Four quick Safari tips

30 January 2013, 01:00

Here are four quick tips for Safari:

1. Editable history: If you’ve been visiting sites to buy birthday presents then you might be used to clearing your browser history to scrub the evidence. However, browser history can be a useful thing — without it Safari won’t autocomplete popular URLs when you start typing them, for example. A better solution if you’ve been buying birthday presents is to click History -> Show All History, then locate the birthday present site(s) in the list. Then right-click it and select Delete. Repeat until your history is innocent. Then nobody will ever know you’ve been up half the night buying birthday presents.

2. No status bar required: By default Safari doesn’t have a status bar, so you can’t see a preview of an address when you hover the mouse over a link, as with other browsers. You can activate the status bar using the option on the View menu, but it takes up space and arguably makes the window look a little ugly too. If you want to see what a link’s address is before you click it, one solution is to click and drag it a few millimetres away. The URL text will appear at the mouse cursor position. Try it now with this link.

3. Quickly jump to bookmarks: You can quickly jump to any bookmark on Safari’s bookmark toolbar by holding down Command and pressing 1, 2, 3 and so on relating to the placement of the bookmark from the left (i.e. the first is 1, the second 2, the third 3, and so on). Curiously, any bookmark folders on the toolbar don’t count — if bookmark 5 is to the left of a folder, then bookmark 6 will be the one on the right of the folder.

Of course, you could edit the bookmarks so there’s a number before each if counting from the left becomes a chore. To quickly rename a bookmark on the toolbar, just click and hold it.

4. See URLs in your history: You might already know that you’ll see a list of websites you’ve recently visited if you click and hold the back button in the toolbar. If you hold down the Option key while doing so, you’ll see their URLs rather than seeing the names of the sites (i.e. rather than seeing “BBC News”, you’ll see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news”).

Disagree? Tell me why...

 
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