The Mac Observer - Monday's Mac Gadget - Want New Features in Safari? Get Saft!

Monday's Mac Gadget
by John F. Braun

Want New Features in Safari? Get Saft!

November 15, 2004

Sure, Safari is one of the best browsers available for any platform. When compared to other Mac browsers, it has a relatively modest footprint, weighing in at under 15 MB, when most of the competition consumes at least 20 MB, and some using over 50 MB of disk space. Although it takes up a small amount of space, Safari offers impressive performance, and sports some of the most popular browser features, such as tabbed browsing and blocking annoying pop-up windows. Fortunately, Apple provides information to help developers extend Safari to give it new, useful features. Saft offers a wealth of features you may enjoy...

One set of Saft features impact what Safari displays on your screen. You can enable a full screen mode, which makes Safari take up as much screen real estate as possible. This can be especially useful for PowerBook G4 12" owners, since the built-in screen can only handle 1024 x 768 pixels resolution. To complement the built-in "Block Pop-Up Windows" features, Saft offers a "Block Images and Plug-Ins" option, to help offer a zippy surfing experience. This can be a great plus for those on low-speed connections.

Configure Saft Preferences from Safari

Saft also offers several navigation aides. One is a shortcut feature that goes way beyond the one that is already part of Safari. If you didn't know about the built-in feature, just type in the name of a site you'd like to visit, without the www. or .com. Safari will send you directly to the site. But Saft allows you to define your own shortcuts, and what's really neat, you can define a shortcut that passes an optional argument to a web site. That's great for searching! Several search examples are already included. Saft also includes some goodies in the Safari contextual menu (the one you get when you do a Control-click) adding Forward and Back options, as well as a spiffy Export PDF option.

Saft also offers some other assorted extras. There's a Kiosk Mode, which allows the use of Safari as a front-end, and prevents many common ways of switching to another application or terminating Safari. You can ask Saft to save the last site you visited, and restore it the next time you launch Safari.

So give your Safari browser some useful new features, and try Saft today!

Have any other gadgets that enhance your browsing experience? Send an e-mail to John, and he'll grok it.

Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs.

John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at

You can also Post Your Comments below.

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Observer Comments

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Close Name:Mace Posts: 9604 Joined: 07 Aug 2003
Mon Nov 22, 2004 2:41 pm Subject:

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Close Name:Guest
Mon Nov 22, 2004 3:35 pm Subject: Image Dimensions?

Nice extension, but does anyone know a way to see an image's dimensions by right-clicking it? Right now, the only way I know how to get the dimensions is to drag the image to the location bar, then look at the Activity window.

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Close Name:Guest
Mon Nov 22, 2004 4:44 pm Subject:

Is the developers site down?? It seems to be on his local box (dnsalias.com) and is constantly timing out.

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Close Name:Guest
Mon Nov 22, 2004 7:39 pm Subject: image dimensions

<I>does anyone know a way to see an image's dimensions by right-clicking it?</I><P>

Well, not exactly, but if you right click and "open image in new tab," the tab label itself will show the dimensions.

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Close Name:egarc Posts: 9 Joined: 12 Jan 2004
Tue Nov 23, 2004 1:07 am Subject: easy full screen for Safari

I set up a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar with: javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(screen.availWidth,screen.availHeight); in the url field.

This will stretch Safari to full screen for free.

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Close Name:Guest
Tue Nov 23, 2004 7:52 am Subject: Site not available, Where else can you find it?

Can't access the site at all

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Close Name:iJack Posts: 313 Joined: 13 Jun 2001
Wed Nov 24, 2004 12:26 am Subject: April Fool?

So what's the deal here? It's been over 24 hours and the site link above goes nowhere. Is this a leftover April Fool's joke, or what?

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Close Name:Guest
Mon Jan 24, 2005 8:17 am Subject: Re. easy full screen for Safari

javascript:self.moveTo(0,0);self.resizeTo(screen.availWidth,screen.availHeight);
gives you max screen as in Saft. Full screen is totally different thing.

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Close Name:Guest
Thu Nov 24, 2005 11:46 am Subject: not a site link but a javascript command

this resizes the safari window to fill the entire space available on your screen with one click. If you paste the command and "Enter" it resizes the current page. Drag it to your bookmarks bar as FS (for fullscreen). and click it once at the beginning of each browsing session. This takes the place of manually resizing the safari window. If you have Saft, you don't need to do this.

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Close Name:Guest
Fri Mar 10, 2006 7:48 am Subject: safari timing out

when i try to book on aa.com [American Airlines website] it pages will time out or the pages will not completely display. Any body know why or what I can do?

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Close Name:Guest
Thu Apr 26, 2007 2:12 pm Subject: Cool trick...

Thanks for that tip on filling the desktop with Safari. Works great and best part is it is free!
Do you have a way to set up my iMac to automatically connect to my wireless network here at home automatically? I am constantly having to reconnect by picking the network and then typing in the password.

Vince

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