MacMost Now 573: Useful Safari Extensions

Take a look at four free Safari extensions that you may find useful. You can add a customizable toolbar, view multiple pages in one long page instead, print specific areas of a page and see your incoming Gmail at the top of the Safari window.

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

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's look at some useful Safari extensions. So, of course you can find Safari extensions by going to extensions.apple.com or just using the Safari Extensions Gallery menu item in the Safari menu. Once you have some installed, you go to preferences, and then to extensions, and you can see a list of the ones you have installed. Let's look at these four. So, you think a very basic extension would be one that puts a toolbar at the top of Safari. Let's turn the Widgets extension on and you can see it puts a toolbar up here, and we have a customize anything. We can do that here inside of the preferences, we can have it display weather and change the location. We can have it display an RSS ticker if we want, a clock, and several clocks in fact, and the date, and a few other things. And, once we've got that, click done up here, and now we get this toolbar here with a bunch of useful stuff. So, since you can put any RSS feed you want here in the top, it could be very useful indeed for just having some basic information that you have to access all the time, always at the top of your Safari window. So, here's one called AutoPagerize. So, you turn this one on, and what'll happen is, then things like search results that have several pages in them will appear as a single page. Let's do as an example, search for MacMost, and we get a list of things here. And, normally at the bottom, it would have a list of pages, and you go to page two, but you can see here I've automatically got page two there. Matter of fact, as I scroll down, you can see it adds page three, page four, et cetera. It keeps adding them to this one long page here so I don't have to keep jumping from page to page. So, the Print Plus extension is really useful when you only want to print a certain section of a page, not the entire thing. Very useful when you get like a receipt, and the receipt has tons of ads and menus and things, and you just want to print that important bit of information. So, for instance, it puts this button up here, and now I can highlight places that I want to print. And, I can actually do many of them, so I'm gonna click this one, this one here, and just have this article printed, rather than everything on the rest of the page. So, I press the print button, and then what comes out here, you can see in the preview is just the sections that I've selected. So, the next one that I want to show you is the Gmail Counter, and it puts this toolbar here at the top. And you have a lot of customizable things. You can even use it with Google domains, as well as a regular Gmail account. And, what it'll do is, it'll just check for incoming mail and put it here in the toolbar, and you can see the subject there. And you can move back and forth between the messages just to see their titles. You can even click on a button to compose a quick message, and of course just clicking on the message title itself will take you right to Gmail, so if you use Gmail a lot, this could be very handy. And if you do use Gmail a lot, you should check in the mail category inside of Extensions at Apple.com. You can see there are a lot of Gmail specific extensions. So, there's just a quick look at some Safari extensions that I find useful. There are a lot of other ones there in the Gallery and more added all the time. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 10 Responses to “MacMost Now 573: Useful Safari Extensions”

Tom

13 years ago

The extensions may be useful, but it sure is hard to locate them to install when there is no search field on the Safari extensions page. Is there any easier way to locate the Widgets extension, for example?

Gary Rosenzweig

It is frustrating, isn't it? I find the fastest way is to just do a Google search for them. You usually come up with the developer's home page pretty quickly.

Ivor

I found this comment in Apple Support Community:Mar 21, 2011 1:01 AM
"I installed this extension called "Print Plus" from apple.com Safari extension page and noticed that when I was browsing amazon.com, I started getting popups for something called "Best Price" - which showed a balloon window with a link to another site." Gary did you have the same experience, the comment goes on to advise to avoid extensions by "slice factory". Thoughts?

They mention this right on their site:
http://www.slicefactory.com/browser-extensions/print-plus/278
It says:
Print Plus includes The Best Price, our revolutionary price comparison engine. It can be deactivated should you really not want to get notified of better offers while browsing a shopping site
So I guess just turn that part of the extension off.

Rick

I installed the widget extension for the weather and time.. Now with Lion, when I do the full-screen mode it disappears. How do I keep the extension with the full-screen mode. Thank you.

So, different extension than the default one? Perhaps it simple isn't compatible with Lion.

It is the widget extension you showed in the video. When I put Safari on full screen it disappears.

Ah, I see. The developer hopefully will update it soon to work with Full Screen Mode.

Mr Anthony Cotton

Yes most useful. I am going for the Auto Pager. Thanks gary

baryon

Google Toolbar for safari is very useful.

http://www.bbshare.com/products/gtoolbar-for-safari/

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 573: Useful Safari Extensions

Comments: 10 Responses to “MacMost Now 573: Useful Safari Extensions”

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