acquisitionx.com) or Transmission (http://transmission.mOk.org).
NOTE: The first time you attempt to launch an application or open a file that you have downloaded from the Internet, Mac OS X will always warn you that you are about to open an application you downloaded from the Internet and that you should do so only if you downloaded it from a trusted source.
On the General tab of Safari’s preferences, a few options affect how Safari downloads items:
Save downloaded files to: This option allows you to choose a folder to save all downloads in. By default, this is the Downloads folder in your home directory.
Remove download list items: This option allows you to choose whether downloaded items remain listed in the Downloads window until you remove them manually (using the Clear button), or whether this list should be cleared automatically when the download is complete or you quit Safari. Private Browsing overrides this option. Additionally, failed or canceled downloads are never cleared automatically.
Open “safe” files after downloading: When this option is selected, items deemed safe will launch automatically when they have completed downloading. When this option is selected, archives will be uncompressed and disk images will be mounted automatically. This will not in any situation cause a newly downloaded application to launch automatically, though (that would be considered unsafe).
Web Forms and AutoFill
Many functions of many web sites require that you fill out forms with data ranging from simple web site login information to shipping information and other contact info. Filling this information in time and time again can be very tedious. To help, Safari provides a feature called AutoFill.
The AutoFill options are located under the AutoFill tab in Safari’s preferences (Figure 9–8). Here you can select what type of information you would like Safari to save and fill in when you access many forms in a web site.
Figure 9–8. The AutoFill options in Safari’s Preference window
Checking the “Using info from my Address Book card” option enables you to use the contact information about you stored in your Address Book card to fill in that information when it is requested in an online form. This detects fields like “Address,” “email,” and so on, and fills in the appropriate information. Clicking the Edit... button next to this option opens up the Address Book application to your Contact information.
The “User names and passwords” option, which is off by default, stores usernames and passwords for various web sites. It ties a specific username/password combination to a particular web site and only fills in the specific username/password combo for that specific site. This data is stored safely in your keychain so that it would be difficult for someone to discover your password using devious means. However, if this is active, any user who has access to your account will be able to access any web sites protected by information stored here (unless you do not unlock your keychain). The Edit... button allows you to view and edit web sites and usernames associated with those web sites that are stored in AutoFill. Passwords are not shown (however, you can view them in your keychain with the Keychain Access utility).
TIP: While Apple’s keychain is an excellent tool for securely storing important information, there are a number of third-party applications that are available specifically for managing passwords. 1Password (available from the Mac App Store) is one such application that provides tight integration with Safari (and other popular browsers), as well as the ability to sync your password data from your computer to a number of other devices, including iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and even Windows PCs. Applications like 1Password make it easy to effectively utilize strong, unique passwords for web sites, which helps keep your online information protected.
If you check the “Other forms” option, data will be collected from forms on various web sites, and that information will be stored for reuse the next time you visit those sites. You can view what web sites AutoFill is storing data for by clicking the Edit... button.
CAUTION: While AutoFill is convenient, it also could allow someone to access you online accounts by visiting sensitive web sites from the account you have AutoFill associated with. If you use AutoFill you should probably be careful to disable auto login from your system and to log out of your account when you are away from your computer or enable the “Require password [immediately] after sleep or screen saver begins” in the Security & Privacy System Preferences.
Security and Privacy
As more and more services and activities shift over to taking place on the Internet, and particularly on the Web, browser security becomes more and more important. Since its inception, Safari has proven to be one of the more secure browsers out there, and the version of Safari that ships with Mac OS X seems to uphold that level of security.
CAUTION: Safari is not without security flaws. Throughout Safari’s evolution there have been a number of known security issues uncovered, and it is probable that others, unknown or outside of public knowledge, exist. While there are no reports that any of these things actually resulted in a security breach, it underlies the importance of keeping your software up to date, as issues like these are usually quickly resolved after they are discovered.
