Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual

2017-07-07 02:10:07

11.1. Safari

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

That must be what Apple was thinking when it wrote its own Web browser, which so annoyed Microsoft that it promptly ceased all further work on its own Mac version of Internet Explorer.

Safari is beautiful, very fast, and filled with delicious features. Unless you visit the handful of sites that still require Internet Explorer (like some banking sites), you'll be glad not to use the poky Internet Explorer for Mac.

To move your Web bookmarks over from Windows to the Mac, see Section 5.7.2. Then, when you're ready to get going, read on.

Tip: If you'd like to use a different Web browser on the MacFirefox, for exampleopen Safari, and then choose Safari Preferences General. Pick your favorite Web browser from the Default Web Browser pop-up menu. Now, any time you click a link in an email message (or anywhere else), your favorite browser will open up instead of Safari.

11.1.1. Browsing Basics

Navigating the Web requires little more than clicking buttons and/or hyperlinks , as shown in Figure 11-1. Most Web pages, in fact, look almost identical in Safari and Internet Explorer, so buttons and hyperlinks should be right where you expect them.

Tip: If you're not sure whether something on a page is a hyperlink, just move your cursor over it. If the arrow turns into a pointing finger, you've found yourself a link.

Figure 11-1. The Safari window offers tools and features that let you navigate the Web almost effortlessly. These various toolbars and buttons are described in this chapter. One difference that may throw you if you're used to Internet Explorer: When you're loading a Web page, the progress bar appears as a colored stripe that gradually darkens the Address bar itself, rather than as a strip at the bottom of the window.

11.1.1.1. Saving graphics

If you ever find a graphic that you want to save to your hard drive, just Control-click (or right-click) it, and then choose Save Image to the Desktop from the shortcut menu. (You can tell Safari where to save all such files in the Safari Preferences General tab.)

Even better: If you know exactly where you want a graphic stored, just drag the image straight off the Web page and into the desired folder in the Finder.

11.1.1.2. Scrolling

Scrolling a Web page in Safari is virtually identical to scrolling in Internet Explorer. You can use the scroll bar on the rightby clicking the arrow buttons, dragging the little slider, or clicking inside the scroll bar itselfor use the arrow keys on your keyboard. You can even use the Page Up and Page Down keys to scroll in full-screen incrementsa stunt that also works if you press Space and Shift-Space

Finally, if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, that'll work in Safari, too. You can even scroll horizontally by holding Shift as you scroll.

11.1.2. Safari Toolbars

Many of Safari's most useful controls come parked on toolbars and buttons that you summon or hide by choosing their names from the View menu. Here's what they do:

11.1.2.1. Address bar

When you type a new Web page address (URL) into this strip and press Enter, the corresponding Web site appears.

Because typing out Internet addresses is so central to the Internet experience and such a typo-prone hassle, the Address bar is rich with features that minimize keystrokes. For example:

You don't have to click the Address bar before typing; just press -L.

You can highlight the entire address (so it's ready to be typed over with a new one) by clicking the very upper or lower edge of the Address bar text box. Alternatively, you can click the small icon just to the left of the current address, or triple-click the Address bar.

You don't have to type out the whole Internet address. You can omit the http:// , www , and .com portions; Safari fills in those standard address bits for you. To visit NYTimes.com, for example, a speed freak might press -L to highlight the Address bar, type nytimes , and then press Enter.

When you begin to type into the Address bar, the AutoComplete feature compares what you're typing against a list of Web sites you've recently visited or that you've saved as bookmarks. Safari displays a drop-down list of Web addresses that seem to match what you're typing. To spare yourself the tedium of typing out the whole thing, click the correct complete address with your mouse, or use the down arrow key to reach the desired listing and then press Enter. The complete address you select then pops into the Address bar.

You can summon or dismiss a number of individual buttons on the Address bar, in effect customizing it (Figure 11-2):

Back/Forward . As usual, click the Back button to revisit the page you were just on. Keyboard shortcut : Delete, or -left arrow, or -left bracket .

