Filed under: Tips and tricks, Leopard
PlugSuit: legacy plugins in Safari 3 for Leopard
I have to be honest, as a browser, Safari, on its own, does very little for me. In my pre-switcher life I loved Firefox, in large part because of its plug-in structure - and although Safari is certainly more stable than FF (on my system at least) - it's not the same. Luckily, a number of good plug-ins for Safari DO exist. Unfortunately, many of those plug-ins have not been updated to be fully compatible with Safari 3 (which was previously in beta) or Leopard. In fact, because of the way Input Manager was changed with Leopard, there was a lot of speculation that plug-in development for Safari would become obsolete.That's where PlugSuit from Infinite Labs comes in. PlugSuit is a Leopard compatible plug-in manager that will work with many popular Tiger plug-ins like Inquisitor and SafariStand without changing a thing. Infinite Labs also makes the great free plug-in, Twicetab (that allows users to open up a new tab simply by double clicking on the tab bar, a la FireFox or Opera), and users even have the option of downloading and installing PlugSuit and Twicetab together. Plus, it's free! It's important to note that that plug-ins that were not designed with Leopard in mind may still have some problems or not function correctly. Infinite Labs says that most that were developed for the latest Safari 3 beta should work, but double-check with the plug-in developer to ensure compatibility.
My favorite non plug-in Safari hack, J.Y. Design's Full Screen script, works just fine with Leopard.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David said 1:24PM on 10-27-2007
I can't get inquisitor to work with this setup, the file inquisitor.bundle show up in plugsuit preference pane but there is no change in safari, I've tried restarting safari and reinstalling inquisitor a couple times... am I missing something?
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Christian said 2:11PM on 10-27-2007
Saft doesn't work.
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dailyrorschach said 2:18PM on 10-27-2007
guys,
I've been trying to tell people this for well hours now, this is a foolish solution to the InputManager problem.
The good people at TextMate already figured this out. Leopard still allows InputManagers, but requires very specific things/settings to make it work. I've tested this method with SafariStand and it works, I haven't tried Saft, and Inquisitor because of its installer doesn't appear to be working. Hopefully Saft and Inquisitor will modify their packages to work this way: http://macromates.com/blog/2007/inputmanagers-on-leopard/
Yes, I tested it on retail, using Stand right now with glorious tab opening.
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James said 2:19PM on 10-27-2007
For me, on a PPC Mac Mini, it's the opposite for me. Inquisitor (latest release) is the only plugin that works through PlugSuit. The old release of FLVR and SafariStand do not work.
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G said 2:35PM on 10-27-2007
Having paid for Saft, because I dig it, I am eagerly awaiting word from Hao Li. Fingers crossed.
http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/
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leobolin said 2:50PM on 10-27-2007
It works. Great, except Safari nog "quits unexpectedly" every time I close a Safari window.
Also, disabling the thing has no effect.
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Rhywun said 2:59PM on 10-27-2007
@3: And at that link Apple sez: "The automatic loading of bundles located in InputManagers folders is now officially unsupported […] This functionality is likely to be disabled in a future release". This says to me that it's not worth bothering with InputManagers at all.
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Austin said 3:10PM on 10-27-2007
This is fantastic news.
I haven't updated to Leopard yet, because I use Inquisitor religiously. It's as much as a staple to me as an RSS Reader and Quicksilver.
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kakapo said 4:20PM on 10-27-2007
OK... I used Saft, PithHelmet, Stand and Inquisitor every time I opend Safari. I hate HATE HATE ads and all the other crap that really slows things down and is so annoying! So when I read about this, I was excited. Downloaded PlugSuit - installed it - reinstalled Saft and Inquisitor - and started Safari - and lo and behold - Safari crashed EVERY time! Gave me a file name causing all of the problems that I could not track down. So I removed the PrefPane for PlugSuit and have decided to go live with FireFox - maybe... BUT Safari works again now.
