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Tap into Safari 4's hidden preferences

by Jay Hathaway on February 25, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Safari 4 marks a dramatic shift in UI design for Apple's browser. In the Mac version, the big news is the Chrome-like "tabs on top" layout, and the equally Chrome-like Top Sites feature, but some smaller things have changed too. A new autocomplete feature has been added to the URL bar, and Google Suggest has been added to the search bar. Worst of all, in my admittedly-finicky opinion, That blue bar tracking page load progress in the URL bar is gone.

If this is all too much for you to take at once, and you want the faster rendering and improved standards-compliance without all of the UI upheaval, you might want to have a look at this list of hidden preferences compiled by Caius Durling. Using the Terminal, you can change everything I mentioned above back to the way it was in Safari 3. Want tabs on the bottom again? You got it. And long live the load bar!

[via Daring Fireball]

Tags: browser, hidden, preferences, safari, tabs

Comments

MaxFeb 25th 2009 11:15AM

Neutral

I always hated the blue bar. I would, however, love to get the "pie" display that was available as a hidden pref on earlier Safaris.

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NikFeb 25th 2009 11:52AM

Neutral

Thanks for this! I missed the blue bar!

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lureoftheseaFeb 25th 2009 1:19PM

Neutral

The link to the list of hidden preferences is broken. Thx

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ParkerFeb 25th 2009 4:01PM

Neutral

I primarily use Firefox but I've always loved Safari's blue bar. In my opinion it's better looking and more useful than the traditional throbber, and it saves precious screen real estate as well. I recommend the Fission extension to bring it over to Firefox -- works great!

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kyleabakerFeb 25th 2009 4:50PM

Neutral

'Chrome-like "tabs on top" layout'

This is actually an Opera-like layout since Opera has done this far longer than Chrome.

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Jay HathawayFeb 25th 2009 4:55PM

Neutral

That's completely true, and my friend Faruk Ates pointed out the same thing to Macworld. I agree with Jason Snell's response to him, though: in all the time Opera's been doing that, Apple never copied them. Chrome does it, and all of a sudden the feature is in the next version of Safari.

http://www.macworld.com/article/139011/2009/02/chrome_safari_4.html

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