Secure Browsing
To support a secure environment, Safari has built-in support for an array of protocols that assure the information you send and receive from a web site is encrypted. Safari supports the standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) versions 2 and 3, as well as Transport Layer Security (TLS, a newer, potential replacement for SSL). Whenever you have a secure connection between your browser and a web site, Safari will display a small lock icon on the right side of the title bar. Clicking the lock will provide information about the security being used, as well as the certificate information assuring that the web site is indeed what it claims to be.
CAUTION: It’s not advisable to send any information you deem private or important over the Web unless you know who is on the receiving end and the connection is secured. This rule generally applies beyond the Web as well, and should be followed for all network communication. A secure connection doesn’t guarantee the information you submit will be secure once it reaches its destination.
Blocking Web Content
Safari can also block certain types of web content, specifically any pop-up windows that are not only annoying but may contain undesirable content. To enable pop-up blocking, you can select Block Pop-Up Windows from the Safari menu (or use Shift-Command-K). Safari tries to block only non-requested pop-ups, but if for some reason Safari blocks a desirable pop-up window, then you may need to toggle off this protection temporarily.
Besides blocking pop-ups, you can block other web content as well. On the Security tab of Safari’s Preference window (Figure 9–9), you can disable JavaScript, Java, and plug-ins to further block potentially harmful content. Also, at the very top of the Security Preference tab, an option warns you when you are visiting a potentially fraudulent web site. This option will notify you if you are about to visit a site that may be used in phishing scams. Phishing refers to when one site pretends to be another site to acquire personal information such as credit-card information or usernames and passwords to sensitive sites. (Banks, eBay, and PayPal are common sites that phishers attempt to mimic.)
Figure 9–9. The Security options in Safari’s Preference window
NOTE: Disabling plug-ins, Java, and JavaScript may make for a safer and perhaps less distracting web browsing experience, but by disabling these things, you will also be losing a great number of features, and some web sites may become unusable. It comes down to your own personal security vs. hassle priorities.
Private Browsing
Another way to protect your information when browsing is to utilize the Private Browsing feature of Safari. When Private Browsing is enabled (by selecting Private Browsing... from the Safari menu), Safari will not save any of your browsing activity in the browser history or cache. This assures that people can’t go into your computer and poke around at places you’ve been and items you’ve been browsing.
CAUTION: Private Browsing may overlook items in your Downloads window, specifically any canceled or incomplete downloads, as well as any data cached by plug-ins (i.e., Flash).
Controlling Cookies
HTTP is a stateless protocol, which means that generally when you load a web page there is no common mechanism to remember anything about your last visit. There are, of course, many ways to work around this, but the most popular method today is to use a cookie to keep track of session data as well as other data (web site preferences and other information can be stored in cookies as well). As such, cookies are an important part of using the Web today, and while you can disable them, you will be losing out on a great deal of web functionality doing so.
NOTE: Since cookies became popular, there has been a large amount of paranoia about them, most of which is unfounded. Cookies can track your movement around a web site, and they can contain personal information, however, cookies are location based so the information in a cookie is only useful to a single location. That said, you may not want to leave cookies lying around on a computer in a user account that others have access to—but beyond that, they are generally safe and make the Web a much more interesting place to visit. Like plug-ins and so many other computing features, it comes down to a security vs. ease issue.
NOTE: While cookies are only relevant to a specific location that doesn’t mean that they can’t follow you around the web. Google’s AdSense, for example, is a popular addition to many sites wishing to generate revenue through advertising. Since other web sites embed a piece of AdSense into their web site, the information AdSense (or Google) gets from one site, can be used on other sites using AdSense.
Safari has a number of options available to you regarding the accepting of cookies. In the Privacy tab of Safari’s Preference window (Figure 9–10), you can select how you want to deal with cookies by blocking cookies in certain circumstances. Your options for blocking cookies include “From third parties and advertisers” (the default and suggested option), Always (no cookies allowed), and Never (accept all cookies).
Figure 9–10. The Privacy tab in Safari’s preferences allows you to control what sort of data is collected and shared with Safari. The options here allow you to determine what cookies you would like to block and how location data may be used. You can also remove selected or all data Safari has collected from here.