Once you've clicked Back, you can then click the Forward button (or press -right arrow, or -right bracket) to return to the page you were on before you clicked the Back button. Click (and hold on) the Back button for a drop-down list of the Web pages you've visited during this online session. (Hold Option as you hold down the mouse to see the actual addresses as opposed to the namesof the Web pages you've visited.)

Figure 11-2. You summon or hide these buttons by choosing View Customize Address Bar and dragging buttons onto or off of the Address bar. Some of them lack text labels, but all offer tooltip labels that you can read by pointing to the button without clicking.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Let AutoFill Do the Typing

Safari can remember user names, passwords, and other information you type into the text boxes you encounter in your Web travels .

To turn on this awesome feature, visit the Safari Preferences AutoFill tab. If you turn on "Using info from my Address Book card," whenever youre supposed to fill in your shipping address on a Web form, you can click the AutoFill button in the Address bar to have Safari fill in the blanks for you automatically. (If you don't see the AutoFill buttonas shown in Figure 11-2add it using View Customize Address Bar, or use Edit AutoFill Form to do the deed instead.)

Alternatively, just click a text box" Name ," for exampleand start typing. As soon as Safari recognizes a familiar scrap of your contact information, it fills out the rest of the word automatically. (If it guessed wrong, just keep typing.)

If, in Preferences, you turn on "User names and passwords," then each time you type a password into a Web page, Safari offers to memorize it for you. It's a great time and brain saver, even though it doesn't work on all Web sites. (Of course, use it with caution if you share an account on your Mac with other people.)

When you want Safari to "forget" your passwordsfor security reasons, for examplerevisit that Safari Preferences AutoFill ab. Click one of the Edit buttons, and then delete the Web site names for which your information has been stored.

Turn on Other Forms if you'd like Safari to remember the terms you've typed into search engines, shopping sites, online gaming sites, and so on.

Home . Click to bring up the Web page you've designated as your home page (in Safari Preferences General tab).

AutoFill . Click this button to make Safari fill in Web order forms with your name, address, and other information. See the box on the facing page.

Text Size . You can adjust the point size of a Web page's text using these buttons. When you visit a Web site designed for Windows computerswhose text often looks too small on Mac screensyou can use these buttons to bump up the size. Keyboard shortcut: -R.

Add Bookmark . When you find a Web page you might like to visit again, click this button. You can also press -D, or choose Bookmarks Add Bookmark, or drag the tiny icon from the Address bar directly onto your Bookmarks bar.

As shown in Figure 11-3, Safari offers to add this Web page's name (or a shorter name that you specify for it) either to the Bookmarks menu or to the Bookmarks bar described below. The next time you want to visit that page, just select its name in whichever location you chose.

Tip: Press Shift- -D to add the bookmark to the menu instantlyno questions asked, no dialog box presented.

You can rearrange the names in your Bookmarks menu easily: Just choose Bookmarks Show All Bookmarks (Option- -B), or click the tiny book icon shown in Figure 11-3. In the resulting organization window, drag the bookmarks up and down.

For more dramatic management tasksto edit, rename, or delete your bookmarks, for examplealso see Figure 11-3.

Google Search . Here's one of Safari's most useful featuresa Search box that automatically sends your search request to Google.com, the world's most popular Web search page. It's kind of like the MSN Search Toolbar for Internet Explorer, just more compact and more convenient .

In any case, press Option- -F to deposit your insertion point inside this rounded text box, type something you're looking for, and then press Enter. Safari takes you straight to the Google results page.

Tip: Click the tiny triangle at the left end of the Google bar to produce a pop-up menu of your most recent searches.

Tip: If you Control-click (right-click) a highlighted word or phrase on a Web page, you can choose Google Search from the shortcut menu to search for that text. And, even cooler , this trick works in all Cocoa programsnot just in Safari.

Bug . Ladies and gentleman, Apple at its most humble . This insect-shaped button opens a tiny "Dear Apple" box, where you can tell Apple about a Safari feature or Web page that doesn't work. If you click Options, you can even send Apple a screen illustration of, for example, a screwy Web-page layout that Safari delivered.

