I seriously tried to get used to Safari 4.0 beta, I honestly did. However, there was simply too much missing.
I noticed that Safari’s a bit faster when it comes to surfing. Yep. I noticed. However, there was simply too much missing.
I get the fact that Safari is Mac’s default browser. Uh-huh. Too much missing.
When I start my day off, besides making my morning cup of Gevalia (actually, I’m trying out grinding my own Zoéga coffee beans fresh for a while), I log on to my MacBook Pro and fire up Morning Coffee. As the summary on the add-on page states, Morning Coffee allows me to “…organize websites by day and open them up simultaneously as part of your daily routine. This is really handy if you read sites that update on a regular schedule…” Well I do just that.
Morning Coffee uses one mouse click to open up the first sites I want to see in the morning. I’m able to check on important spiritual matters, the weather, my Facebook page, the world of news, and what’s happening policy wise back in my home-country. Nice.
The really sharp folks out there will notice that my tabs are all in different colors as well. That’s another Firefox add-on that I really like called ColorfulTabs. ColorfulTabs is a simple way for me to not have to search too hard for a page I was recently on. It may sound trivial to some, but it sure is helpful.
The security conscious side of me is rather nervous about surfing new web sites. There are a growing number of internet pages that take advantage of scripting vulnerabilities such as cross site scripting (aka xss scripting) and clickjacking. To help protect myself from these risks, I use NoScript. NoScript gives me the power to decide whether or not I want to run Javascript, Java, Flash, or other plug-ins on a site I’m not familiar with or willing to trust just yet. When I come across a page that wants to run one of the above, here’s what I see down in my status bar:
When I click on that icon, I then have the following choices (bear in mind I was conducting a Google search for an add-on called “xmarks” during the time; hence their reason for being in the choices):
As you can see, if I want I can choose to not allow, temporarily allow, allow all the time. I like being able to choose. 
Another nice plug-in I enjoy using is SSL Blacklist. SSL Blacklist “…detects and warns about certificate chains that use the MD5 algorithm for RSA signatures.” For online shoppers like myself this is pretty important. I want to know that the sites I shop at have made the right move and are no longer using the MD5 algorithm for RSA signatures, which I know can be faked nowadays. When I head to sites like Amazon, where I do a LOT of shopping, here’s what I want to see in my status bar:
Seeing that the certificate gets the okay makes me feel just a little safer.
Lastly, but by no means least, is Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks). Xmarks is the award winning bookmarking program that allows one to “keep your bookmarks and (optionally) passwords backed up and synchronized” on all of your computers. In a nutshell, you install the Xmarks plug-in, and then synchronize your current bookmarks and browser passwords (optional) from your computer to their server for storage. You can then install Xmarks on your other computers using Firefox and simply synchronize from the server to the computers initially, and from computer to server after that. Xmarks is, of course, password protected.
Wrapping things up, I need to mention that all of these are free Firefox plug-ins you can all download and start using for yourself whenever you like. They do all of those cool things and they don’t cost a dime (or “crown” where I live 
). They’re not available for Safari, and if Safari has equivalents I’m not aware of them which is a shame.
You know. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure if one can even select a theme for Safari, and themes are pretty cool.
Laterz.
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