Michael Sunarlim

In November 2010, Apple officially introduced extensions to their popular browser Safari. It was one of the most requested features and with the release of version 5 of the browser, customers were finally able to add functionalities to their favorite browser. Apple provides Safari Extensions Gallery for users to browse  extensions which can be easily installed in a few clicks.

Here are my top 5 extensions that I use regularly:

Delicious

If you use Delicious bookmarking service, then you need to install this immediately. This plugin by jeveaux.com will add a button on your toolbar and with a single click, you can save web page you want to bookmark. This plugin is hosted on Github and can be downloaded here.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, Google Chrome Web browser, Opera Web Browser, and Apple Safari Web browser that allows you to easily post to all of your blogs. Once you have set up your blog properly, you can will be able to start writing and posting right on your browser without requiring to open and login to your blog admin panel. Pretty cool.

Awesome Screenshot

With Firefox, you can find dozens of web capture plugins. In Safari, Awesome Screenshot is one of the best and most simple one. It also gives you extra features like to annotate and share.

1Password

While it does not fall as a pure Safari extension, it is only one of the so many awesome features from 1Password, it is almost impossible to pass a single day without using it. 1Password itself is a cross-platform password manager and generator. Currently it is available for Mac, PC, iOS and Android. It also works with DropBox to make it super easy for you to sync across different machines.

Everybody loves Firefox. Even if I use Safari as my main browser most of the time, Firefox’s expandability is still irreplaceable. With so many available themes, plugins and extensions, you can personalize your browser according to your browsing or work behavior.

Firefox toolbar with Web Developer extension

So, what’s my favorite? Since switching to Mac, I do not test out everything one-by-one anymore but I have to say Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension is one of the best of productivity purpose. It provides you with almost every tool you need as a web developer like customize how the CSS should be displayed, window resize, display outlines (tables, links, frames) and so much more.

For me this is perticularly important and makes everything easier to learn how a site or webpage is built.

This extension is available for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Chris Pederick’s Web Developer page link

For all of you who ever use other than Safari as your primary browser, you might notice that Safari is lacking the feature to disable/enable CSS on a page/site. So it is always enabled.

We can use something called Safari bookmarklets to solve this. Here’s how:

1. From Safari, CMD+right click then choose ‘Copy Link’ this link.
2. Add the previously copied link as one of your bookmark, you may name it ‘Toggle Linked CSS’ or anything.
3. Now, everytime you browse just click on that bookmark during a visit of a page and you can see it with its CSS disabled.
4. Confused? Just try to test it by clicking on the link above or the added bookmark on this site first then.

Note that this trick does not work 100% on every site, but more than enough as an alternative.