How To Bend Safari 4 To Your Will

OK, so you’ve installed the Safari 4 Beta and found, perhaps to your mild surprise, that you no longer have Safari 3 around and that your default browser is now beta software. (For what it’s worth, I think this beta period will be pretty short, and that a proper release is not far away. Anyway.)

But there are some things you don’t like. Perhaps you’d like the tabs to appear where they used to. Perhaps you liked the old loading progress bar – the blue one that filled the address bar, instead of the new spinning wheel which only displays *activity*, not progress. Or perhaps you hate the new Top Sites feature and want to disable it completely (not much need for this, as it’s easy to switch off, but still).

All these tricks and more can be achieved with a little Terminal-fu and some copying and pasting from this web page, upon which Caius Durling has posted some of the nuggets of hidden prefs he found lurking inside the Safari 4 package.

Maybe that messing about isn’t enough for you, and you want to go back to Safari 3. Fair enough: look inside the Safari 4 Beta disk image that you downloaded, and there you’ll find an uninstaller. Run this and all will be reverted.

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And if you’re fed up with all versions of Safari, you could always try something new by downloading OmniWeb, which is now free (as Pete pointed out earlier) and is full of browser feature goodness.

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Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Nadia
Because I downloaded safari 4 on a vista, it actually looks horrid.
The reason I downloaded safari was because it had a mac look to it, to satisfy my mac craving until I got a new one, and i think I might just promptly delete the beta
http://coreminimalist.blogspot.com Dann
I downloaded and tried it last night, and I have stopped using it after an hour or so. Issues I had
- I couldn’t adjust the size of the link bar! I have two rows of links in Camino and couldn’t for the life of me find out how to get the same in Safari. I’m sorry, but a More Links button doesn’t cut it.
-I don’t need a Top Sites. I know what sites I got to a lot. That’s why they’re on my link bar. Way to create a useless “feature.” I rarely even use my link bar because I launch all my websites from QuickSilver.
-No AdBlock! Camino’s inclusion of this has made me soft. I go to sites like Digg and the whole left side of the layout of the site is altered thanks to stupid ads.
-Where are the extra search engines in the top right search bar? The instant Google results are nice, but I use the bar to seach lots of other sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and YouTube. Can I ad these to Safari? If you can, I can’t find it.
-It’s not noticeably faster than Camino in loading pages.
AndyM
Thank you! I was able to reclaim my tabs. I can see why they are putting them on top as it saves space. But I am happy to have them back on the bottom. Also, I didn’t initially notice the change in the status bar and now I am happy to have that back too. The rest of the new Safari is pretty cool.
KsbjA
Actually I didn’t like the old look, it looked alien in my Windows desktop. Great thing that now it adapts to whatever OS I run it on. I also like the new tabs placement, and Top Sites and Cover Flow are useful for me, too. The only thing I really miss is the support for addons, which is only on the Mac version.