Chapter 10

Going Places with Safari

In This Chapter

Introducing the Safari window and controls

Visiting websites with Safari

Moving between sites

Creating and using bookmarks

Receiving files with Safari

Surfing with your tabs showing

Saving web pages to disk

Protecting your privacy on the web

Blocking those irritating pop-ups

I proudly surf the web via a lean, mean — and fast — browser application. That’s Safari, of course, and it just keeps getting better with each new version of OS X. Safari delivers the web the right way, without the wait. You’ll find that new features have been added to Safari that no other browser offers, such as the Reading List (which allows you to easily select articles and pages for later perusal).

If you need a guide to Safari, this is your chapter. Sure, you can start using Safari immediately, but wouldn’t you rather read a few pages so that you can surf like a power user?

Within these pages, I show you how to use those other controls and toolbar buttons in Safari — you know, the ones in addition to the Forward and Back buttons — and you discover how to keep track of where you’ve been and where you’d like to go.

Pretend You’ve Never Used This Thing

Figure 10-1 illustrates the Safari window. You can launch Safari directly from the Dock, or you can click the Safari icon from Launchpad.

Major sections of the Safari window are

• The toolbar: Here are the most often-used commands for common tasks such as navigation, adding bookmarks, and searching Google (or Yahoo!, or Bing). Plus, here you can type or paste the address for websites that you’d like to visit. You can easily hide the toolbar to provide more real estate in your browser window for web content. To toggle hidden mode, choose View⇒Hide/Show Toolbar.
• The Favorites bar: Consider this a toolbar that allows you to jump directly to your favorite websites with but a single click or two. I show you later (in the section “Adding and Using Bookmarks”) how to add and remove sites from your Favorites bar. For now, remember that you can toggle the display of the Favorites bar by choosing View⇒Hide/Show Favorites Bar or by pressing +Shift+B.
• The Tab bar: This toolbar allows you to quickly switch between multiple web pages that you’ve loaded, using what appear to be old-fashioned filing folder tabs (something familiar — familiar is good). To hide or display the Tab bar, press +Shift+T or choose View⇒Hide/Show Tab Bar.
• The Safari sidebar: The sidebar pane allows you to organize and read your bookmarks, your reading list, and your shared links. To hide or display the sidebar, press +Shift+L or choose View⇒Hide/Show Sidebar.
• The Content pane: Congratulations! At last, you’ve waded through the pregame show and reached the area where web pages are displayed. The Content pane can be scrolled, and when you minimize the Safari window to the Dock, you get a thumbnail (minimized) image of the Content pane.

  The Content pane often contains underlined (or colored) text and graphics that transport you to other pages when you click them. These underlined words and icons are links, and they zip you right from one area of a site to another or to a different site. You can tell when your cursor is resting on a link because the cursor changes to that reassuring pointing-finger hand. Handy!

• The status bar: The status bar displays information about what the cursor is resting upon, such as the address for a link or the name of an image; it also updates you on what’s happening while a page is loading. To hide or display the status bar, press +/ (forward slash) or choose View⇒Hide/Show Status Bar.

Visiting Websites

Here’s the stuff that virtually everyone over the age of five knows how to do … but I get paid by the word, and some folks might just not be aware of the many ways to visit a site. You can load a web page from any of the following methods:

• Type (or paste) a website address in the Address box on the toolbar and then press Return. If you’re typing in an address and Safari recognizes the site as one that you’ve visited in the past, it “helps” by autocompleting the address for you. Press Return if you want to accept the suggested site. If this is a new site, just keep typing.

  The Safari Address box also acts as a smart address field, displaying a new pop-up menu of sites that match the text you entered. Safari does this by using sites taken from your History file and your bookmarks, as well as sites returned from Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. If the site you want to visit appears in the list, click it to jump there immediately.

• Click a Bookmarks entry in Safari.
• If the Home button appears on your toolbar, click the button to go to the home page that you specify. Read more on this in the upcoming section, “Setting Up Your Home Page.”
• Click the Show Top Sites button on the toolbar. Safari displays a wall of preview thumbnail pages from your most frequently visited sites, and you can jump to a site just by clicking the preview. You can anchor a thumbnail to keep it onscreen permanently by clicking the pin icon next to the desired thumbnail. Click the Edit button on the Top Sites screen to delete a preview thumbnail (click the X). You can also choose the size of the preview thumbnails in Edit mode.