Removing Cookies and Other Stored Data
In addition to storing cookies Safari also maintains a cache of most of the content you encounter on the Web locally to help improve the browser’s response time when revisiting a web site. While this is fantastic from a performance point of view, you might not want to leave all the items you were browsing lying around in your computer, as they may contain sensitive or private information (they can also take up a good amount of disk space, although that’s not as big of a problem today as it was a few years ago).
In the Privacy tab of Safari’s preferences you can view and manage not only the cache files, but also any stored cookies. To simply wipe out all stored data (cache, cookies and offline application data) Click the Remove All Website Data… button next to “Cookies and other website data:” This will bring up a dialog asking you to confirm that you want to erase all of this data and clicking the Remove Now button will wipe it all away. To selectively delete data, or to view what data is being stored from what web sites, click the “Cookies and other website data:” Details… button. This will open a dialog allowing you to browse by web site and see what data is being stored, you can then remove the data for any individual web site.
CAUTION: One place that Safari data may still exist, even after you use Remove All Website Data…, is in your ~/Library/Caches/com/apple.Safari folder. Here a special Cache.db file and Webpage Previews folder exist. The Webpage Previews folder contains .jpg image files of many web sites you have visited. These files are used in the various Top Site and History cover flow views. If you are really trying to cover your tracks (and didn’t select Private Browsing to begin with) you will want to manually delete these items.
Occasionally you may want to just clean out Safari’s cache files without erasing cookies. To do this, just select the Safari > Empty Cache... from the menu or use the Option-Command-E keyboard shortcut. This opens up a dialog to confirm you want to empty the cache. Click the Empty button to empty it.
TIP: It is possible to disable the cache entirely. To do so, you must first select the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” option on the Advanced tab of Safari’s preferences. Next, select Develop > Disable Caches from the new Develop menu.
CAUTION: The Develop menu has lots of fun and useful options (launching the Web Inspector is awesome for debugging web sites), many of which can be useful if used in the proper context. However, used poorly, these options can cause all sorts of problems with Safari and have an unfortunate effect on your web browsing experience. If you don’t know and understand what you are doing here, it’s best to leave these options alone.
Advanced Safari Features
Safari has a few advanced options located in its preferences (Figure 9–11) that are useful in certain situations.
Figure 9–11. The advanced Safari preferences
Universal Access
The Universal Access options on the Advanced preference tab allow you to adjust the minimum font size for readability and to select between using Tab or the default Option-Tab to cycle through links and form items on a web page.
NOTE: The difference between the default Tab and Option-Tab is that, unless you set the “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage” option, Tab will only cycle through form items (as well as the address field and search field on the toolbar), while Option-Tab will cycle through form items and hyperlinks.
Setting a Default Style Sheet
The Advanced Safari preferences also include the ability to use a specific style sheet that will affect every web page you visit. It’s important to note that only text settings are imported from this style sheet to help improve readability, so the layout of each web site shouldn’t be affected—unless large text settings cause items to wrap funny, which is really the fault of an inflexible web design(er), not Safari or the style sheet.
Database Storage
Database storage is a new feature in Safari that is also part of the emerging HTML 5 standard. This enables web applications to store application data in a local database so you can continue to work with a web application even if you are offline. The Database storage option in the Advanced preferences allows you to set the maximum size of data that you allow in your web database. By setting this value to something very low (or none) will not prevent the use of web Database, however; you will be prompted if you reach the limit as to what you would like to do.
NOTE: Two other options on the Advanced tab of Safari’s preferences are an option to change proxy settings, which will take you to the proxy settings of the active network device on the Network pane of the System Preferences, and a check box to “Show Develop menu in menu bar,” which we touched upon previously.
RSS Feeds in Safari
RSS is a way for web sites to syndicate their content. This allows users to subscribe to a web site’s RSS feed, which contains any updates to the web site. This is great if you like to visit a large number of web sites frequently, because with RSS, instead of going to each site to see what’s new, you can get a list of new items from all of the web sites and filter out what items interest you.