11.1.2.2. Bookmarks bar

The Bookmarks menu is one way to maintaining a list of Web sites you visit frequently. But opening a Web page from that menu requires two mouse clicks an exorbitant expenditure of energy. The Bookmarks bar (View Bookmarks Bar), on the other hand, lets you summon a few very favorite Web pages with only one click.

Figure 11-3 illustrates how to add buttons to, and remove them from, this toolbar.

Figure 11-3. Top: Once you've got a juicy Web page on the screen, you can drag its tiny page-logo icon from the Address bar directly onto the Bookmarks bar.

Second from top: Safari realizes that you may prefer a shorter name to appear on the space-limited bar, so it offers you the chance to type in a label you prefer.

Third from top: When you click OK, the new button appears on the bar, as shown here. (You can also drag any link, such as a blue underlined phrase, from a Web page onto the baror even drag an icon from your desktop!) To remove a button, drag it off the bar; to rearrange the buttons, just drag them.

Bottom: Click the little book icon (circled) to open the Organize Bookmarks window. Here, you can drag names up or down to rearrange the list, or drag them into a "folder" that becomes a submenu in the Bookmarks menu (create one by clicking the + button below the list). You can edit a bookmark by clicking once on its name or URL, or delete one by pressing Delete.

11.1.3. Status Bar

The Status bar at the bottom of the window tells you what Safari is doing (such as "Opening page" or "Done"). When you point to a link without clicking, the Status bar also tells you which URL will open when you click it. For those two reasons, it's a very useful strip, but it doesn't appear when you first run Safari. You have to summon it by choosing View Show Status Bar.

11.1.4. Tips for Better Surfing

Safari is filled with shortcuts and tricks for better speed and more pleasant surfing. For example:

11.1.4.1. SnapBack

The little orange SnapBack button ( ), at the right end of the Address bar or Google whose bookmark you last clicked), or to your first Google results page. The point here is that, after burrowing from one link to another in pursuit of some Google result or Amazon listing, you can return to your starting point without having to mash the Back button over and over again. (The SnapBack button doesn't appear until you've actually clicked away from the first page you visited.)

Tip: At any time, you can designate your current page as the new SnapBack page. To do so, choose History Mark Page for SnapBack (Option- -K).

11.1.4.2. Stifle pop-ups and pop-unders

The world's smarmiest advertisers have begun inundating us with pop-up and pop-under adsnasty little windows that appear in front of the browser window, or, worse , behind it, waiting to jump out the moment you close your current window. They're often deceptive, masquerading as error messages or dialog boxes, and they'll do absolutely anything to get you to click inside them.

If this kind of thing drives you crazy, choose Safari Block Pop-Up Windows, so that a checkmark appears next to the command. Its a war out therebut at least you now have some ammunition .

Note: Unbidden pop-up windows are sometimes legitimate (and not ads)notices of new banking features, warnings that the instructions to a site have changed, and so on. Safari can't tell these from ads and stifles them too. So if a site you trust says "Please turn off pop-up blockers and reload this page," you know you're probably missing out on a useful pop-up message.Also, while Safari's pop-up blocker is better than Internet Explorer's on Windows, it's not perfect. You may, from time to time, encounter a pop-up that manages to sneak by.

11.1.4.3. Impersonating Internet Explorer

Sooner or later, you'll run into a Web site that doesn't work in Safari. Why? When you arrive at a Web site, your browser identifies itself. That's because many commercial Web sites display a different version of the page depending on which browser your using, thanks to differences in the way various browsers interpret Web layouts.

But because you're still using the relatively unknown Safari browser, your otherwise beloved Web site tells you, "Sorry, browser not supported."

In such times of trouble, you can make Safari impersonate any other browser, which is usually good enough to fool the picky Web site into letting you in.

The key to this trick is Safari's Debug menu, which is generally hidden. You can make it appear using TinkerTool, a free program available on this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com. TinkerTool offers a simple checkbox that turns on the Debug menu.

When you next open Safari, the new Debug menu appears right next to Help. Most of its commands are designed to appeal to programmers, but the submenu you wantUser Agentis useful to everyone. It lets Safari masquerade as a different browser. Choose User Agent Mac MSIE 5.22, for example, to assume the identity of Internet Explorer for Macintosh.