  Because each thumbnail is updated with the most current content, the Top Sites wall makes a great timesaver. Quickly make a visual check of all your favorite haunts from one screen!

• Click an item you saved earlier in the sidebar’s Reading list.
• Click a link in the sidebar’s Shared Links list.
• Click a page link in Apple Mail or another Internet-savvy application. Some Mac applications require you to hold down while clicking to open a web page.
• Click a page link in another web page.
• Select a web address in a document, click the Services menu, and choose Open Page in Safari.
• Type a search term in the Address box. By default, Safari uses Google as a search engine, but you can also use Yahoo! or Bing if you prefer. To set the default search engine, choose Safari⇒Preferences; then, on the General tab, open the Default Search Engine drop-down menu. (You can immediately switch to another engine from the bottom of the menu that appears as you’re typing into the Address box.)

  Click in the Address box, type the contents that you want to find, and then press Return. Safari presents you with the search results page on Google for the text that you entered.

• Click a Safari page icon on the Dock or in a Finder window. Drag a site from your Favorites bar (or drag the icon from the left side of the Address box) and drop it on the right side of the Dock. Clicking the icon that you add launches Safari and automatically loads that site.

  This trick works only on the side of the Dock to the right of the vertical line. More on that all-important divider in a bit.

If you minimize Safari to the Dock, you’ll see a thumbnail of the page with the Safari logo superimposed on it. Click this thumbnail on the Dock to restore the page to its full glory.

Speaking of full glory, Safari supports the same full-screen mode as many other Mavericks applications. Click the Full Screen icon at the top-right corner of the Safari window to switch to full-screen mode, or press the Control++F shortcut (a good shortcut to memorize because it works with virtually all Mavericks-compatible applications). To make things convenient for you, the Address box remains, as do the iCloud Tabs, Share, Reader, Downloads, Back, and Forward icons. To exit full-screen mode, press Esc or the Control++F shortcut again.

Navigating the Web

A typical web surfing session is a linear experience. You bop from one page to the next, absorbing the information that you want and discarding the rest. However, after you visit a few sites, you might find that you need to return to where you’ve been or head to the familiar ground of your home page. Safari offers these navigational controls on the toolbar:

• Back: Click the Back button (the left-facing arrow) on the toolbar to return to the last page you visited. Additional clicks take you to previous pages, in reverse order. The Back button is disabled if you haven’t visited at least two sites. If you right-click the Back button, you see a pop-up menu with the pages you’ve visited — click any entry in the menu to return there immediately!
• Forward: If you’ve clicked the Back button at least once, clicking the Forward button (the right-facing arrow) takes you to the next page (or through the pages) where you originally were, in forward order. The Forward button is disabled if you haven’t used the Back button and haven’t navigated to another page.

  Safari supports a number of trackpad gestures. For example, you can swipe in either direction with two fingers to move backward and forward, just as you would move with the Forward and Back buttons. To zoom in and out on the Content pane, you can either double-tap the trackpad or pinch with two fingers — yes, just like an iPhone. (Ever get the notion that someday we’ll just have a single box called “The Device” that does it all?)

• Home: Click this button (look for the little house) to return to your home page.

  Not all these buttons and controls must appear on your toolbar. You may never see many of these toolbar controls unless you add them yourself. To display or hide toolbar controls, choose View⇒Customize Toolbar. The sheet that appears works just like the Customize Toolbar sheet in a Finder window: Drag the control you want from the sheet to your Safari toolbar or drag a control that you don’t want from the toolbar to the sheet.

• New Tab: Click this button (it looks like a little tab with a plus sign) to open a new tab in the tab bar. I’ll get knee-deep into tabbed browsing later in the chapter.
• AutoFill: If you fill out a lot of forms online — when you’re shopping at websites, for example — you can click the AutoFill button (which looks like a little text box and a pen) to complete these forms for you. You can set what information is used for AutoFill by choosing Safari⇒Preferences and clicking the AutoFill toolbar button.

