10 cool Safari Extensions worth installing | Hacker News Reader

10 cool Safari Extensions worth installing

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12 pointsjaybol12 comments

There's the chrome adblock extension that is safari-enabled now too: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj...

It doesn't look like there's a binary you can just install yet, but if you grab a (free) Safari Extension Developer certificate from http://developer.apple.com/safari/ you can build/install it yourself. It seems nicer than the old SIMBL adblock stuff, and will presumably be kept fresh because it's used by Chrome users too.

I'm still looking for a "keyword in location bar -> expand an URL" extension. E.g., typing "wiki foobar" in the location bar expands it to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foobar automatically. Is there one of those for Safari 5 yet?

http://safariadblock.com/

He packaged it up when he got back from WWDC.

I've just ported OnePage from Chrome to Safari, give it a try here:

http://blog.libinpan.com/SafariExtensions/HackerNews/HackerN...

http://j.mp/hn4safari

Hope you will like it. Thanks!

Sadly Safari 5 inhibits SafariTabs which is a SIMBL based plugin (http://stuconnolly.com/projects/safaritabs/).

Any idea on how a similar feature can be made available on Safari 5 (which I love for his "reader" feature).

(edited for grammar)

It doesn't look possible right now. I've looked through the extension docs (http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/Tool...), and the overall architecture is very similar to Chrome's. Safari extensions are essentially user scripts with a limited API for access to the UI and user data; if Apple doesn't provide an API hook for a given UI feature, the extension can't touch it. SafariTabs would be possible to implement if Safari fired events when tabs and windows are closed, but it currently doesn't.

Despite every release of Safari reducing the feature set of SafariTabs (which is good), I've had a load of requests for an updated version. It should be available within the next couple of days:

http://stuconnolly.com/blog/safaritabs-and-safari-5/

Are Safari extensions starting to increase dramatically in number now? If so is it because of Safari 5?

Safari 5 actually introduced support for extensions. They were not possible before. What was possible before were plug-ins, but they were and are unsupported by Apple, and required coding in Objective-C instead of HTML and JavaScript, which more people know.

Safari 5 includes support for Chrome/Jetpack style HTML + JS Extensions, whereas before Safari didn't include extension support directly.

Some tools, like 1Password did load "extensions" in Safari, but they did with hacks like SIMBL, which Apple discouraged use of.

Can i use extensions in webkit nightly or just safari 5?

Cool extensions btw, love the gmail checker.

I've just checked with WebKit nightly, GMail checker works fine on it. However I am not sure if it will work if you don't have Safari 5 installed.

WebKit Nightly is only a wrapper to make Safari use newer build of WebKit, you still need Safari 5 installed for extensions.

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