Taking a Safari through the Wild Web

Open Safari by clicking its icon in the Dock. When Safari opens, it displays a browser window and goes to a Web page that has been previously designated as the home page. With Mac OS X, the home page is initially set to an Apple-enhanced Netscape page, filled with news and links. Go to Apple’s Web site Type in www.apple.com and hit the Return key. Besides being a Web site that every Mac-head should know and love, it is a great example page for demonstration. You can even go as far as to set this to your home page, by going under the Safari menu and choosing the Preferences option. (An example of this is shown in Figure 6-20.) Where it says Home Page, type in www.apple.com. If Safari is displaying the Apple Web site already, because you’ve typed its name into the address field, you can click the Set to Current Page button, which changes the homepage to whatever the browser is displaying. Click OK to save the change.

Figure 6-20: Safari displays a Web page. Note the icons of Safari’s toolbar buttons, and the placement of the address field and Google search bar.

Navigation basics (Features immediately visible)

All the buttons and fields you see in front of you are tools designed to help you navigate the Web. You can type in the names of the Web sites that you want to visit, do searches, travel to your previously saved bookmarks, and shuffle backward and forward to places you have recently been. If you haven’t noticed, the toolbars in Finder windows have a similar look to them. Apple has actually taken the Web browsing concept and applied its logical simplicity for browsing the files in Mac OS X as well. A walk-through of Safari’s toolbar and basic features follows:

Backward and Forward buttons

Say that you’re At Apple’s Web site, and Wow! You’ve simply got to read more about that 15-inch PowerBook that was just released. So you click on its picture, a link, which takes you to Apple’s hardware section where you can read more about said PowerBook. The overview, however, just isn’t enough, and you’ve got to click on the Tech Specs section to get a nice feature comparison between all the models. When you’re done with that, how can you get back to Apple’s main page? Clicking the Back button (the one with the left-pointing arrowhead on it) once will take you one page back, from the tech specs back to the overview. Clicking Back again will take you from the overview back to Apple’s main page. Want to go back to the overview? Click on the Forward button (with the right-pointing arrowhead) to take you forward to the page you just came back from. If you are buried many pages deep in a Web browsing session, you can click and hold on either the Back or the Forward button, and a list of pages that you have been to will appear. Scroll down the list and click on the page that you want to go to.

Stop and Reload buttons

Perhaps you are browsing the homepage of the New York Times. You’ve read a bunch of articles, clicked your way back to the main page, but it’s an hour later, and you’ve got a hunch that a new tidbit of information might have been posted to the site. Clicking the Reload button (the one with the circle-arrow) will reload the Web site from the NYT server, and if anything new has posted, your display will reflect that. Shift-clicking on the Reload button fully reloads the page from the server, which is sometimes more effective than a regular reload.

As it often happens while browsing the Web, you clicked on a link, and man, that page is taking forever to load. You’ve gotten through a full email to your boss with the top ten reasons why you should be able to work from home, and that page isn’t quite halfway done. You can see bits and pieces of text and graphics, but nothing useful, and you just can feel it. That page just isn’t coming along. Look at the toolbar. Instead of a circle-arrow indicating a reload, the button has changed to display an X. In fact, anytime a page is loading, even if it’s not stuck, an X will be displayed instead of a reload symbol. The X is the Stop button. Clicking on it ceases the download of whatever page load you were attempting. After the page has stopped, you can attempt to do a reload, or just move on in life.

Bookmark button

It’s happened. You’ve found the definitive Web home of Arlo Guthrie, and you need to save that page for future reference. Click on the Add Book Marks bar (shown in Figure 6-21), and Safari will not only save it for you, but first asks you just where you want to save it to, and what name to give it. You can choose to save it in the bookmarks bar (which places it on the toolbar next to the currently displaying Amazon and eBay ones), the Bookmarks menu (you can get to it by going to the Bookmarks menu), or any number of folders that exist within Safari’s unique bookmark management system. This system is covered a bit later in the Chapter. For now, you can save it to the toolbar or in the menu.