NOTE: When is RSS not RSS? When it’s some other type of syndication standard. RSS has always had a few things that others found as weaknesses. This has resulted in two things: first, people adding content to RSS feeds that weren’t covered by the RSS standard (Apple, for example, does this for iTunes podcast feeds); and second, people getting together and inventing new syndication standards, like ATOM. Most RSS clients, including Safari and Mail, support ATOM along with RSS—however, they still tend to refer to it all under the blanket of RSS.
NOTE: Occasionally, a particular web site will have more than one RSS feed available. This is especially true of larger web sites, like news sites or even Apple. This allows subscribers to only receive information that they find interesting (for example, a sports site may allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed that only relays stories about a particular sport or a specific team).
Safari contains the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds as easily as adding a bookmark, and it makes a suitable RSS reader with some nice features.
NOTE: Apple has also added the ability to handle RSS in Mail, which provides a nice alternative to Safari’s RSS feature. While some items referring to this will come up here, we will focus on how Safari handles RSS here, and how Mail handles RSS in the next chapter.
NOTE: Even though Apple provides a couple of good options for viewing RSS feeds, a number of other third-party applications specifically handle RSS feeds (called news aggregators) that add some additional or unique features or that help you organize a large number of feeds in a more suitable way. One such reader is NetNewsWire (http://netwirenewsapp.com). NetNewsWire is a free, full-featured RSS aggregator that makes managing and reading a large number of RSS feeds a snap. If you manage lots of RSS feeds, NetNewsWire is definitely worth checking out.
Adding Feeds
When you are browsing the Web in Safari, whenever you visit a site with an RSS feed, a blue RSS icon will appear on the far right side of the Address field in Safari’s toolbar (Figure 9–12).
Figure 9–12. A web site that has an RSS feed associated with it will display a blue RSS box in Safari’s address bar.
Clicking the RSS icon either opens the RSS feed in your browser or opens a list of all the feeds available if more than one feed is available. Select the feed you wish to subscribe to from the pop-up, and the news feed will open up in Safari (Figure 9–13).
NOTE: When you select an RSS feed from within Safari, the RSS feed opens up in the default RSS newsreader. If your default newsreader is not Safari (e.g., Mail or a third-party RSS reader), then something else will happen than what is described here.
Figure 9–13. An RSS feed open in Safari
Once the feed is open, you can add the feed just as you would any bookmark (Command-D). Adding a feed saves the feed’s location but doesn’t necessarily update the feed automatically (which is usually the desired result). Depending on your RSS options, you must add the bookmark to either your Bookmarks Bar collection or your Bookmarks Menu collection for the feeds to update automatically. (You may want to create an RSS folder in one of these locations to store your favorite RSS feeds.)
NOTE: The Bookmarks view provides an All RSS Feeds collection that contains all the RSS feeds you have bookmarked. You can use this to view all your RSS feeds in one place.
NOTE: When you go to add the bookmark, you will notice an option to add the bookmark to Mail. This is provided if you wish to subscribe to the RSS feed in Mail as well.
Reading Feeds
Reading RSS feeds is pretty straightforward in Safari. If you select a specific feed, all of the current articles will appear in the Safari view area. If you select a collection of feeds by clicking View All RSS Articles in the Bookmark menu or from a folder list in the Bookmark bar, then all the articles from all the feeds will be displayed.
On the right side of the view area are some RSS options that apply to the feed(s) you are viewing. The Search Articles text field allows you to search for specific strings within all the visible articles. Below the Search Articles text field is the Article Length slider. This limits how much of the feed summary to show. (RSS feeds themselves vary in how they summarize articles. Some feeds give no summary at all, while others send the entire article.) The Sort By options adjust the order in which the articles appear in Safari. The Recent Articles option adjusts which articles appear in the view. For example, if you select Today, then only the articles that were updated today will be shown. The Source item shows where the feeds come from: if you select an individual feed, then the feed’s name will be shown (and will open the source site if clicked); if you select a collection of RSS feeds, then the name of that collection will be shown. Finally, there are some actions available: Mail Link to This Page opens up a new mail message in Mail containing a link to the news feed or feeds being shown; Subscribe in Mail subscribes to all the feeds in Mail (which is handy if you use Mail as your primary RSS reader).
