MacMost: Web

There are three main ways to block websites on your Mac. Youc an use Screen Time, but that only works for Safari. Editing the hosts file will work across browsers and accounts. A better way may be to use a function of your Wi-Fi equipment.

You can use ChatGPT to take the text of a long article and summarize it for you. You can even more it easier to digest by asking for bullet points. You can do the same for any video using the transcript.

While watching YouTube videos on your Mac (or PC) you can use a variety of onscreen and keyboard controls. Learn how to navigate by chapter, speed up or slow down playback, use picture-in-picture, view transcripts and more.

Here are some techniques you can use when searching the web with Google. You can specify one or more sites to search, or exclude sites, terms and more. You can add date ranges, use boolean operators and even a special advanced search page.

There are many commands and modifiers you can add to your Google searches to get better results. You can narrow searches to a single site, look for exact phrases, search using an image instead of text and much more. There are also special Google pages and sites that Google offers with tons of useful information.

If you need to capture an entire web page as an image, it can be difficult to do so because macOS screenshots don't allow you to capture all of the contents of a scolling window. However, you can use many different techniques to get the entire contents of a web page. Safari has a hidden feature to do this, but sometimes it won't work on certain pages. You can buy third-party pro capture software that will let you take perfect screen grabs of entire pages. You can also use a feature of the free Firefox browser, though it sometimes doesn't work perfectly.

If you are having trouble accessing a website, it could be because of a problem with your DNS cache. To reset your DNS cache on your Mac, you need to enter a command using the Terminal. In most cases, this will work, especially if you are using macOS Sierra, High Sierra, or Mojave. Earlier versions of OS X may need some additional commands as well.

When you play a YouTube video on your Mac in a web browser you can use keyboard shortcuts to jump around in the video, control volume, go to full screen and turn on or off captions. Make sure you have the YouTube video selected as the keyboard focus by clicking on it before you try to use shortcuts.

When you are searching the web or Apple's discussion forums for technical information, it is important to only look for recent posts as older posts will contain information that doesn't apply to the current devices and operating systems. You can limit your searches in Google to the last month or year. You can also limit your searches in Apple's user discussion forums.

Instead of saving links in bookmarks or the Reading List, you can also save them to a Reminders list and the Notes app. This can be useful during research or when you want to share a link of links with students or co-workers.

While Safari is the default browser and the one most people use on their Macs, you can also easily use Chrome or Firefox. The advantage to those is being able to use the same browser on non-Apple devices, and for Chrome being able to use Google's cloud systems instead of Apple's. Both are free and easy to install, and may come in handy in situations where Safari doesn't work.

Even if you have been searching online for years, you may not know some basics about how to search quickly and efficiently. Often people try formulating a series of keywords for a search, when all that is needed is to type a question. On the Mac in Safari, you can choose your search engine, and sometimes skip the search results page with the suggestions provided. You can also search a specific site if you already know which site contains the information you seek.

You can search for text on the current web page using your iPhone or iPad just as you can with a desktop computer. The trick is knowing how to start a search. You start by using the address field, which feels like you are about to leave the page. But if you look at the search suggestions, you'll find a On This Page item at the very bottom that allows you to find the text on the current page instead. You can then use a new search field at the bottom and arrows to find more matches.

You can use the address bar in Safari to search with your default search engine. In Safari Preferences you can set this to Google, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But you can browser to any search engine you want and use it outside of the address bar. You can also set your default search engine to almost any other site using Safari extensions.

The ability to move video into a picture-in-picture overlay with macOS Sierra is a great new feature. However, it doesn't appear to work with YouTube videos. You can get YouTube videos to do this, however, if you know how.

With a simple change to how you type your search terms, you can target one website instead of the entire Internet. This is handy when you know the result you want is in a specific place.

With Safari in El Capitan you can subscribe to news feeds in the left sidebar and see an aggregated list of items that update automatically. You can also include Twitter and LinkedIn feeds. This allows you to see the news from your favorite sources all in one place without needing to go to individual web sites.

You can change your default search engine in Safari to Google, Bing, Yahoo! or DuckDuckGo. The latter offers no-track searching and a variety of other features. You can use "bangs" like !apple to quickly search inside popular websites. You can also set it as your default on iOS.

Many web sites feature multiple language options. If a site is not in the language you speak, try looking for a way to switch to another language inside the site. For sites that do not offer a translation in your language, you can use either Google or Bing to translate bits of text or entire web pages. You can simply copy and paste text or a URL in Safari, or use Chrome's special feature to do this quickly. The translation isn't always perfect, but it works well when no other option is available.

When sharing links with friends, long URLs can cause issues as they take up a lot of space in tweets and text messages, and can wrap across multiple lines in emails. You can use one of the many free URL shortening services to turn any URL into a very short one. These will redirect to the original page. The danger in using URL shorteners is that you can't be certain where a link leads. But browser extensions and the URL shortening services can help with that.