  To be honest, I’m not a big fan of releasing any of my personal information to any website, so I don’t use AutoFill often. If you do decide to use this feature, make sure that the connection is secure (look for the padlock icon in the Address box) and read the site’s Privacy Agreement page first to see how your identity data will be treated.

• Top Sites: Click this button to display the Top Sites screen I discuss earlier. If you’re having trouble finding it, the button bears a tiny, fashionable grid of squares.
• Zoom: Shrink or expand the size of text on the page, offering smaller, space-saving characters (for the shrinking crowd) or larger, easier-to-read text (for the expanding crowd) by clicking the Zoom button, which is labeled with a small and large letter A. (From the keyboard, you can press ++(plus sign) to expand and +– (minus sign) to shrink.
• Favorites bar: Click this button (which carries the Bookmarks symbol sandwiched between two horizontal lines) to display or hide the Favorites bar.
• Stop/Reload: Click Reload (which has a circular arrow in the Address box) to refresh (reload) the contents of the current page. Although most pages remain static, some pages change their content at regular intervals or after you fill out a form or click a button. By clicking Reload (look for the curvy arrow in the Address box), you can see what’s changed on these pages. (I use Reload every hour or so with CNN.com, for example.) While a page is loading, the Reload button turns into the Stop button — with a little X mark — and you can click it to stop the loading of the content from the current page. This feature is a real boon when a download takes foorrevverr, which can happen when you’re trying to visit a popular or slow website (especially if you’re using a dial-up modem connection to the Internet). Using Stop is also handy if a page has a number of very large graphics that are likely to take a long time to load.
• Bookmarks: Click this toolbar button (which carries an open book icon) to hide or display the Safari sidebar. You’ll find the complete description of the sidebar in an upcoming section.
• History: Click this button (which bears a clock symbol) to display or hide the History list, which I discuss later in this chapter.
• Downloads: Click this toolbar button to display the files you’ve downloaded recently. Click the Clear button to clear the contents of the Download list. Note that clearing the list does not delete the files you’ve downloaded; it simply cleans things up. You can also double-click a completed download in the list to open it immediately. (More on downloading in a couple pages.)

  When you’re downloading a file, a tiny progress bar appears in the Downloads button on the toolbar to show you how much you’ve received. Now that, good reader, is progress! (Let’s see whether my editor allows such a horrible pun to remain.)

• Open in Dashboard: Click this button to create a Dashboard widget using the contents of the currently displayed web page. Safari prompts you to choose which clickable section of the page to be included in the widget’s borders (such as the local radar map on your favorite weather website). Click Add, and Dashboard loads automatically with your new widget.
• Mail: Click this button (bearing an envelope icon) to send an e-mail message with a link to the current page, just as if you clicked the Share button and chose Email This Page. Safari automatically opens Apple Mail (or whatever you’re using as your default email application) and creates a new message with the link already in the body. Shazam!
• Add Bookmark: Click this toolbar button (which carries a plus sign) to add a page to your Bookmarks bar or Bookmarks menu. (More on this in a tad.)
• Print: Click this convenient button to print the contents of the Safari window. (Dig that crazy printer icon!)
• Share: If you have an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you’re probably already familiar with this button, which carries a rectangle and curved arrow symbol. Click the Share button to send the current page (or a link to it) to a number of different destinations, including your reading list, an e-mail message, your Messages application, Facebook, or Twitter. You can also add a bookmark to the current page using the Share button. Figure 10-2 illustrates the Share button in action.

  

Setting Up Your Home Page

Choosing a home page is one of the easiest methods of speeding up your web surfing, especially if you’re using a dial-up modem connection. However, a large percentage of the Mac owners whom I’ve talked with have never set their own home page; instead, they simply use the default home page provided by their browser. Declare your independence! With Safari running, take a moment to follow these steps to declare your own freedom to choose your own home page:

1. In Safari, navigate to the web page that you want to become your new home page.

   I recommend selecting a page with few graphics, or a fast-loading popular site.

2. Choose Safari⇒Preferences or press +, (comma).
3. Click the General button.

   You see the settings shown in Figure 10-3.