Funny side note - I used the sync with all of my Macs the list in .mac (including my bookmarks in Safari and now I have bookmarks and folders of bookmarks interspersed within folders of bookmarks that I had deleted a couple of years ago!
Weird.
AND - has anyone figured out how to use command tab to switch between applications that are active not just the ones that automatically load upon start-up?
All in all, I am pleased enough to now have it loaded on six Macs here at home. Will run it a while and see how things go before I load up the office and lab.
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Matt said 5:42PM on 10-27-2007
@ 3.
Inquisitor works great for me - did the same thing as the texmate guys told...
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Luigi193 said 5:48PM on 10-27-2007
This is so weird... i was just talking to my dad about this!!! I don't want to buy saft...so i got an add blocking program called Safariblock, which is an InputManger. I was so sad it wouldn't work in leopard, but now it will!!! Now i am happies...
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Quine said 6:46PM on 10-27-2007
...and in a week or two all of these will be updated to work flawlessly with leopard. It's only been out 22 hours O_O.
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MILE said 6:56PM on 10-27-2007
Not sure what I am missing here, but none of the plugins I tried seem to be working...!?! Inquisitor, PithHelmet, FLVR...nothing...!? I even installed them again and they don't work...and also the freshly installed ones don't show up in the PlugSuit list of installed plugins...!?!
And if that wasn't bad enough, it broke my install of 1password as well...!! 2.5 worked for me, then I installed 2.5.1 today, which worked as well...until I installed PlugSuit -- now I can't get 1Password to show up in Safari anymore...!! :(((
Hopefully I can uninstall it somehow and at least get 1Password working again...! I'll worry about the other plugins later then...
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Nuno Sousa said 7:35PM on 10-27-2007
PlugSuit was giving me problems aswell, but I have to admit, its a way better alternative than hacking around InputManagers. I'm sure once all the bugs are ironed out, it will be great.
However, in the meantime, I was attempting to get my existing InputManagers working using the TextMate method. I simply could not.
I copied Inquisitor.bundle (for example) and did:
sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers
sudo chmod -R 755 /Library/InputManagers
Nothing. Doesn't load in Safari.
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Carlos Fonseca said 8:30PM on 10-27-2007
inquisitor works for me, but Mail.appetizer doesn't
:(
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john russell said 10:55PM on 10-27-2007
This Preference Pane is a godsend. When I installed Leopard today and opened Safari, I was crushed when SafariStand and Inquisitor didn't work. I installed PlugSuit and boom—both started working on my Rev. A Intel Mac Mini. Other plugins, however, such as Blacktree's Visor for Terminal crashed.
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millenomi said 3:32AM on 10-28-2007
A small aside about InputManagers: PlugSuit loads them but doesn't use Apple's loading method: it uses a way that Apple says won't go away for a while (injection via mach_inject), so it will continue to work even if InputManager capabilities are removed.
If you feel there's a bug, please report it ASAP at plugsuit@infinite-labs.net. Thanks!
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Kendal said 8:56AM on 10-28-2007
Saft:
Saft for Leopard
Apple has released Leopard, but did not give us developers the GM version of it for testing. Saft for Leopard is delayed by few days to be verifed to work with the public release of Leopard. Please check Saft site later for Leopard release.
Posted on 27 Oct 2007.
http://haoli.dnsalias.com/
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MILE said 1:19PM on 10-28-2007
David Watanabe just released an update to Inquisitor -- it works just as before, without any need for additional plugins or whatever...! :)
I guess that's good news, we'll probably see most of the other ones updated as well over the next few days...!?
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Aaron said 9:32PM on 10-29-2007
Saft 10.0 for MacOS 10.5 and Safari 3.0.4 (5523.10)
Saft is now a Safari launcher. To enable Saft features, run Saft.app and it will start Safari with Saft plugin loaded. This change is due to MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) has dropped the support of InputManagers.
Improvement: MacOS 10.5 and Safari 3.0.4 (5523.10) support
http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/Download/index.html
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