Figure 6-21: Clicking on the Add Bookmark button presents you with the option to name your bookmark and save it to the location of your choice.

Address field

As it often happens, you need to go to a Web site, it’s not bookmarked, but you know its address. Typing in its full name (like www.apple.com) and hitting the Return key on the keyboard gets you there. A Web address is officially called a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. Many times, you do not need to type in the full name of the site, for instance, just typing in the word macaddict should take you to MacAddict magazine’s Web site (www.macaddict.com). If you have been there before, and if it’s bookmarked and you don’t know it, Safari might try to fill in the name for you. This can be helpful at times and irritating when you don’t want Safari to think for you.

The address field serves another purpose, a visual one, in Safari. As a Web page is loading, the background of the address turns into a page-load status bar; as the page loads further, the blue background gradually makes it all the way across the field. When a page has finished loading, the background turns back to white, as shown in Figure 6-22.

Just Google it

For a noun to make its way into verb status (at least in common language) is an esteemed achievement. Google is the very popular and very effective Web search engine (www.google.com) and now has become an action as well. If you ever hear someone tell you to just Google something, they’re asking you to go to Google’s Web page, type in the term, and hit Return. It’s so popular and effective, in fact, that Apple has built this capability directly into the Safari toolbar. Typing something into the Google field and hitting Return is identical to first going to the actual Web site and searching from there. Safari’s field even stores recently searched-for items, accessible by clicking on the magnifying glass inside of the field. If something is typed into the field and you wish to remove it, click on the x that appears in the right-hand side.

Figure 6-22: A page in the process of loading displays a progress bar in the address field.

Bookmarks bar

Below the toolbar with the above-mentioned features lies the bookmarks bar. When you save a page by clicking on the Add button, Safari gives you the option of saving the location in this always visible and easily accessible location. Once in the bookmarks bar, its name — that is, the name that you have specified (shorter names are ideal for the bookmarks bar) — becomes a button that you can click to bring the Web site up. Folders of bookmarks can be displayed in the toolbar as well and are evident by the presence of a disclosure triangle next to the folder’s name. Clicking on the name displays a list of items residing in the folder.

More features, plus customization (Features not visible)

Now that you know the basics of Web navigation and of Safari’s visible features , it’s time to hike around to where Safari really shines: all its special features and customization. Apple has included many slick features, original or not, to make your Web browsing experience quick and enjoyable.

Preferences

Sometimes, the best way to get to know a program is to go poking around in its Preferences window. Safari’s are located under the Safari menu.

Understanding URLs

The technical name for a Web address is called a URL, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator. An example of a URL is http://www.macworld.com. A URL begins with a code that specifies a kind of Internet protocol. The http stands for hypertext transfer protocol, which is the protocol for viewing Web pages. Often a Web URL is shown without the http:// portion, and beginning with www. This is because most browsers are smart enough to assume that anything beginning with a www implies the http protocol, and the browser inserts that automatically. Another protocol is the file transfer protocol, which is signified by ftp, and is used for transferring files over the Internet. Protocols also exist for local networking; for example afp signifies AppleTalk Filing Protocol, used by many Mac OS fileservers. The remainder of the URL specifies the domain name, (macworld.com) and the specific server to access (www). Internet addresses are all based on numbers. The names you type in exist because they are easier to remember than the numbers. The catch is that the name has to resolve, or be properly tied into, the proper number, in order for the Web site to be located. This kind of information is stored on DNS, or Domain Name Service servers.

General

The first option is the General preferences, shown in Figure 6-23. Here, you can change your Mac’s default Web browser to something other than Safari, using the pull-down menu. If you hate that your homepage opens every time you make a new window, you can set Safari to do something else, like to open nothing. You can also change which folder to save your downloaded files to, and whether to automatically remove items from the download list or not. A checkbox lets you decide whether to let Safari automatically launch certain files after you download them, which is easier than double-clicking every file you save from the Web. Sometimes other applications link to Safari, like an email program; the last option lets you choose to have Web sites from linked applications open in a new window, or in the current window. Having links load in the current window runs the risk of taking you off of the page you were just reading, so many people like to have links open in a new one.

