Saft 7.2.1 ($10 Demoware)
Hao Li

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.