Note: Unfortunately, there's a dark side to using this User Agent trick. If enough people pretend that they're using Internet Explorer, whoever created the Web site will never know how many people are actually using Safariand will never get around to fixing the Web site.Whenever you encounter a Web site that gives Safari trouble, therefore, you should also (a) take a moment to notify Apple of the problem and (b) notify the Webmaster of the site you're trying to visit that you want Safari compatibility.

11.1.4.4. Where am I?

As you dig your way down into a Web site, you may wish you could have left a trail of bread crumbs to mark your path . Ah, but Safari has already thought of that. See Figure 11-4.

Figure 11-4. If you -click the title bar (centered just above the Address bar), Safari displays the "ladder" of pages you descended to arrive at the current one.

11.1.4.5. Faster browsing without graphics

Graphics are part of what makes the Web so compelling. But they're also responsible for making Web pages take so long to arrive on the screen. Without them, Web pages appear almost instantlyand you still get fully laid-out Web pages with all their text and headlines.

To turn off graphics, choose Safari Preferences and click the Appearance tab. Turn off "Display images when the page opens," and close the Preferences window. Now try visiting a few Web pages and enjoy the substantial speed boost. (And if you wind up on a Web page thats nothing without its pictures, return to Safari Preferences, turn the same checkbox on, and reload the page.)

11.1.4.6. Viewing Web pages offline

You don't have to be connected to the Net to read a favorite Web page. You can save a certain Web page on your hard drive so that you can peruse it lateron your laptop during your commute, for examplejust by choosing File Save As.

If you want to save the entire page, along with all its images, movies, and so on, be sure to choose Web Archive from the Format pop-up menu. If you're tight on hard drive space, though, choose Page Source instead; you'll still get all the text of the page, but without the fatty multimedia.

Tip: Whenever you buy something online, don't waste paper by printing out the final "This is your receipt" page. Instead, choose File Print and, from the PDF pop-up menu, choose Save PDF to Web Receipts folder. Safari saves it as a PDF file into a tidy folder (in your Home Documents folder) called Web Receipts.

Mail Contents of This Page (-I) to open a new Mail message with a copy of the actual Web page in the body. Address the message and click Send.

Bear in mind that your recipient might not be so thrilled about this method. HTML messages (like the ones you send with this technique) are bandwidth-clogging monstrosities, so the message can take a while to download on the other endespecially over a dial-up connection. And even once it's downloaded, there's no guarantee your recipient will even be able to see the message, since some email programs can't display HTML messages at all.

The send-a-link method . To send just a link to the page you're looking at, choose File Mail Link to This Page (Shift- -I). Then proceed as usual, addressing the message and clicking Send.

Links take only a split second for your recipient to download, and they're guaranteed to display properly in all email programs. All your recipients have to do is click the link to open it in their Web browsers.

11.1.4.8. Designate your home page

The first Web site you encounter when Safari connects to the Internet is an Apple Web site. This site is your home page . You'll probably find Web browsing more fun, though, if you specify your favorite Web page as your home page.

To do that, navigate your way to the page you prefer. Google, or its news page http://news.google.com, is a good starting place. So is your favorite newspaper home page, or www.macsurfer.com, a summary of the day's Mac news coverage from around the world, or maybe www.dilbert.com, for today's Dilbert cartoon.

Then choose Safari Preferences, click the General tab, and click Set to Current Page (or type the address into the box).

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Erasing Your TracksAnd Private Browsing

So about this History menu: I'd just as soon my wife/husband/boss/parent/kid not know what Web sites I've been visiting. Must that History menu display my movements quite so proudly?

Some people find it creepy that Safari maintains a complete list of every Web site they've seen recently, right there in plain view of any family member or co-worker who wanders by.

To delete just one particularly incriminating History listing, click the book icon at the left end of the Bookmarks bar; in the resulting Bookmarks organizer window, click History. Expand the relevant date triangle, highlight the offending address, and then press the Delete key. Click the book icon again to return to normal browsing. You've just rewritten History!

Or, to erase the entire History menu, choose History Clear History.

