I love Safari Stand
Browser plugins have become really popular over the last couple of months. Even though there are far less plugins available for Safari than for Firefox, those that are available are stunning. This time we want to focus on Safari Saft as well as on Safari Stand which enhance Safari with a bunch of great features.
Input Manager
Input Managers are a convenient way to add additional functionality to all or single Cocoa applications. One of the most popular Input Managers for Safari is “Saft”, which enhances Apple’s default browser with a bunch of useful features such as:
- Full-screen browsing
- Kiosk mode
- Control-drag to scroll page
- URL shortcuts
- Tab rearranging with drag and drop
- and much morey
So make sure that you head over to Hao Li’s web site an grab a copy. Trust me, once you’ve tried it, you’ll never ever want to live without it anymore. By the way Saft is shareware and can be bought for 12$, which is a quite reasonable price — at least from my point of view.
Safari Stand
Stand is another famous Input Manager for Safari that adds some practical features to Apple’s browser. Some of them overlap with the ones provided by Saft, but there are two unique ones that are outstanding and therefore definitely worth mentioning.
Syntax highlighting
One thing I missed back since the first day when I started using Safari as my default browser, was the lack of syntax highlighting when viewing HTML source code. But now with the helping hand of Stand it is not just possible to view colorized HTML source code, but also to edit HTML documents directly from within the browser. What a great feature man.
Visual tabs
But it’s getting even better. I’m sure most of you have already taken a look at Omniweb and its great way of displaying tabs. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well Omniweb’s tab bar is not aligned horizontally but vertically — and instead of normal tabs it displays thumbnails of each page, making it a piece of cake to identify the right tabs.
The only drawback of Omniweb is that the rest of its interface is not that sleek as the one of Safari. So you can imagine that I was really excited when I read on Manuela Hoffmann’s weblog that the most recent version of Safari Stand adds visual tabs to Safari. Great.
You can even change the tab order via drag and drop as well as define the thumbnails’ size. However it would also be great to define, whether to use Safari’s or Stand’s tab bar — because currently you have to deal with two tab bars, which is somewhat annoying and a waste of valuable space. Anyway, both plugins are great additions to Safari and I don’t want to miss them. If you want to share your experiences with some of the plug-ins, feel free to post a comment.
