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Impressive Safari Plugins

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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.

Categories: Internet, Popular
Tags: Application, Leopard, Safari, WebBrowser

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35 Comments

Steve 

Personally I prefer Camino. Its another browser that uses the gecko rendering engine like Firefox except it's Mac native and blazingly quick.

You can try it here:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/

There are quite a few addons available for Camino too:
http://www.pimpmycamino.com/

Evan 

There are a few plugins that aren't available for anything else and really keep me tied to firefox. I do still use Safari for some things, though.

David Chin 

One thing missing on the Safari is the Google Browser Sync Firefox extension which I use to keep my Firefox settings synchronized among multiple computers.

Matthias 

Thanks for the information - great tools.

Jens 

"Safari has been optimized for Mac and because of that, it becomes the best browser for running on Mac."
err, what?
Internet explorer was designed for Windows, so its the best browser on windows?
WTF

Hal 

A hardy agreement with Jens. I'd like to use Safari, but in my mind it is not the best browser for any OS. I don't see anything here that comes close to the gazillion plugins for Firefox. And although I like Mac more than any other OS, I still have to work and research. Using Safari is annoying.

Ken Burns Effect 

Saft is addictive!

Glims is the free alternative.

piggybox 

I think you should mention the adblock plugin, very nice and open source
http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net

Though I'm using firefox3 now. I find ff3 pretty fast on my MBP.

sn00ze 

checkout Glims.
I actually think its better than Saft and its freeware!

http://www.machangout.com/

Felix, the Upright Bassist 

Hi,

I can only second sn00ze about Glims: it is better than Saft, though lacking a few features. Saft made my Safari (both 3 and developer 4) instable, while with Glims it remains solid.

Regards, Felix

John 

Is there a way to make it like Firefox where you don't have to click the >> to show the other tabs you have opened?

Brad 

Glims is way better than inquisitor.

Fotograf Lüneburg 

Safari is the best browser for my mac - indeed!

Robin Buckley 

Amazing list! Thanks!

Roy 

check out cooliris, amazing UI

Internetagentur München 

The plugins shown on this site are excellent. Thanks for the listing of the resources!

Jane 

Great list of wonderful Safari plug ins!
Sadly we cannot get SIMBL to work, we have it installed in our Application Support , but you cannot drag the plugins into it?
Perhaps Im not doing it properly, as Im not great at this stuff.
Ive 2 screen shots showing my problem and the error message, so if anyone has a solution to this, please email me at jcarter(at)capecod.net.
Thank you very much, as I really would love to use two of these plugins.
My classmates would like to know how to do this too, so if we can figure out my problem, and have a solution, I can give it to them too.
Jane

titanic 

Aww man! Everything here should be free. A great list here but sadly some of them are not free.

Steven 

Those plug ins flat out suck.
Safari Stand is semi decent aside from the fact that half the features don't even work. These plug ins, much like Safari Stand, are half assed and weak.
A+ for your efforts though. You didn't have a whole lot to work with.
Give in, ditch this disgrace of a "Browser" and just get Firefox or Opera, at least THEY give you options.........................Good options.
This post will be deleted by the administrator before anybody reads it. Too much negativity. I'd much rather be positive here but come on, have you tried Safari? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Scott 

Plug ins and addons should be free. Why should I have to pay for a feature that does nothing more than attempt to bring this horse shit browser up to par? Do the words "BLOW" and "ME" in the particular order mean anything to you?
Bitch please.

John 

Here are some really great, stable and oft overlooked SIMBL plugins, please take a look see:

http://en.cyan-stivy.net/safari-plugins/

* SafariGestures brings some basic but really necessary mouse/wheel gestures to Safari, something even xGestures cannot quite do!
* SafariTabConfig finally allows you to customize the behavior of tabs to your liking, e.g. clicking a link in the bookmarks bar or menu will open it in a new tab! Finally!!

Kudos to the developer canberland! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Lava 

I must confirm that like another user already said: I'm missing on Safari is Google Browser Sync Firefox extension which I use to keep my Firefox settings synchronized among multiple computers. This would be a great having such an oppurtunity at the next update.

Teeth Whitening Products 

Thanks for the post.

tuning shop 

The plugins looking great. At the moment i search for an alternative of firefox. Safari is not bad but i muss much plugins where i have in firefox. but this one here are not bad for the beginning.

Lowrance HDS 5m 

The plugins looks great, thank you for the post.

Resveratrol 

Safari is not bad but i muss much plugins where i have in firefox. but this one here are not bad for the beginning.

Shop Support 

Glims is way better than inquisitor.

robert 

Thanks for the information - great tools. Best regards

laser whitening 

Thanks for the list, I got a bit annoyed when itunes tried to install safari on my machine, but I think now I will check it out. SafariStand looks awesome.

Kreditvergleich 

Good list of wonderful Safari plug ins! Thanks for the listing!

Niels 

I use TabExposé since more than one year almost daily.

regulated gambling casinos 

Web site design is a plays important role in e-commerce and can substantially increase your sales. The web page design gives the first impression to the visitor about and your website, so it is very important that it gives a positive image is created in the mind of the visitor.

Rosamunda 

Thanks for the information !

travail sur internet 

I would like to Thanks for the informative post. I really appreciate it. I hope that I can get more benefit from this safari tool.

copywriting 

Safari might not be as popular as Firefox, but it has some great plug-ins that extend its functionality. Read this blog post by Don Reisinger on The Download Blog.

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