Feed Options
The Safari preferences include an RSS tab containing some options for RSS feeds (Figure 9–14).
Figure 9–14. The RSS options in Safari’s Preference window
The “Default RSS reader” option provides a list of all the known RSS readers installed on your system. The application chosen here is the primary one that Safari will use to open RSS links in.
The “Automatically update articles in” options allow you to select whether you would like all the RSS feeds in your Bookmarks bar, Bookmarks menu, or both to be updated automatically. The “Check for updates” list determines how often these feeds get updated.
The “Mark articles as read” option allows you to choose if an article should be counted as read when it’s opened in a page or only after it’s been clicked on. You can also select to highlight unread articles.
Finally, while RSS feeds themselves often limit the number of articles that are contained in the actual feed, Safari will keep track of all the articles once downloaded until they are removed. The “Remove articles” list allows you to determine when Safari should automatically remove older articles.
Safari Plug-Ins
Browser plug-ins are special add-ons that typically enable a web browser to view a special type of file or application that the browser itself would not display natively. Safari in Lion comes equipped with only two browser plug-ins: a Java applet plug-in that will allow Java web content to display in the browser, and a QuickTime plug-in that will allow a wide range of multimedia to display properly in the browser. Occasionally, however, you may come across some content on the Web that requires some other type of plug-in (for example, an Adobe Flash based application or media player). Depending on the web site, you may be prompted to download and install the plug-in, or you may just be told that you are missing the required plug-in (and usually told which one you are missing). Two common plug-ins not installed by default are plug-ins for Adobe Flash and for Windows Media. To get the Adobe’s Flash Player, visit www.adobe.com and follow the links to download Flash Player (or just go straight to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/). Microsoft doesn’t develop a plug-in for Windows Media for the Mac, however they make a free version of Telestream’s Flip4Mac available that will add the ability to playback certain .wma and .wmv files in QuickTime. You can get this component from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/windows-media-player/wmcomponents.
Beyond that, there are some other infrequently used plug-ins. Often when you encounter these, there will be information about what is necessary to view the content. Luckily, though, the days of plug-in madness have passed (i.e., the dot-com days when every wannabe tech company had its own plug-in for its own proprietary format). With the advent of many new features in HTML 5 perhaps a day will soon come where plug-ins are no longer necessary.
NOTE: Safari posses the ability to natively display a wide range for common web content ranging from image files to PDFs without the need for any plug-ins.
Extensions
The ability to add extensions to Safari was added with Safari 5. Extensions provide a way for developers to add new features to Safari including UI features such as custom toolbar buttons and bars, inject scripts and style sheets into web pages, and much more.
To discover what extensions are available, take a look at the Safari Extension Gallery (Figure 9–15). To visit the Safari Extension Gallery select the Safari > Safari Extensions… menu option to open the gallery in a new tab or window. Once there you can browse through the various extensions and install them by clicking the Install Now button associated with the desired extension.
Figure 9–15. The Safari Extension Gallery provides a list of available Safari extensions.
Once you have some extensions installed, you can set them up, check for updates, turn them on or off, or uninstall them from the Extensions tab in Safari’s preferences (Figure 9–16).
Figure 9–16. The Extensions tab in Safari’s preferences allows you to manage all of your installed extensions.
Summary
Since Apple introduced Safari, it has been a quite capable web browser, but with the latest version of Safari, Apple has introduced what is clearly one of the best (and fastest) web browsers available on any platform today. Combined with its tight integration with Mac OS X, it’s a clear winner. Of course, there is much more to the Internet than the Web—in fact, for many people, e-mail is the most important feature of the Internet—so next, we’ll talk about Mail, along with iCal and Address Book, which now all work together to provide a seamless way to manage your e-mail, news feeds, to-do lists, notes, and more.