An Improved Web Inspector Means Better Web Development

A lot of web developers use Firefox because of the web development plugins that you can download to extend debugging and development. Apple, however, has upped the game with their web development tools called “Web Inspector.”

Right-click anywhere on the page and select Inspect Element to instantly view code from the web page (you can run your mouse over the parts of code and it will highlight elements on the page), resources files, scripts (JavaScripts), check profiles, storage, and see a log in the console.

This is a great resource for developers and Apple made it better by adding a timeline view that lets you track your website loading times for loading, scripting, and rendering.

Bing Support for Searching

As mention in the WWDC Keynote for iOS 4 devices, Apple is now supporting Bing for search in Safari. To switch your search preferences, you can visit Safari > Preferences > General. Select Bing from the drop down menu that says Default search engine.

Google will remain the default, but you can now select between Google, Bing, and Yahoo. More choices are better after all, right?

 

Hardware Acceleration for Windows

For Windows users, they have a great new feature: hardware acceleration support for a speedier experience. This means that things on webpages like media and interactive graphics will load faster and provide a streamlined experience to the user. Apple doesn’t give much information on this, but we’re assuming that this will only work on hardware that supports hardware acceleration offloading.

 

Private Web Browsing More Apparent

Safari 4 introduced the ability to use private browsing. By turning on this feature in Safari, you are able to browse the web without logging any cache files, cookies, or history.

With Safari 5, however, you can see a small icon in the address bar that will let you know with one glance if your web session is being logged. When you’re done privately browsing, you can click the icon and Safari will ask if you wish to end your private session.

 

Location Services

HTML5 includes the ability to detect your location using the Location Services in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. This means that applications like Google Maps can directly ask Mac OS X to give it the location of your computer in the world, allowing websites to pinpoint your location.

If you wish to have location services enabled all the time, you can visit Safari > Preferences > Security and check the box labeled “Location Services: Allow websites to ask for location information.”

Note that location services doesn’t provide completely accurate location information due to the way it retrieves this information. Your computer is tracked via your IP Address, which could be off depending on where your ISPs central office is located.

iPad-Specific User Agent

Apple has added a new iPad-specific User Agent to Safari 5.0. A user agent is the bit of information that is sent to a website to let the site know what browser you’re using. Under the Develop menu, Apple has had a few different user agents to switch between, but now you have an iPad-specific one to choose from.

What does this mean to you, the user? Well, it means that you can go to Develop > User Agent > Mobile Safari 3.2 - iPad and be able to load iPad-specific websites, such as Apple’s own documentation that is specially formatted just for the iPad.

To the developer, this means that you can test your websites built for the iPad without having to actually own an iPad, or fire up the iPad simulator. You can play around with user agents to get to websites that are built for other platforms, plus there’s even user agents for Windows.

Extensions to Add Features to Safari 5.0

 

Disable Ads with Extension

One of the more popular plugins for Chrome is now available for Safari called AdBlock. AdBlock for Safari lets you do just what the title says, block advertisements on websites.

When you download and install the plugin from the developer website, you’ll get a button next to the address bar that looks like a stop sign with a hand on it. By clicking this button, you’ll see a myriad of options.

In the General Options, you can select to have text ads on Google search results disappear, and you’ll also have the ability to block ads inside of YouTube videos. Please note, however, that these features are in beta and might not exactly work for every video.

Under Filter Lists, you can subscribe to ad blocking lists for your country of choice. These lists are updated every 5-days or manually as you wish. On the Blacklist tab, you can manually block ads by their CSS selector, or you can have the software do it automatically by pressing Ctrl + Shift + K on any page that still has ads on it. This will add the page to your filter list.

Under Whitelist, you can specify websites where you actually wish to view ads (this would be a good place to add your favorite website, Mac|Life.com). You can add these manually, or have AdBlock do it for you by pressing Ctrl + Shift + L.

Download YouTube Videos

Do you like a particular YouTube video so much that you would like to engrain it onto your computer for an eternity? Well, with an extension called YouTubeDownloader you can do just that.

After you’ve downloaded and installed this extension, you can visit any YouTube video. When you do, you’ll notice two new buttons near the top of the video. One will let you download an FLV (Flash video) file of the video, and the other will allow you to download the video as an MP4.

Sync it to your iPod and you’ll never be without a Rick Roll again!

 

Save Your Tabs in Between Safari Sessions

One of the biggest drawbacks to using Safari over Firefox for many is that Safari won’t ask to save your tabs when you close the application and have multiple tabs opened. With the SaveTabs Safari extension, however, you will be able to back up and restore tabs at will.

Once installed, you will have two new buttons next to the address bar, one shows a tab with a down arrow and one with an up arrow. When you’re ready to save your session and quit Safari, click on the down arrow and close the application. When you reopen Safari, click the up arrow and Safari will be populated with the tabs that you previously had opened.

 

Better Sorting for your Netflix Queue

When you’re browsing your Netflix queue, you don’t have a simple sort option that will let you see your queue based on item availability, title, or instant availability. With the Netflix Queue Sorter extension though, you gain these and many other sorting options.

When installed, the Netflix Queue Sorter will let you sort by title, instant, star rating, genre, and availability date. This extension allows you to see at a single glance what’s arriving soon or what’s now available to play instantly on your computer.

Your Netflix queue browsing session will never be the same again.


This Safari is the best trip you'll ever take

So there you have it, 17 of the most notable features in the new Safari update. As we have shown, extensions are a huge part of this release and will most likely prove useful time and time again for Safari users.

Have you discovered an extension that we missed? We would love to hear about it! Let us and others know in the comments below.

 

Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.