Quickly Check a Web Site Without Using Your Browser

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you several ways that you can check a webpage without using your web browser. 

The idea here is that you want to check a website without opening up your web browser. I can go to Safari here and, for instance, check this website to tell me how long wait times are at Security at my local airport. It's all right here and it's good to have this page Bookmarked. But every time I visit it, it adds to my history. Maybe I've got some other things going on in the web browser. I don't want to open up a new tab. There are a lot of different reasons. You may just want to check this information and not actually use the browser. 

So the first way I'm going to show you actually starts with the web browser. You're going to in Safari and you're going to go to the page and then you're going to use File and then you're going to Add To Dock. Now this menu item doesn't explain what it is really doing. What it is really doing is creating a web App. A Web App that you can use to access this page and, in fact, an entire website if you want as a separate application from your web browser. So let's use it here. It's going to prompt us for a name in the URL. The URL, of course, is the page here. We want to keep that. But we'll simplify this and call this, say, TSA Wait. I will then add and what this will do is add this to the Dock. Let's Quit Safari now and look in the Dock here. We can see there is an icon for that website. It's taken from the website itself. It's just called TSA Wait and if we click on it to run it from the Dock it opens up a window that looks just like a web browser and loads up that page. We can check the information. Note that the App is actually named after the website. It's actually kind of running Safari in the background. But it's just doing it like this webpage is its own app. The great thing is it doesn't add to your Safari history. It doesn't interrupt anything that is going on in Safari or open up a new tab or anything like that. 

Now it is probably not convenient to have this in the Dock. I mean maybe if you just have one and it's really important. But if you have several then this is just going to clutter up your Dock. So, Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and choose Options and then Remove From Dock. Now it is not in the Dock. But guess what? You can still run it using Spotlight. So, Command Space for Spotlight and then type in the name or just start typing it in and you'll see the app is still there. You can run it here. It's very convenient. So what is actually happening is if you go in the Finder and you go Home in your User Account Home Folder, there's an Applications Folder. That's where this particular app is going to be placed. It's right there. You can see it's a tiny little file. If you want to get rid of it this is where you Delete it from. You just drag this to the Trash. 

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Now let's look at another way to do it. This time using the Shortcuts App. So I run Shortcuts here and I'm going to create a new shortcut. The first Action I want is URL. I'm just going to put that in and this allows me to enter in a URL. I'm going to paste in a website that gives the water levels in streams near me. So say if I like fishing or rafting or something where I rely on the streams nearby I may want to go visit this site pretty often. So I've got this here. Now I want a way to view it. So I'm going to use the Show Web View Action here. This is just going to put up a web view without opening up Safari. So when I run this, this is what it will look like. It is going to ask for permission the first time. It's going to bring it up in a Window here. So I'm going to call this Water Levels and I can set the icon here if I want. Let's go and do a blue. Let's search for water. Like that. Now to run this I don't really have to do much of anything.

If I run this I go to Details here. You should see Show in Spotlight. This is new in macOS Tahoe and allows me to run Water Levels very easily from Spotlight. So I'll Quit Shortcuts now and use Spotlight and look for Water Levels. It is going to bring it all up in this little window here. I can scroll through it and I can press Return. There's actually a button that's a little out sight for me to Dismiss this web view. It didn't even really launch any kind of app. 

Now if I wanted to back in Shortcuts I could have also gone to File, Add To Dock and it will add this to the Dock. So I can see it right here. I can run it from there. But I can also go to my Applications Folder in my Home Folder and I would see it there as well. For either one of these two I can also Drag & Drop an alias somewhere. So I can hold Command and Option and now this is going to create an alias to Water Levels or I could have done it for TSA Wait. I can put this icon anywhere I want. But another cool thing you can do with Shortcuts is you can also add them to Control Center starting with macOS Tahoe. I'm going to bring up Control Center and click Edit Controls here at the bottom. What I can do here is I can add Run Shortcuts. But first I'm going to create another Control Center. In this Control Center I'm going to add Run Shortcut here. I'm going to select the shortcut and I'll choose that Water Level shortcut right there. Done. If I wanted to I could Control Click on it and change it to small size, like that. I can fill this Control Center with other similar shortcuts. So now when I'm going to run it  I can click on this Control Center, click here, and it is going to run it. Bring up that webpage in a window that I could easily refer to and Dismiss. Note that when I was here in the Edit Mode for Control Center, I go down to Shortcuts and I go to Add it, notice if I click the Plus button here I could also choose, instead of adding it to Control Center, to Add an icon to the Menu Bar for even faster access though it has the same problem as the Dock in that if you add too many it is going to clutter things up. 

Now let's look at one more way. Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to create a web loc shortcut to a web page. We're going to go to this page here which gives me the status of various Apple Sites and I click and I drag the URL here. If you click first in here  then you're editing text, then you're dragging text. You don't want to drag the text. What you want to do is you want to not have it selected at all and a quick Click and Drag. so you're dragging the URL. It's even got that little icon there to the left. Drag that to the Finder. It could be a Folder, it could be the Desktop. Put it here. You'll get this Web Loc or Web Location File. What this does is you can use this as kind of a bookmark. You can put this anywhere you want. In a folder with other documents, for instance. If you double click on it, it launches Safari and goes to that webpage. Kind of like using a Bookmark. But here's the thing. You don't have to actually use Safari to view it. You can select this and then press the Spacebar which gives you Quick Look and for a Web Loc File it will load up the page. So I press Space and now in Quick Look I get a little view here. It turns out this page needs to be a little bit wider to display all the dots, but for different pages it may just be fine at the original width. So you get a Quick Look at the webpage without having to leave anything. You're just viewing it in Quick Look. 

Here's another example. Here's the National Weather Service page from my location. If I click and drag this out to create a web loc, like that, I can Quit Safari and then select it, Press Space, and it loads it up as a Quick Look window. 

So these are all handy techniques for quickly viewing the contents of a webpage without needing to use your web browser. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.