MacMost Now 430: Safari 5.0.1 and Extensions

Apple updated Safari 5 today with full support for Extensions. You can now browse a gallery of extensions that will add toolbars, buttons and other features to the Safari web browser. Learn how to add, remove and set preferences for them.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On todays episode let's look at the new Safari extensions feature.
This episode of MacMost Now is brought to you by Gazelle. Gazelle is the easiest and fastest way for you to sell and recycle your gadgets. For instance I just went to the site and looked up the value of my iPhone 3gs and it came up to more than $150. So you may want to check out the value of your gadgets. Every item gets an offer and you get paid to be environmentally responsible. And, use the promo code MacMost2 and you get a 5% bonus.
So, today Apple released Safari version 5.0.1. The major change is full support now for the new Safari extensions. Let's take a look.
So, if you haven't already of course you need to go to the software update and make sure you download the new version of Safari 5.0.1. Once you do, one of the changes you'll notice is a Safari extensions gallery menu choice under the Safari menu. Select that and it will bring up this list of Safari extensions. There's a whole bunch of different ones. A few recommended at the top and the list goes on and on of different ones that you can choose. 
So let's start by choosing, say Twitter for Safari and most of these have an 'install now' button. And, you see, you click on it and it actually installs just like that. Immediately installs, there's nothing else you need to do.
So, what does this Twitter toolbar do? Well, of course you've got a search field here to directly search Twitter, you've also got a 'related tweets' button. You've got a quick link to show what accounts are associated with this website. So for instance the MacMost and my own rosenz account is associated there. And you have overall trending topics on Twitter and a 'tweet' button. These work in an interesting way for instance if I click here I can see a list of the accounts. I can also click on 'related tweets' and it's more interesting if you go to a piece of content. So for instance let's go to this automated tutorial here, and I'll click on 'related tweets' and it gives me the side bar here and it shows me several tweets about Automator; including three that are about this article in particular.
You can also click on the 'tweet' button. It'll jump to Twitter and immediately put in the title of the page that you were looking at and a shortened URL for it. So, it's very quick and easy to tweet about a page that you've seen.
Here's another one that I found useful, there's a Gmail counter toolbar. Install that and it immediately puts this toolbar up here and it will tell you how many messages you have in your Gmail inbox and what the subjects of these messages are as well.
So now when I go to a YouTube page and I'm viewing a video, I can click on that button there and you see it dims out everything else on the page except the video content. So it only seems to work on YouTube, it doesn't work for instance at MacMost which has YouTube videos embedded, but its a nice little extension to have. You can see here that it adds a button here at the top and it also effects how you see a web page. 
Here's another interesting one that adds a button, this is called 'duplicate tab' button. And of course you've had the ability now to create new tabs very easily but what this button does now is it duplicates the current tab so it opens up the current window in a new tab.
Now there's much more to new extensions than just that, if you go to Safari and preferences there's a new tab here called 'Extensions' and you can see a list here of all the extensions that you have installed. You can easily uninstall any one of these by clicking on the 'uninstall' button and you can also disable the extension as well and these changes take effect immediately. 
Now, for some of these there are a lot of different preferences. For instance how exactly the Gmail counter works. 
So, once you've updated to Safari 5.0.1, you want to check out the Safari extensions page and see if there's anything you find useful. There's also a lot of information there about how to create your own extensions. Any programmer or developer can do it so you may want to think about creating one for your website or for your area of expertise. 
Hope you found this useful. 'Til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 430: Safari 5.0.1 and Extensions”

Rob Ippolito

14 years ago

You rock Gary. If I still lived in Denver, I'd have to insist we become best friends and talk about Apple products all the time. :)

Thank you for your hard work, it's extremely valuable.

Daniel

Thanks for this review, I had no idea what came with this last update.

ALAN

Hi Gary,

Keep up the great work you do to educate we MAC users. I'd be lost without your column and videos.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 430: Safari 5.0.1 and Extensions

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 430: Safari 5.0.1 and Extensions”

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