Safari is a great web browser that is fast, based on WebKit, and provides many great Apple-supplied features, such as Reader. However, there are a lot of hidden features and tricks that Safari has up it's sleeves. We'll expose these features in this article.
In version 4.0 of Safari, Apple decided to remove the Snapback feature. This feature allowed you to navigate back to the very first page of browsing history for a particular window or tab in Safari.
If you miss this feature, you can get it back by creating a bookmark from any website in the Bookmarks Bar and naming it "Snap." From the "Show All Bookmarks" screen, find this newly created bookmark and paste in the following JavaScript code into the "Address" field:
javascript:history.go(1-history.length);
To activate the "Snap" feature, just click on this new bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar.
The web changes fast. Because of this, you may wish to preserve a webpage exactly as you saw it for future use. To do this in Safari, navigate to a webpage you want to save, and click File > Save As.
In the save dialog, ensure that the save Format is set to "Web Archive." Give the file a name, and then click "Save."
Private browsing is great for those times when you don't want Safari to track your browsing history, create new cookies, or cache any webpages.
This little-known feature can be enabled by navigating to Safari > Private Browsing. When enabled, you'll see a "Private" tag in the Address Bar. To disable Private Browsing, click the tag.
Creating a lot of tabs when browsing around the web can be a bit confusing. To lessen the confusion, it may be important to create new windows instead of new tabs. With Safari, you can drag tabs off of the current window and let go to create a brand new window with the dragged tab's webpage.
Website caching can be a great way to speed up page loading, but can be a bit of a drawback with different tasks (such as when you need to refresh a page often to see the latest content). With Safari 5.0, you can easily disable caching.
Navigate to Safari > Preferences > Advanced, and check the box at the bottom of the window to "Show Develop menu in menu bar." From this new menu, click Develop > Disable Caches. As long as this menu item is checked, Safari will not use the cache when loading new webpages.
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