The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Emulate Firefox’s type-ahead search in Safari

Fri, Dec 21 2007 at 7:30AM PST • Submitted by johnga1t

As input managers are in danger in Safari 3.0 and later versions, it might be useful to know that a type-ahead search feature that emulates Firefox can be enabled in Safari using a fairly simple hack that involves native OS X tricks.

To do so, quit Safari and go to System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts. Click the ‘+’ to add a new shortcut, select Safari as the Application, Find… as the Menu Title, and a temporary (and arbitrary) shortcut as Keyboard Shortcut. (Note that this field does not allow a simple entry, such as ‘/’, but instead requires a modifier key like Command or Option.)

Now go to ~/Library/Preferences and edit com.apple.Safari.plist. (You may be able to just double-click and open the plist in Property List Editor if you have Xcode installed.) Find the NSUserKeyEquivalents entry and edit the string entry for Find…, replacing the arbitrary shortcut you entered earlier with /. This will remove the need for a modifier key, and allow / to activate search.

Now relaunch Safari and type /; you should see the Find box appear, emulating the type-ahead search in Firefox.

via macosxhints.com – Emulate Firefox’s type-ahead search in Safari .

Web sites often display pop-up windows, or forms, and suppress the location (address) bar so you cannot see where you’ve been routed to, or the full address of the page that has popped up.

Occasionally, you may close the main Safari window by mistake leaving you with only the pop-up window and no obvious way to edit the address, or to enter a new address.

By pressing Command ⌘ + L Safari will re-display the location bar. This is a simple but very handy trick to wrestle back control of your browser. It’s got me out of a fix on many occasions

Apple’s Safari web browser is built around the open source web engine called Web Kit. This is developed by the open source community and updated each and every day (and is recompiled nightly).

This ensures that the browser’s ‘engine’ is the most up to date possible, supporting emerging standards and compatibility. Additionally you benefit from faster rendering of pages and their content.

Web kit is available for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems so the vast majority or users are covered (sorry Linux users!). The Web Kit runs Safari as the front-end application but with Web Kit as the rendering engine running “under the hood”.

To quote the Web Kit site:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60’s S60 WebKit development.

The Web Kit open source home is at webkit.org to download either the Mac OS X or Windows version click on the nightly builds button:

To test your current browser you can run Acid3 Test <- note: this link runs the test. The Acid3 test puts the Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note regarding web browsers (aimed mostly at new Mac users). When I used to/had to use Windows I used Internet Explorer (IE) and then progressed to Firefox. On Apple Macs IE is not available (hurrah!) so what are your choices?

My 3 main browsers of choice are:

Firefox – Available at getfirefox.com

Camino – Available at caminobrowser.org

Safari – Available at www.apple.com/safari

Depending on the website you visit you may find one of the above browsers more suited than others (for example, Camino for Wordprss blog editing).