4. Click the Set to Current Page button.
5. Click the Close button to exit the Preferences dialog.

   Alternatively, open the New Windows Open With pop-up menu and choose Empty Page if you want Safari to open a new window with a blank page. This choice is the fastest one for a home page.

   

Visit your home page at any time by pressing the Home button on the toolbar. If it doesn’t appear on your toolbar, you can add it by choosing View⇒ Customize Toolbar.

Adding and Using Bookmarks

No doubt about it: Bookmarks make the web a friendly place. As you collect bookmarks in Safari, you’re able to immediately jump from one site to another with a single click of the Bookmarks menu or the buttons on the Favorites bar.

To add a bookmark, first navigate to the desired page and then do any of the following:

• Choose Bookmarks⇒Add Bookmark.
• Press the +D keyboard shortcut.

  Safari displays a sheet where you can enter the name for the bookmark and also select where it appears (on the Favorites bar, Top Sites display, Bookmarks folder, or Bookmarks menu).

• Drag the icon next to the web address from the Address field to the Favorites bar.

  This trick also works with other applications besides Safari, including in a Mail message or Messages conversation. Drag the icon from the Safari Address field to the other application window, and the web page link is added to your document.

You can also drag a link on the current page to the Favorites bar, but note that doing this adds a bookmark only for the page corresponding to the link — not the current page.

To jump to a bookmark

• Choose it from the Bookmarks menu. If the bookmark is contained in a folder, which I discuss later in this section, hover your cursor over the folder name to show its contents and then click the bookmark.
• Click the bookmark on the Favorites bar.

  If you’ve added a large number of items to the Favorites bar, click the More icon on the edge of the Favorites bar to display the rest of the buttons.

• Click the Show Sidebar button (which looks like a small, opened book) on the Favorites bar, click the Bookmarks icon in the sidebar, and then click the desired bookmark. The sidebar that you see in Figure 10-4 appears, where you can review each collection of bookmarks at your leisure.
• Choose Bookmarks⇒Show Bookmarks (or press Option++B) to open the Bookmark list. For those who prefer more information (and more onscreen elbow room) while selecting or organizing their bookmarks, the Bookmark list is the cat’s meow. It displays both the name and web address for each bookmark in your collection.

  The more bookmarks you add, the more unwieldy the Bookmarks menu and the sidebar can become. To keep things organized, choose Bookmarks⇒Add Bookmark Folder and then type a name for the new folder. With folders, you can organize your bookmarks into collections, which appear in the column at the left of the sidebar, as folders in the Bookmark list, and as menus on the Bookmarks bar. (Collections also appear as separate submenus in the Bookmarks menu on the Safari menu bar.) You can drag bookmarks into the new folder to help reduce the clutter.

To delete a bookmark or a folder from any of these locations, right-click it and then choose Delete.

Working with the Reading List and Shared Links

Here are two other methods of loading, saving, and retrieving specific pages in Safari — and they’re both hiding in the now-familiar confines of the Safari sidebar! These two sidebar celebrities are the reading list and your shared links.

Saving pages for later with the Reading List

The sidebar’s Reading List pane allows you to save entire pages for later perusal — unlike a bookmark (which displays only the current contents of a page), a page saved to your Reading List is retained (with its original content) until you can read it. From the keyboard, press +Shift+L to display the sidebar, and then click the Reading List button. Choose Bookmarks⇒Add to Reading List or press +Shift+D to add the current page to the list; you can quickly add a snapshot of that page to the list by holding down the Shift key and clicking the link. (Oh, and don’t forget that you can click the Sharing icon in the toolbar and choose Add to Reading List to achieve the same victory.)

Ah, but when you click one of those entries in the Reading List and then click the blue Reader button that appears at the right side of the Address box, the real magic begins! The Reader panel appears to display text articles free of advertisements and silly pop-ups. And if an article is continued over multiple web pages, the Reader panel automatically stitches them together to form a continuous block of text. (Think of an e-book shown within iBooks on your iMac, and you get the idea.) You can also print or e-mail the article from in the Reader panel.

