Safari has been optimized for Mac and because of that, it becomes the best browser for running on Mac. However, with Firefox empowered by plenty of plugins, it's confusing to determine which one to choose: Safari or Firefox?

After searching around the web, I found several impressive plugins for Safari, such as del.icio.us bookmark, StumbleUpon toolbar, Tab Exposé, Greasemonkey script customizer, and many others. Interested?

PimpMySafari

PimpMySafari is a site that collects lots of plugins for Safari. It's worth you time to check for some outstanding plugins.

SIMBL

For some add-ons, you will need to download SIMBL which stands for Smart InputManager Bundle Loader. Because some of the add-ons come in the form of a bundle that can only work with SIMBL.

Once you've installed SIMBL, you need to drop some bundles into the Plugins folder. (/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins) SIMBL scans this folder for bundles each time an application launches. It will check both the Local and User domain for this special folder.

This means that it will check ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins before looking in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins. Additionally, SIMBL detects if you have two conflicting plugins and prevents potentially undesirable behavior by only loading one.

Above: How to use SIMBL, taken from SIMBL website.

Now we've had the preparations done. Now let's see what can you add to your Safari.

SafariStand

Have you ever tried Shiira? Using Shiira, you can get a thumbnail view of all your opened tabs. Like Shiira's feature, SafariStand also gives you thumbnail view of all your opened tabs but it's on the left/right side of the browser (Shiira's bar on the bottom).

You can hide/unhide the sidebar by using a toolbar item called Stand Sidebar.

As shown in the picture, I've installed other add-ons besides SafariStand, which I will mention one by one in this article.

Inquisitor

Inquisitor, also called Spotlight for the web, adopting Spotlight idea for the web with its black theme makes it really cool. And since it's free, it's worth a try.

TabExposé

It will be difficult to see what're inside all the tabs if you have opened many tabs. Fortunately, TabExposé brings Exposé feature to our Safari web browser. As its name, the toolbar button to toggle Exposé for your Safari is called TabExposé.

For trial, you can only attempt 10 times of TabExposé for each session.

GreaseKit

Remember what Firefox users use to render displayed page with script? It's called Greasemonkey. Luckily, there are also similar feature for Safari called GreaseKit.

Safari-Stretch

In Mac, zoom only extends window until the required space is fulfilled. But with Safari-Stretch, you can have your Safari browser stretched to its maximum.

SafariSource

With SafariSource installed, you can now customize your syntax coloring while observing html code of particular site.

Safari Tidy

Safari Tidy helps you validate the webpages you browsed around. It shows up list of the errors and warnings when you open View Source window.

DeliciousSafari and Stumbi

Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon users now can have Safari plugins that integrate those sites with Safari.

And for your information, stumbi is a shareware. The trial version will end after 100 stumbles used up.