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Mac 101: Safari tab tricks

I've found myself using Firefox 3 more and more as of late, though there is one feature of Safari that I miss dearly. Picture it: you have a bunch of tabs loaded up in one window of your browser. For some reason you decide that you would really like to see one tab in its very own window. In Safari all you have to do is click on that tab and drag. As you can see to the right, a little picture of the website you're viewing appears and you can drop that picture anywhere on your screen. Once you drop it, the picture expands into a Safari window displaying that website.

This cool feature is a little tough to explain in words, so read on for a brief video demonstration.

Please note that I'm using Leopard and Safari 3.

As you can see, this is a nice piece of eye candy, and a useful little feature.

Direct Viddler link | Direct QuickTime link



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Mac 101

I've found myself using Firefox 3 more and more as of late, though there is one feature of Safari that I miss dearly. Picture it: you have...
 

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chris

This isn't related to tabs, but I have a trick I use to make accessing my bookmarks a lot easier. I dump all my bookmarks into my "bookmarks bar" and have created a hierarchical structure. I categorize everything into simple folders like Apple, Clients, CSS, Design, etc. then have categories of folders within those that contain my bookmarks. Also if you need to sort your bookmarks in alpha (which Apple really needs to fix) take all your bookmarks out of safari and dump them into a folder on your computer and sort by name. Then simply drag those bookmarks back into the safari folder.

July 28 2008 at 12:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Mobley

Something else with Firefox that is lacking from Safari is the ability to drag an image from the internet straight to photoshop or illustrator. Firefox does this goofy Quicktime Image conversion when you try and the only workaround is saving the picture to your HD. quite irritating.

July 27 2008 at 9:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mrt2

I hate the way Safari handles tabs... if it weren't for this, I would
use it exclusively. I HATE having a drop down list at the end of my
window when I'm working on a bunch of tabs...
I like how in Firefox I can just flick my mouse wheel and it scrolls
through all my tabs.

July 27 2008 at 2:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to mrt2's comment
Shahryar

Via FireFox, is there a way to scroll through tabs on a laptop without having the wheel? Is there a way to scroll through tabs in general w/out doing the cmd+number thing? I like how I can scroll through my open FF windows via cmd+~. If it doesn't exist already, I'd like something like this to scroll through open tabs.

July 27 2008 at 6:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nuno

If it were possible, in Safari, to use Cmd+(number) to jump to tabs directly (instead of calling a bookmark from the toolbar) I'd use it much much more.

July 27 2008 at 6:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve516

I also like the fact that Safari remembers the windows you had open in your last session...

History>Reopen All Windows From Last Session

Because once or twice I have hit Open Apple Q by mistake, or W once too many times and wiped out work I was doing. It makes it really easy to recover from stuff like that.


July 26 2008 at 11:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Steve516's comment
G

Firefox 3 > Preferences > Main > When Firefox starts: Show my windows and tabs from last time

July 27 2008 at 7:04 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jutzuro

After the hype, I switched to Firefox, but I found myself using more and more Safari, because scrolling in Firefox is incredibly S L U G G Y. Surfing with Safari, IMHO, is a far more pleasant experience.

July 26 2008 at 2:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jash Sayani

See ! Everyone kept saying Apple is useless and Safari si not up to the mark. Firefox Rulz. But, after all Safari has great features and half a dozen of them are not even known by people !

July 26 2008 at 6:24 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sam

Safari allows you to "tear" off tabs.

7 Words. Pretty simple.

July 26 2008 at 4:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Patbon

What about the number one feature that Safari has and Firefox is missing:

Green button resizes window to fit the web page's content.

This is an absolutely fantastic feature because you can know you're viewing all the website has to show you and maximize screen real estate. Especially useful on macbooks where screens are relatively tiny.

Why oh why doesn't Firefox have this??

July 26 2008 at 4:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Patbon's comment
Shahryar

Damn, that would be nice. I'm mainly an FF user and prob will stay on as one mainly for the addons ScribeFire and Foxmarks. I use Safari here and there.

July 27 2008 at 6:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Shaun

Wow, I use Safari almost exclusively and am always opening multiple tabs. I knew you could right-click to open in a new window but never even thought to drag the tabs off. I guess I should have figured that was an option; it IS Macintosh, after all!!

July 26 2008 at 3:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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