If the Reader button is blue in Safari’s Address box — and you’re not using the Reading List — don’t panic! Because the page you’re reading contains text articles, Safari is offering to display it in the Reader panel. (If a page has nothing to display in the Reader panel, the button remains gray.) To display the page in the Reader panel, click the blue Reader button in the Address box. To return to your mundane browsing experience, click the Reader icon again.

Visiting pages recommended by friends

If you’re a fan of the Twitter or LinkedIn social media sites, listen up: Mavericks introduces shared links to Safari! After you add your Twitter and LinkedIn account information in the Internet Accounts pane in System Preferences, Safari automatically adds links posted by your friends on both services on the sidebar’s Shared Links pane.

To visit a shared link, just click it. To search for a specific shared link, click in the Search Links box at the top of the Shared Link list and type a portion of the link (or just type the person’s name to see all the links he or she has posted).

The Shared Links pane won’t appear in the sidebar unless you successfully add your Twitter or LinkedIn account information in System Preferences.

Downloading Files

A huge chunk of the fun that you’ll find on the web is the capability to download images and files. If you’ve visited a site that offers files for downloading, typically you just click the Download button or the download file link, and Safari takes care of the rest. While the file is downloading, feel free to continue browsing or even download additional files; the Downloads status list helps you keep track of what’s going on and when everything will be finished transferring. To display the Download status list from the keyboard, press +Option+L. You can also click the Download button at the upper-right corner of the window to display the Download list.

By default, Safari saves any downloaded files to the Downloads folder on your Dock, which I like and use. To specify the location where downloaded files are stored — for example, if you’d like to scan them automatically with an antivirus program — follow these steps:

1. Choose Safari⇒Preferences or press +, (comma).
2. Click the General tab (refer to Figure 10-3) and then open the Save Downloaded Files To pop-up menu.
3. Choose Other.
4. Navigate to the location where you want the files stored.
5. Click the Select button.
6. Click the Close button to exit Preferences.

To download a specific image that appears on a web page, move your cursor over the image, right-click, and then choose Save Image As from the menu that appears. Safari prompts you for the location where you want to store the file.

You can choose to automatically open files that Safari considers safe — things like movies, text files, and PDF files that are very unlikely to store a virus or a damaging macro. By default, the Open “Safe” Files after Downloading check box is selected on the General pane. However, if you’re interested in preventing anything you download from running until you’ve manually checked it with your antivirus application, you can deselect the check box and breathe easy.

Luckily, Safari has matured to the point that it can seamlessly handle most multimedia file types that it encounters. However, if you’ve downloaded a multimedia file and Safari doesn’t seem to be able to play or display it, try loading the file in QuickTime Player. QuickTime Player is like a Swiss Army knife that can recognize a huge number of audio, video, and image formats.

Using Subscriptions and History

To keep track of where you’ve been, you can display the History list by clicking the History menu. To return to a page in the list, just choose it from the History menu. Note that Safari also arranges older history items by the date you visited the site so you can easily jump back a couple of days to that page you forgot to bookmark!

Safari also searches the History list automatically, when it fills in an address that you’re typing. That’s the feature I mention in the earlier section, “Visiting Websites.”

To view your Top Sites thumbnail screen, press +Option+1 or choose Show Top Sites from the History menu. You can also click the Top Sites button on the toolbar.

You can add a site manually to your Top Sites by dragging a bookmark from the sidebar to the Top Sites icon in the Favorites bar, or by dragging a link or URL address from another application to the Top Sites icon in the Favorites bar. (You’ll see a plus sign appear next to your cursor to indicate the addition.) To rearrange screens in the Top Sites display, just drag a screen thumbnail to the desired location. If you prefer that a specific thumbnail remain in the same place, hover your cursor over the thumbnail and click the gray pushpin icon, which will turn blue to indicate that the thumbnail is pinned in place.

If you’re worried about security and would rather not keep track of where you’ve been online, find out how to clear the contents of the History file in the upcoming section, “Handling ancient history.”

Tabs Are Your Browsing Friends

Safari also offers tabbed browsing, which many folks use to display (and organize) multiple web pages at one time. For example, if you’re doing a bit of comparison shopping for a new piece of hardware among different online stores, tabs are ideal. (Heck, tabbed browsing is so popular, Apple added tabs to Finder windows with the release of OS X Mavericks!)

