In this episode I show you some of the new features of the Safari 3.0 Beta as well as some of my favorite old features. This seems particularly relevant with the announcement of the Safari 3.0 Beta for Windows and OS X.4 at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

You may watch this episode small (low bandwidth) or large (high bandwidth).

In no particular here are some of my favorite features of Safari (2.0 and 3.0).

  1. Like most modern web browsers, Safari offers Tabbed Browsing: You may create a new tab by hitting ⌘T (⌃T Windows) in Safari. You are then free to enter any URL or even use keyboard shortcuts to access bookmarks located in your bookmarks bar. For example ⌘1 will load the first bookmark in the book marks bar (as of now this does not work in windows).

    Other ways to create new tabs include: ⌘clicking (⌃clicking windows) on a link to open a new tab with the link you clicked, ⌘⇧clicking (⌃⇧clicking windows) a link to create and select a tab of the selected URL, and dragging links to the Tabs bar.

  2. Using the tab key to select text fields: You can use the ⇥ key to select text fields and drop down menus in any web page. You can take this a step further by using ⌥ and ⇥ to select links any given web page (OS X only). Like the rest of OS X, ⇧⇥ will select text fields in the reverse direction and ⇧⌥⇥ (OS X only) will select links in the reverse order.
  3. Using the space bar to select items from drop down menus (OS X only): As you tab through a site you may open drop down dialogue boxes by hitting the space bar. You may select any given element by typing in the first few letters of the item and you can select it by hitting the ⌅ (enter) key. From here you can ⇥ on to your next form element.
  4. HTML mail via Safari and Mail.app (sorry windows users): You can send HTML easily via Safari and Mail. All you need to do is navigate to the desired HTML page in Safari and hit ⌘I. Mail will launch and the contents of the HTML doc will be loaded as your mail message. The page title will even populate the Subject header. This is very valuable and makes sending HTML messages a breeze. You can even launch HTML documents from your hard drive and mail the contents without posting the page to a web server.

New Features in Safari 3.0

  1. The ability to rearrange tabs: It is nice to be able to finally do this. All you need to do is click on the tab and drag it to your desired location in the tabs bar.
  2. The ability to ⌘click and ⌘⇧click bookmarks that reside in folders in the bookmarks bar to open the link in a new tab: This feature has been in firefox for some time now and it is a much needed addition to the 3.0 beta (once again, sorry windows users, this feature does not appear to work within the windows version).
  3. Moving tabs to new windows and vice versa: To make a new window from any tab all you need to do is click the tab and drag it down. A thumbnail of the page will appear. On both windows and OS X you can hold the shift key while letting go of the left mouse button to slow down the animation process. This is a great introduction for windows users to the eye candy that has been known to mac users for some time.
  4. Resizable Text Input Fields: As of version 3.0 you can resize text input boxes within Safari. This can be quite helpful if you are planning on composing a length comment. To resize a text box just click the bottom right hand corner and drag it to you hearts content.
  5. ⌃click (right click) the page header to navigate directories on the web site’s server: This can be very helpful if you get lost in a complex web site. Simply right click (⌃click) the page title at the top of the browser to view the directories of the site you are visiting.
  6. Web Inspector: As of version 3.0 you can right click (⌃click) a link and select inspect element to bring up the web inspector. This tool allows you to view the node, style, metrcs and properties of the selected element. This is a wonderful tool for anybody that dabbles in web development or design. For this feature to appear you must have the Debug menu activated. You can activate the debug menu by typing the following command into the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Hopefully you gain something from this Safari overview. I have tried every browser out there and continually return to Safari. If you have not given it a try I encourage you to do so!

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