Safari Browser
Safari, the standard web browser that’s included with Mac OS X is fast, stable and has some great features. But there are some ways of improving it to make you’re browsing experience even faster, more secure and pleasurable. Here’s a walkthrough of my favorite extensions for Safari.
ClickToFlash
Let’s face it, most of the time when Safari crashes, it’s actually the Adobe Flash plug-in that brings the application down. Just ask Apple, they get the crash logs. Apple has tried to remedy this with later 64-bit versions of Safari, so when the Flash plug-in hangs, it doesn’t bring down Safari, it just refuses to load the page. Thanks to the iPhone and iPad (and people getting annoyed of the use of Flash on web pages), Flash is getting out of fashion in a hurry and many of its uses are being replaced with HTML5. But until every flash ad or page disappears completely, we have to live with it. Or do we? There’s a great extension for Safari called ClickToFlash. Instead of loading the Flash plug-in for the page that contain Flash, it just puts up a grey square with the word “Flash” in it. If you want to see the Flash content, just click on it. Now that specific Flash content is loaded. This will speed up page loading and rendering a lot when viewing pages full of Flash ads. It also reduces CPU use (the Adobe Flash plug-in is a resource hog). The battery life will increase if your on a laptop, and also let you surf without an annoying fan running all the time. And it also cuts down on the annoyance factor of busy pages full of ads. You can add sites that are allowed to display Flash content in the settings for the extension. Another nice benefit? No more Safari crashes.
ClickToPlugin
This is an alternative to ClickToFlash that stops the loading of any content that requires a plug-in on a page. It can also replace media player plug-ins with Safaris native HTML5 player instead.
AdBlock
If you don’t want to see ads on the web pages you surf to, there’s a solution. The AdBlock plug-in removes all ads all together and is very good at it. You can disable the ad removal for specific sites in the settings. It’s a fantastic plug-in. Sometimes it’s actually nice to see ads, especially on sites about an interesting topic where the ads may be of interest. You can whitelist sites so that the ads are shown.
YouTube5
The standard video player on sites like YouTube and Vimeo are Flash based. As you have seen above, the less use of Flash, the better. There is support for HTML5 players on almost every video site today, and are used when devices (or computers) doesn’t have support for Flash. This extension replaces the Flash Video player with a HTML5 based player instead. This player uses less CPU and gets all the benefits of bypassing Flash and also removes the in-video ads as well. You can set your preferred resolution when playing back video in the extensions settings.
Here’s some of the features:
- A custom designed HTML5 player to replace the usable, but very limited built-in player. Support for Vimeo and Facebook video.
- The ability to switch video resolutions within the player, without having to access Safari’s preferences. Support for downloading videos from YouTube and Facebook.
- A fully functional volume control, rather than just a mute button.
- Support for displaying the video’s title, author, and source, in a video overlay, along with a link back to the video’s page on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
If there is a problem with displaying the video, there’s a button so you can switch to the original video player if you like.
Ghostery
This is an extension that tracks the trackers. When you go to a web site, most of your online habits are tracked by a lot of companies that then use or sell that information. With this extension you can see who’s tracking you, get information on that company and their policies. But the great thing is that you can block them from snooping on you. I’ve disabled all the trackers except Google Analytics, because it’s nice for those who run the web site to get some statistics. I’ve been using it for over a year and the only site I had problem with was my bank. But you can put sites on an exclusion list which solved that problem.
Result?
After installing all these Safari extensions, your browsing should now be both faster and makes Safari almost crash proof. Not bad for a couple of minutes of work.
I agree with most of these, but with these changes:
Switch ClickToFlash for ClickToPlugin, to block EVERY kind of plugin and also automatically replaces loads of Flash video players around the web with HTML5 variants.
Remove YouTube5 as ClickToPlugin does the exact same job (replaces with a HTML5 player).
Add clea.nr Videos for YouTube, an extension that re-designs YouTube to make it extremely lightweight and beautiful and much more focused on the video content rather than distracting ads and comments.
Add gDirectLinks, an extension I helped create. It replaces Google and Google Images results with direct links rather than ones that go through Google's tracking service, leading to faster page loading and more privacy - oh and your Google Images results will finally take you to the actual image rather than that massive interstitial page Google uses!
Final extension list: gDirectLinks, clea.nr Videos for YouTube, AdBlock for Safari, ClickToPlugin, Ghostery.
Cool! Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try them out and update the article.
You're welcome, and thank you for reminding me to get Ghostery and AdBlock; I'd looked into them before but then forgotten about those myself. I just had this impression that AdBlock for Safari was not mature yet, but I'm finally running it now and it's fantastic. ;-)
One very important tip once you install ClickToPlugin is to go into the preferences and set "Media player: Default resolution" to 720p if you're on fast broadband or 480p (which is actually YouTube's own player's default value) if on slow broadband; otherwise it will default to the 1080p versions of videos at YouTube, and those are usually several gigabytes large and will severely slow down your video loading. I'm lucky to be on a 100mbit connection and I still feel the delay of 1080p videos. You can still manually switch to a higher quality by hovering over the top left of the video player if you ever want 1080p for some reason.
Two brief extra niceties: If you go into the "shortcut menu" options tab and enable "View on Site" and "Download Video", you'll be able to rightclick videos and hit "Go to YouTube" if the video was embedded on an external site; very handy if you want to go to the actual video page to look at the comments or whatever. And the "Download Video" option speaks for itself.
Enjoy and thanks for the nice article!
ClickToFlash is great. Unfortunately Ghostery seems to crash my Safari once a day and AdBlock hampers performance and causes Safari to gobble up way more RAM than it would otherwise.
Weird that you get crashes. My safari never crashes. How much memory do you hav installed in your machine?
8GB on a Mountain Lion Mac Pro. I wish it didn't crash because I loved the extension. I just hate having to deal with daily crashes. After disabling Ghostery I have had no problems.
Have you checked the safari crash logs? I'm using Ghostery all the time and never have crashes.
I did and found the following:
Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0 com.apple.JavaScriptCore 0x00007fff8ea1c484 JSC::JSCell::getOwnPropertySlotByIndex(JSC::JSCell*, JSC::ExecState*, unsigned int, JSC::PropertySlot&) + 4
I did some cursory research and found a few others report a similar issue. But to be on the safe side I remove Ghostery and no issues since.
safari crashes? have not had any app crash on my mac in many years.