When you hold down the key and click a link or bookmark using tabs, a tab representing the new page appears at the top of the Safari window. Just click the tab to switch to that page. By holding down Shift+, the tab is both created and opened. (If you don’t hold down , things revert to business as usual, and Safari replaces the contents of the window with the new page.)

You can also open a new tab by clicking the plus sign that appears at the upper-right corner of the Safari window, or by pressing +T.

Trackpad owners will appreciate Safari’s two new gestures that control tabs. With multiple tabs active, you can

• Pinch to display them all in a new Tab view (as shown in Figure 10-5).
• Swipe to switch between tabs.

To display your tabs in Tab view without a trackpad, click the Show All Tabs button that appears at the right side of the Safari window (next to the Open a New Tab button). From Tab view, you can click the white dots that appear below the thumbnails to view your tabs, and click any tab thumbnail to switch immediately to that tab. To close a tab in Tab view, click the Close button at the top of the thumbnail.

To fine-tune your tabbed browsing experience, choose Safari⇒Preferences to display the Preferences dialog; then click Tabs. From here, you can specify whether a new tab or window automatically becomes the active window in Safari.

Done with a page? You can remove a tabbed page by hovering your cursor over the tab and then clicking the X button that appears to the left of the title.

Printing Web Pages

If you’ve encountered a page that you’d like to print, follow these steps:

1. Display the desired page.
2. Choose File⇒Print or press +P.
3. In the Save As text field, type a name for the saved page.
4. Select the number of copies and specify whether you’d like to print the entire page, only the current page or a range of pages.
5. Click Print.

   After the Save file has been created, double-click it to load it in Safari.

A quick word about printing a page in Safari: Some combinations of background and text colors might conspire to render your printed copy worthless. In a case like that, use your printer’s grayscale setting (if it has one) or click the Show Details button and deselect the Print Backgrounds check box in the Print dialog (which can save you quite a bit of ink or toner). Alternatively, you can simply click and drag to select the text on the page, press +C to copy it, and then paste the text into TextEdit, Word, or Pages, where you can print the page on a less offensive background (while still keeping the text formatting largely untouched). You can also save the contents of a page as an electronic PDF file by choosing File⇒Export as PDF.

If you’d rather mail the contents of a web page to a friend, click the Share button and choose Email This Page. (If you’ve added the Mail button to your toolbar, one click does the job.) Mail loads automatically, complete with a prepared e-mail message. Just address it to the recipients and then click Send.

Protecting Your Privacy

No chapter on Safari would be complete without a discussion of security, against both outside intrusion from the Internet and prying eyes around your iMac. Hence this last section, which covers protecting your privacy.

Although diminutive, the padlock icon that appears at the left side of the Address box when you’re connected to a secure website means a great deal! A secure site encrypts the information that you send and receive, making it much harder for those of unscrupulous ideals to obtain private data, such as credit card numbers and personal information. You can click the padlock icon (next to the site name) to display the security certificate in use on that particular site. A secure site web address begins with the prefix https: instead of http:. (The extra s stands for secure. A Good Thing.)

Yes, there are such things as bad cookies

First, a definition of this ridiculous term: A cookie, a small file that a website automatically saves on your hard drive, contains information that the site will use on your future visits. For example, a site might save a cookie to preserve your site preferences for the next time or — like shopping at Amazon.com — to identify you automatically and help customize the offerings that you see.

In and of themselves, cookies aren’t bad things. Unlike a virus, a cookie file isn’t going to replicate itself or wreak havoc on your system, and only the original site can read the cookie that it creates. However, many folks don’t appreciate acting as a gracious host for a slew of little snippets of personal information. (Not to mention that some cookies have highly suggestive names, which can lead to all sorts of conclusions. End of story.)

You can choose to accept some or all cookies, or you can opt to disable cookies altogether. You can also set Safari to accept cookies only from the sites you choose to visit. To change your Cookie Acceptance Plan (or CAP, for those who absolutely crave acronyms), follow these steps:

1. Choose Safari⇒Preferences.
2. Click the Privacy toolbar button.

   Safari displays the preference settings shown in Figure 10-6.

