Safari 6: New Ways to Share & Email Links

Last month, I wrote an article about mailing links in Safari. Safari 6, released this week, has a different take on doing so, which makes my old article obsolete for you Lion and Mountain Lion users. Sigh.

In any case, there are a bunch of new features to take advantage of. For starters, we can now tweet or use Messages to share cool Web stuff. Also, Mail Link to This Page and Mail Contents of This Page have been combined into one keyboard shortcut and menu item, though you can override this and send a link directly if you’d like. So to check things out, either click on the toolbar icon and choose Email this Page

…or hit Command-I, which is the shortcut for File > Share > Email this Page.

Whichever method you use, you’ll see the new options for using Twitter or Messages to share links, too. Pretty awesome if you’re into that sort of thing. 

So now that Safari has sent your page’s info over to Mail, what do you do? If you look at the right side of your compose window, you’ll see a new drop-down menu.

From here, you can choose to send your Web content as a link, as the full page, as a PDF along with the link (neat!), or in Reader format, which’ll pass along a version that’s optimized to be read easily. (The Reader choice is only available on pages that support it, so it’ll be greyed out if you’re sending a link that isn’t compatible.) Mail will remember what you pick, too, so the next time you hit Command-I in Safari, your link will be popped into a message the same way you sent it the last time.

By the way, if you’re really invested in the “old” (as in, last week) way of doing things, Shift-Command-I still works for Email Link to this Page, which you’ll see if you hold down Shift while you’ve got the File > Share menu open.

This shortcut will override whatever your last-used choice was and send a link instead.

I think that this is an elegant solution to all of our link-sharing needs, and the upgrades to Safari mean that I might finally abandon Chrome (blasphemy!). What say you, TMO faithful?