I’m trying to switch from Firefox to Safari 3, because I want to keep my bookmarks in sync between Safari on my Mac and Safari on my iPhone. But so far I’m not a fan of Safari’s Google search box, compared to Firefox’s. Do you know any keyboard shortcuts or other tricks for it, to speed up my acclimation process a little?
We agree with you that Safari’s anemic search box (which can only search Google, unlike Firefox’s, which can also check Yahoo, IMDb, Amazon, ESPN, and numerous other search engines) takes some getting used to. But Safari’s got a couple of tricks up its sleeve regarding that search box. Press Command-Option-F to instantly jump your cursor right to that box, ready to type in a new search. Pressing Return, of course, brings you to your search results at google.com, but as you navigate away from the search-results page, you can click a little orange arrow in that search box to send the browser back to the search results page where you started.
Click the orange arrow to snap back to your Google search results for the term in the search box.
teacher24_70
July 13, 2009 at 11:43pm
No need to give up Firefox. Just download xmarks. It's a plugin (there's a FF & a Safari version) that syncs bookmarks across the browsers.
You may need to occasionally open Safari (or keep it open in the background) so that it can read and sync the changes that happen in FF.
I love this plugin and it allows me to see the same bookmarks from both browsers AND the iPhone.
colinc
July 13, 2009 at 2:51pm
Another powerful extension for users coming from FireFox is Glims:http://www.machangout.com
Out of the box it adds a ton of features, however, you can scale it down to some of the default FireFox features, such as multiple search providers.
Hope that helps answer the question a little more.
While erikonaMac may have been a little harsh, I defiantly agree that I've been disappointed more and more in the quality of some of the articles.
erikonaMac
July 13, 2009 at 1:42pm
Check out Inquisitor for Safari, it should add some nice functionality that you're used to...
http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.phpAnd check out pimpmysafari.com for a whole bunch of plug-ins for Safari.
Note to the author:
Are you serious, that's it for the article? I'm sorry, but did you do any research on adding functionality to the Safari search box? It seems not. I really used to like MacLife, but I find myself coming back less and less now because of poorly researched articles like this.
Soad908
August 02, 2009 at 3:06pm
I see what you mean.... i followed both of your links and downloaded a software from each to help me out... also is there another site you would recommend to get your daily mac-fix.. or one that has just simple how-to's or software recommendations?
g3rd
July 13, 2009 at 10:22am
I would pay money to get the tabs back on top. Anyone figure out how to put them back on top?