Figure 6-23: Change the default Web browser or your homepage in Safari’s General preferences.

Appearance

The Appearance section lets you choose the fonts in which to view the World Wide Web. When pages don’t specify in their formatting what font to use, Safari will use the ones that you can specify here. The standard font will be what you see the most, the fixed width will be used less often. If you have a really slow connection, or just hate pictures, you can choose not to have Safari load any graphics (meaning you’ll just see text and colors).

Bookmarks

This section lets you choose what bookmark features show up where. In the bookmarks bar, you can choose to display a link that will access the bookmarks found in the Address Book (see Chapter 19) or from Rendezvous, Apple’s zero-configuration networking technology (check out Chapter 15). You also have similar options for the Bookmarks menu (with the added option to display the bookmarks also appearing in the bar) and in the bookmark collection, which we discuss ahead.

Tabs

Tabs are just plain fantastic, and are described ahead. Choose to enable tabbed browsing, and to always show the tab bar. Briefly, tabbed browsing lets you view multiple Web pages within the same window, instead of having 20 or so open Web pages cluttering your screen at once. Glorious. Choose New Tab from the file menu (z-T) to watch them in action.

AutoFill

Instead of typing in your name and address every single time you buy something, Safari can do it for you, if the AutoFill options are checked. Choose the names and passwords box to have all your names and passwords saved; they will show up automatically every time you visit the site. This can be a great time saver, but it’s potentially hazardous if many people have access to your machine — they’ll be able to get into anything you’d normally have to use a password for, like your Web-based email or your online banking. When you enter a password for the first time, or change an existing one, Safari asks you if you want to save passwords for that particular site. You can select Never for this Website, Not Now, meaning that you can decide to choose later on, or Yes, as shown in Figure 6-24.

Figure 6-24: When you tell Safari to save names and passwords in the AutoFill preferences, it lets you choose how to handle individual pages when you enter or change a password.

Security

The fewer things you load onto your Mac from the Web, the less risk you open your Mac to. In general, you should feel free to leave all the Java options enabled; they affect your ability to view certain Java-programmed Web sites. If you only customize one thing about Safari (and we do tell you this more than once) make sure it’s the Block Pop-up windows option. If this is checked (it can also be enabled from the file menu) you’ll never again see another of those maddening, frustrating, and annoying pop-up advertisements that assault your screen. A cookie is a bit of information your computer stores when you have visited some Web sites. Amazon.com knows you’ve been there before (and might greet you by name) because it’s being provided with that information from your computer. Selecting the option to accept cookies from only the sites that you navigate to will prevent cookies from advertisements and sites that you have not elected to visit from installing themselves on your computer. If you choose the option to “ask before sending a non-secure form to a secure Web site,” you will be alerted every time this happens, as can occur when you switch, for example, from a secure online banking site to a Macintosh news site.

Advanced

Selecting a custom style sheet overrides the look and feel of the sites that you go to. If you know HTML (hypertext markup language), the language that Web pages are written in, you can code your own. Clicking the button to change proxies settings sends you to the Network Preferences pane.

Security

Most Web surfers are lax about security. Internet security, as it relates to you, is the idea that other Web users do or do not have access to information that you don’t want them to see. This includes any information that you transmit, from your birth date, to your email password, to your credit card numbers. In general, when typing sensitive information into a Web page (like when you are buying something), make sure of two things in Safari: one is that the URL begins with https://, instead of just http://. The s means secure. Also, in the upper-right corner of Safari’s window, you see a little icon of a locked padlock. If these two indicators are present, consider the site safe. See Figure 6-25.

Figure 6-25: You know you’re in a secure site by the presence of the lock icon in the upper-right-hand corner, and by the https:// instead of just http:// in the address field.

