MacMost Now 570: Safari Extensions That Change Your Browsing Experience

You can change how pages are loaded in Safari, and alter them after they load with Safari extensions. You can prevent images and Flash content from loading when you are on a slow connection, but click to view that content on demand. You can also mark up a web page and send it via email.

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

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with Macmost now. Today's episode, let's look at some Safari extensions that changed the browsing experience. So, the first one I want to look at is called ImageBlocking, you can see it here, and I have it enabled. Now, if we create a new Safari window, and we go to a site, let's say, let's go to a new site. We can see a lot of images on it. And you can imagine what would happen if we were on a mobile connection, and, maybe, uh, didn't have enough speed, and how long it would take to load this page. If we just wanted to get the basics, without images, we would click the button that is up here that would turn off images *light*, now if I reload this page, you can see what happens is - the page loads, and all the images are missing. So it saves a lot of download time, and you can quickly and easily press the button and all the images appear again. Of course, they appear instantly here, because they've been cached. But, if you are over mobile connection, you'll see them load in, slowly, one at a time. So, similar to that is one called Clicked Flash, Which does kind of the same thing but for flash movies. So, for instance, here I am, at my game site, and I go to play Goldstrike, and you can see that instead of the game appearing here, it's just a box and has the word, very lightly-written, "Flash". All you need to do to activate it is click on it, and once I click on it, it will load in the flash movie, so I can still use Flash on the website, but it just hesitates loading it, until I want it. Now, as a Flash Game Developer, I have to hesitate to recommend anything that blocks Flash. But this doesn't really block it, it just prevents it from loading until you click on the item. So it makes it very easy to browse the internet and view flash that you want to view, but also, while you're on a slower connection, it won't automatically go to load the larger flash files. So, Coda Notes is a very unusual extension. Here's what it lets you do: it lets you mark up a page - let's say you're on a webpage, and you want to send it to somebody, but you don't want to send it without explaining why. So, you click on its button, and now it allows you to draw on the screen, even add sticky notes. And, then you can, I can even edit the text directly on the page. What it's doing is it's creating a screenshot, really, of that website. When you're done with it, you can send notes, and you can email that screen capture to yourself or somebody else, with the notes in place. I can definitely see that being very useful for designers to get notes back on their design, or to get things pointed out to them from other websites so they might want to incorporate in their design. So you can find all these Safari extensions at the Safari Extensions Gallery using the Safari Menu, and, uh, you can find other useful ones in there, as well. Til next time, this is Gary, with MacMost, now.

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 570: Safari Extensions That Change Your Browsing Experience”

Zalman

13 years ago

Thank you Gary for these tips! Very helpful!
Saw these extensions but didn't really realize how well they work, especially Coda.

Nancy N

Hi. I just tried to get the coda notes but it isn't listed in the Safari Gallery.

Jason

I found it through a google search at http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/07/coda-notes-for-safari-now-available/

lubo

Great video,Gary.How about some Firefox tips?Cheers

Gary Rosenzweig

I thought I'd focus on Safari, being the default Mac browser. If I went into Firefox and Chrome, there'd be a lot of videos to do...

Rob Taylor

Downloaded extension but none of the buttons will work how do I fix this!

Which extension? Did you try restarting Safari? Maybe uninstall and re-install. Or, contact the developer for support.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 570: Safari Extensions That Change Your Browsing Experience

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 570: Safari Extensions That Change Your Browsing Experience”

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