Safari For Windows: Six Things to Watch For
It’s the most innovative and most powerful browser in the world, according to Steve Jobs. You’re joining 18 million users — about one twentieth of all web surfers. Now that there’s a Windows version of Apple’s Safari browser, maybe its market share will finally take off.
But if you’re a Windows user getting your first taste of Safari — there some good news and some bad. While exploring the world with Safari, here’s six things to watch out for!
Text boxes are resizeable
If a web page is displaying a text-entry field, Safari will show two grey diagonal lines in its lower right-hand corner. Pull ‘em, and the text-entry field expands or decreases. And you can also resize the width of Safari’s address window by tugging the dot to its right!
Feed Reading is Built In!
Safari can display the items from a newsfeed right in the browser — and allows searching them for keywords, or even sorting by their newness or source. Add them with the “bookmark this” icon — the plus sign to the left of the address bar. And for some RSS fun, try clicking the bookmark menu’s option to “View All RSS Articles”
You can even tell Safari how often to check for new items under the edit menu (after selecting “preferences”.)
Where are the Keywords?
With Safari you’ll miss keyword browsing — or will you? There’s a web site called Pimp My Safari offering its own plugins for the browser — and its keyword add-on looks pretty spiffy.
Tab Differences
Use Cntrl-W to close tab windows. In Firefox and Internet Explorer, Alt-F-C will also close the top tab — but in Safari that key combination causes Safari to exit, taking all your tabs along with it. (And no — it doesn’t remember what they were, and no, it doesn’t warn you first…)
But Safari gives you lots of cool choices for how to use a tab. If you right-click a tab, you’ll even see an option to move the tab to a new window!
More Tab-Opening Choices
Even when opening a new tab, there’s other extra options. There’s a handy list under Edit / Preferences / Tabs…
| Cntrl-Click | Opens a link in a new tab | Cntrl-Shift-Click | Opens a link in a new tab and selects it | Cntrl-Alt-Click | Opens a new link in a new window behind the current one | Cntrl-Alt-Shift-Click | Opens a link in a new window and selects it. |
The Bookmark menu even includes a choice for opening each of your bookmarks in a separate tab.
It’s Beta
Remember that this is a beta release. Apple’s License Agreement warns that it “should not be used in a commercial operating environment, or with important data,” and urges you to back up your data before using it, and “regularly” thereafter. The license even expires on December 31 or “upon the next commercial release.”
Within 24 hours of its release a security blogger was posting about four denial of service bugs and 2 remote code execution bugs.
So enjoy Safari for Windows — but remember that it’s not in its final form. In fact, Apple included a subtle reminder of this right in the software. See that cute little bug icon next to the browser’s address bar?
It’s for sending bug reports to Apple!
Related Posts:
June 14th, 2007
Tabs
Ctrl+Shift left or right arrow should cycle through tabs (the mac equivalent is Cmmd+Shift left or right arrow).
Control (on a PC) is a direct substitute for Command (on a Mac)
If you want a warning that you’re closing a window with multiple tabs go to preferences>tabs and tick “Confirm when closing multiple pages.”
June 14th, 2007
“Control (on a PC) is a direct substitute for Command (on a Mac)”
There are historical reasons for the difference. The control key was *already* in use for keybindings on UNIX systems, so OS X doesn’t interfere with those keybindings by using “Control” for other purposes, as Windows does.
But “Command” is *not* always a “direct substitute” for whatever Windows uses “Control” for.
And the reverse doesn’t hold true either. Try Control+ shift+ right arrow in Safari for Windows, and you’ll soon discover that.