Apple Cares!

Apple Cares about how Safari’s doing, plowing along through all those Web pages. Under the Safari menu, there’s a Report Bugs to Apple command. Choosing this brings up a screen that inputs the name of the active Web page, a field for your comments, and a Submit button. Click on more options for greater specificity. If something doesn’t work right, or a Web page that you go to doesn’t load properly, tell Apple! They’ll fix it.

Other ways to customize Safari

Safari’s customization can go even further than we have discussed. By using Safari’s menus, you can do things like change the items you see in the toolbar, see pages you have previously visited, and manage your bookmarks.

View menu

If you don’t like some of the things you see in Safari’s toolbar, or want to add some things that you don’t see, the View menu is your method. Anything that is already visible in the toolbar will have a checkmark next to its name in the menu. Un-checking something removes it from the toolbar, and vice versa. Choosing to show the status bar is a recommendation. This places a thin bar at the bottom of every window. When you mouse over a link, the full URL will display in the status bar. When a page is loading it will keep you apprised of its progress. If you’d like to go behind the scenes, the View menu also incorporates a View Source option; choosing this lets you see the source code (HTML) of the active Web page. If you’ve got no programming experience, it’ll look like gobbledygook, but it’s a good window into what makes up a Web page, whether written out by hand or laid out in an application like Adobe GoLive or Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.

History menu

This menu’s main function is to provide an interface for your browsing history. Safari keeps track of all the sites you have visited, for a week at a time. Its true usefulness is only appreciated through experience. When you forget that great site that you were just at the other day, you can scroll through the pages that show up in the history, and find it. Clearing the history deletes all the locations that Safari has saved, useful if you don’t want another person poking around where you’ve been. The History menu also lets you mark a page for snapback. Snapback is discussed in a little bit.

Bookmarks menu

Helps you manage your... bookmarks! This is the most convenient spot to access bookmarks that you have saved to the menu. Select a location on this menu and Safari takes you there.

Window menu

Gains you access to any open Safari windows, which will appear in a list at the bottom of the menu. Here, you can select to view the Activity window, which will show you more information than you probably wanted to know. The downloads window keeps track of all your downloads and pops up whenever a file is downloaded.

The coolness that is Safari

Some of the following features are unique to Safari, and others can be found in other browsers, but as usual, the interface wizards at Apple just know how to do it better. Read on to learn time-saving and easier ways to browse.

Avoiding the Back button

Web browsing can be a bit stressful. There’s so much information, so many links, and the lurking fear of something getting lost in the searching! Using the Back button is a tried and true hallmark of Web navigation, but there are better and more organized ways; here are Safari’s.

Snapback

You’ve Googled something (through Safari’s toolbar, of course), say, an ex-boy or ex-girlfriend’s name. Convince yourself that you’re not a stalker. You’ve found some great sites and lots of useless information. In fact, you want to keep reading from the list that Google gave you, but you’re currently eight clicks deep into a fascinating read on how llamas make great pets.

Instead of clicking the Back button a whole bunch of times, you might have noticed the little orange arrow that appeared in the Google search field (shown in Figure 6-26). Clicking the arrow takes you back to the original list of search results that Google returned, without backtracking for a few dozen hits to the Back button. Safari accomplishes this by marking the first page you visit on a site. And, if you visit a page that you know you will be returning to, you can manually mark the page for snapback, by choosing to do so under the history menu.

Figure 6-26: Click on the orange arrow to snapback to your original list of search results.

Tabs

You’re reading the New York Times site. There are tons of great articles. You can either open each one in a new window, which gets cluttered and unorganized pretty rapidly, or make generous use of the Back button, and only have one article loading at a time, or, you can use Safari’s tabs feature. Using tabs gives you the ability to open multiple Web pages in a single browser window, separated by little tabs that protrude down from the toolbar (shown in Figure 6-27).

Figure 6-27: Tabbed windows look like this.