Of course, the History menu isn't the only place where you've left footprints. If you choose Safari Reset Safari instead, you also erase all other shreds of your activities: any cookies (Web-page preference files) you've accumulated , your list of past downloads, the cache files (tiny Web graphics files on your hard drive that the browser stores to save time when you return to the page they came from), and so on. This is good information to know; after all, you might be nominated to the Supreme Court some day.

That's a lot of work just to cover my tracks; it also erases a lot of valuable cookies, passwords, and History things I'd like to keep. Is all of that really necessary just so I can duck in for an occasional look at the Hot Bods of the Midwestern Tax Preparer's Association home page ?

No, it's not. A new Tiger feature called private browsing lets you surf without adding any pages to your History list, any searches to your Google search box, any passwords to Safari's saved password list, or any cookies to your virtual cookie jar. (Apple says that this feature is intended for use at public Macs, where you don't want to reveal anything personal to subsequent visitors . Likely story.)

The trick is to choose Safari Private Browsing before you start browsing. Once you OK the explanation box, Safari records nothing while you surf.

When you're ready to browse " publicly " again, choose Safari Private Browsing so the checkmark goes away. Safari once again begins taking note of the pages you visitbut it never remembers the earlier ones. In other words, what happens in Private Browsing stays in Private Browsing.

If you can't decide on a home page, or your mood changes from day to day, use the "New window open with" pop-up menu to choose Empty Page. Some people prefer this setup, which makes Safari load very quickly when you first open it. Once the empty window opens, then you can tell the browser where you want to go today.

Tip: In the Safari Preferences General tab, you can also choose Bookmarks. Then, whenever you open a new window or launch Safari, you can choose exactly which page you want to open by choosing from a list of your bookmarks.

hold on the Back or Forward button.) These are great features if you can't recall the URL for a Web site that you remember having visited recently.

11.1.5. Tabbed Browsing

Beloved by hard- core surfers the world over (and famously lacking in Internet Explorer) is tabbed browsing , a way to keep a bunch of Web pages open simultaneously in a single, neat window. Figure 11-5 illustrates the concept.

Figure 11-5. Top: First, turn on tabbed browsing in Safari's Preferences Tabs pane. (For best results, also turn on "Select new tabs as they are created.")

Bottom: Now, when you -click a link, or type an address and press -Return or -Enter, you open a new tab, not a new window as you ordinarily would. You can now pop from one open page to another by clicking the tabs just under your Bookmarks bar, or close one by clicking its X button (or pressing -W).

Turning on tabbed browsing unlocks a whole raft of Safari shortcuts and tricks, which are just the sort of thing power surfers gulp down like Gatorade:

If there's a certain set of Web sites you like to visit daily, put the bookmarks into one folder, using the Bookmarks organizer window (Figure 11-5). You can then load all of them at once into a single tabbed window, simply by selecting the resulting "folder" in the Bookmarks menuor the Bookmarks barand choosing Open in Tabs from the submenu.

The beauty of this arrangement is that you can start reading the first Web page while all of the others load into their own tabs in the background.

Tip: Click the book icon at the left end of the Bookmarks bar. In the Bookmarks organizer, click the Bookmarks Bar icon in the left-side list. Now you can see an Auto-Click checkbox for each listed folder.If you turn on this checkmark, you can then open all the bookmarks in that folder into tabs, all at once, merely by clicking the folder's name in the Bookmarks bar. (If you want to summon the normal menu from the folder, just hold the mouse button down.)

If you Option-click a tab's X (close) button, you close all tabs except the one you clicked. The same thing happens if you hold down Option and choose File Close Other Tabs, or if you press Option- -W.

If you Option- -click a link, it opens in a separate window, rather than a new tab. (When tabbed browsing is turned off , you just -click a link to open a new window.)

Tip: Deep in the guts of Safari is a neatly formatted page that lists nearly every keyboard shortcut in the program. If you've installed the Debug menu as described on Section 11.1.4.4, just choose Debug Keyboard and Mouse shortcuts. Otherwise, Control-click the Safari icon in the Finder, choose Show Package Contents from the shortcut menu, and open Contents Resources Shortcuts.html.