   

3. Choose how to block cookies via these radio button choices:
   • From Third Parties and Advertisers: I use this option, which allows sites such as Amazon.com to work correctly without allowing a barrage of superfluous cookies.
   • Always: Block cookies entirely.
   • Never: Accept all cookies.
4. To view the cookies currently on your system, click the Details button.

   If a site’s cookies are blocked, you might have to take care of things manually, such as by providing a password on the site that used to be read automatically from the cookie.

5. Click the Close button to save your changes.

Feeling nervous about the data stored by the websites you visit? You can always delete all that stored information with a single click. From the Privacy pane in the Safari Preferences window, click the Remove All Website Data button. You’ll be asked to confirm your draconian decision.

The Privacy pane also includes the Ask Websites Not to Track Me check box, which works … sometimes. Unfortunately, it’s up to a particular website whether to honor Safari’s request for privacy. (Also, some sites — such as Amazon.com — use tracking legitimately, to keep track of your likes and purchases each time you return.) If you’re especially worried about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind you on the web, however, I recommend selecting this check box.

Cleaning your cache

Safari speeds up the loading of websites by storing often-used images and multimedia files in a temporary storage, or cache, folder. The files in your cache folder can be displayed (hint), which can lead to assumptions (hint, hint) about the sites you’ve been visiting (hint, hint, hint). (Tactful, ain’t I?)

Luckily, Safari makes it easy to dump the contents of your cache file. Just choose Safari⇒Reset Safari, deselect all but the Clear History check box, and then click Reset to confirm that you want to clean up your cache.

Banishing pesky iCloud Keychain passwords

Time for a confession: I am the world’s biggest critic of keychains, which Mavericks uses to automatically provide all sorts of login information throughout the system. In Safari, for example, the password information is automatically entered for you whenever a website you’ve approved requires you to log in.

To be more specific, I’m sure many readers will adopt the new iCloud Keychain, which stores password and credit card information for Safari and wirelessly distributes that information automatically to other Macs and iOS devices using the same Apple ID. (Apple even says the passwords generated by iCloud Keychain are more complex and harder to crack, which sounds more secure, right?)

I’d rather keep a pet piranha in a cereal bowl than use this feature! Why? Whenever you’re logged in, anyone using your iMac gets control of your online persona (in the form of your passwords to secure websites). Safari, like an obedient puppy, will automatically provide access to sites with stored keychain passwords, no matter who is sitting in front of your iMac. Nervous yet?

If you’d like to take the far-less-convenient-but-much-safer, old-fashioned route of remembering your passwords yourself, follow my lead: Visit the iCloud pane in System Preferences and deselect the Keychain check box to turn the iCloud Keychain feature off.

Now that I’ve warned you thoroughly, I feel better about mentioning the Passwords tab in Safari Preferences for those who do decide to use iCloud Keychain. From the Passwords tab, you can view the iCloud Keychain information that Safari uses, and either remove a specific password (or all passwords) from your iCloud Keychain.

Handling ancient history

As you might imagine, your History file leaves a very clear set of footprints indicating where you’ve been on the web. To delete the contents of the History menu, choose History⇒Clear History (at the very bottom of the History menu).

Safari also allows you to specify an amount of time to retain entries in your History file. Open the Safari Preferences dialog, click the General tab (refer to Figure 10-3), and then open the Remove History Items pop-up menu to specify the desired amount of time. Items can be rolled off daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or yearly.

Setting notifications

In Mavericks, Safari can allow websites you’ve approved to send you messages using Notification Center — you can control which sites have been given this functionality from the Notifications tab in Safari’s Preferences dialog. To prevent a website from sending notifications, click the site in the list and click the Remove button.

Avoiding those @*!^%$ pop-up ads

I hate pop-up ads, and I’m sure you do, too. To block many of those pop-up windows with advertisements for everything from low-rate mortgages to “sure-thing” Internet casinos, open the Safari Preferences dialog, click the Security tab, and verify that Block Pop-Up Windows is selected.