Tabs are enabled in the Tabs section of the Safari Preferences. You can create a new tab by selecting that option from the file menu, or typing z-T. Notice that the tab displays a progress wheel to show that a page is loading. Holding down the Command key while clicking on a link opens the link as a new tab, as opposed to in the same window, obscuring what you were just viewing. If you’ve chosen to select new tabs as they are created (in Preferences), the tab will open in the foreground. If you have not, it will open in the background without taking the current page off of the screen. You can also Control-click a link to display a contextual menu, which, among other options, will give you an opportunity for opening it in a new tab. If the status bar is being displayed, mousing over the link while the Control or Option keys are held down reveals what will happen when the mouse button is clicked. Opening tabs in the background is a great strategy for managing links that you have come across while still browsing. Instead of interrupting your reading, you can open as many links as you like as tabs in the background, and read them all as you choose.

After all your tabs are open, you can click among them with reckless abandon. Cycle through them by holding down z-Shift and either of the arrow keys. If there are too many tabs to view onscreen at once, Safari displays a double arrow in the toolbar to indicate more tabs to the right. Tabs can be closed by clicking the little x that appears on each tab, or by typingz-W. If no tabs are open, z-W closes the whole window. In addition, Control-clicking on a tab brings up a contextual menu with the option to close all tabs, or even reload them.

Keeping organized

A Great strength of Safari is it’s capability to keep your Web browsing organized. By Blocking your pop-ups, managing your bookmarks, and keeping your downloads managed, Safari can reduce your Web clutter.

Block those pop-ups

Pop-ups are windows that jump to the front of the screen when you are browsing the Web. You haven’t asked to see these windows. They just appear. They are advertisements. They slow down your Web browser and your Mac. With Safari, you can banish annoying pop-ups forever, by choosing to do so, under the Safari menu. That’s it. Select that option, and Safari blocks them all automatically, simply by refusing to display information from a site that you have not chosen to visit. You can also choose to enable this feature in the Security Preferences; in this case, Safari warns you that some Web sites might use pop-ups for legitimate reasons, and those will be disabled as well. This is true, but very rare, and a small price to pay for the blocking of all the illegitimate ones.

Bookmark management

Safari has a concept of bookmarking that goes way beyond the ordinary. Bookmarking means saving a current page location for future visitation. Safari gives you two immediately visible places to put them — in the bookmarks bar, for pages you access very frequently, or the Bookmarks menu, for pages visited every so often. But, when you choose to save a bookmark, you are greeted with another option, in the form of a bunch of listed folders. Saving a bookmark in one of these folders obviously saves it there, but to retrieve it? Choose Show All Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu, or click the little book icon in the bookmarks bar. What is displayed is Safari’s bookmark manager (shown in Figure 6-28) — an iTunes-like interface for complete control and organization of your bookmarks — because, let’s face it, they’re hard to organize. You tend to accumulate lots of them, and don’t even want them all in that menu all the time. If you’ve been using Internet Explorer (it’s okay to admit that), then Safari will have automatically imported all your favorites into its IE Favorites folder.

Figure 6-28: Keep your bookmarks out of the menu and the toolbar with Safari’s bookmark manager.

What’s great about this is that it’s a way to save tons of bookmarks without having a Bookmarks menu that scrolls down and off of your screen for five solid minutes. Bookmarks stored in the folders of the Bookmarks window get themselves out of the menu but remain easily accessible. Clicking on the plus sign at the bottom creates a new folder, which you can rename and drag any of your existing bookmarks into. Apple has created a bunch of folders — you can choose to keep them, or get rid of them by clicking on them and hitting the Delete key. If you select a number of bookmarks in the right-hand pane, and Option-click on the plus sign in the right-hand window to make a new folder, Safari will make a new folder and move the selected bookmarks into it. From now on, when creating a bookmark, you can choose to file it in a categorized folder, as opposed to slapping it on to the end of a menu.

URLs (whether in the address bar, or in the form of a bookmark) in Safari are draggable. You can drag an address by its icon, either into a folder when it’s being viewed in the bookmark manager, or into the bookmarks bar directly from the address field. Shift-clicking on the Add bookmark button (the plus sign) is a shortcut for adding a bookmark directly to the bookmarks bar. To make use of your bookmarks, go to the bookmark manager and double-click on a bookmark. You can also z-click to open them in tabs.

Storing folders in the bookmarks bar is a great way to have easy access to a bunch of sites at a time. A great customization to this feature is Auto-Tab, which, instead of displaying a list of the bookmarks in the folder when you click on it in the bookmarks bar, will open every bookmark in there as a separate tab (shown in Figures 6-29 and 6-30). This option is available only when viewing the “Bookmarks Bar” collection within the Bookmark Manager. Check the box in the Auto-Tab column to activate. Beware, because clicking an auto-tabbed folder will override any tabs currently being viewed in that window.

Figure 6-29: Auto-Tab takes you from this...

Figure 6-30: ...to this!

Safari, with the aid of a .Mac account, gives you the ability to sync your bookmarks between your different Macs, eliminating the frustration of managing and remembering different sets of saved locations between different computers, and keeping a single set constant among all your machines.

Download window

Downloading a file is a common practice, whether it is an instruction manual for your new outdoor grill, a new piece of software, or a movie preview. To download is to save a file to your computer. In most cases, clicking on the download link will bring up Safari’s download window, simply a list of recently downloaded items. While an item is being transferred, an x will appear next to its name in the list, which will cancel the download if clicked. After it’s downloaded, the x changes to a magnifying glass, which when clicked will show the file’s location in the Finder. You can choose the default location in the preferences. At the bottom is a Clear button, which removes all the items in the list. Some items seem stubborn when their links are clicked, and refuse to download, and instead open a new Web page filled with text and code. What you see is the results of a browser opening the file instead of saving it to your Mac. Try Option-clicking the link, which forces Safari to download.

Caching Out

Safari stores the pages you visit in a cache (pronounced cash, not cach ), which is a store of information located on your hard drive. Instead of reloading the page fully from the server each time, a revisit to the page will usually cause Safari to access this cache, which is faster than downloading the page again, because accessing your local hard drive is faster than accessing the Net. Information that changes frequently might be hindered by this cache, and necessitate a manual reload of a page by hitting the reload button. In some cases, hitting the Shift key and then the Reload button is necessary, it forces the browser to take a brand new copy of the page and not just poll the server for changed information. In rarer cases, a page becomes stuck in the cache and not even a reload will load the page’s contents from the Internet properly. If this is the case, it is necessary to empty the cache, which deletes all locally saved Web pages from your computer’s hard drive. Go to the Safari menu and choose to empty the cache. You’ll be given a warning, but click on empty. Resume browsing with a clear cache.

Using the Debug Menu

Safari has a hidden feature called the Debug menu. It’s got a lot of information for troubleshooting things like JavaScript exceptions and World Leaks, and consequently a lot of not-so-useful features for your everyday user. There are, however, a few cool things, and for the not-faint-of-heart, it’s pretty easy to get to. Try the following:

1. Open the Terminal, from the Utilities folder.

2. Type the following after the prompt:

   defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

3. Hit return. (Later on, you can substitute a zero for the one and remove the debug menu.)

That should be it! The next time you open Safari, you should see a Debug menu to the right of the Help menu. One cool thing you can do with this is to fool a Web site into thinking that you are a non-Safari user, even a PC user! Why? Some Web sites consciously block access to certain platforms and browsers, whether out of spite or incompatibility worries. Under the Debug menu, choose the User Agent option, and tell the Internet what browser you want to masquerade as, even Internet Explorer for Windows (Windows MSIE 6.0). Other neat options are the ability to display a window with all of Safari’s keyboard and mouse shortcuts, and to manually import bookmarks from another Web browser.