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5 reasons to use Safari for research

By nyx | August 16, 2008

It has been a while since my last post, but I have been so busy learning new things that I didn’t have the time to write about anything. I have been researching. We are working harder than ever and I must learn so many new things that sometimes is overwhelming.

Thankfully I have been using Safari (3.1.2) more than anything else during this research period.

I normally have to put up with the slowness of Firefox 2 when I am testing websites, even the obligatory round of tests in Internet Explorer that make me literally sick ( I think I am Windowsphobic, save the term). With Safari browsing the internet safely and keeping track of what you doing can be a ultimate experience from a usability point of view.

Reason 1:

Export your bookmarks to an html file

Safari can export all your bookmarks as an html file so you can share what you have been researching with others in a clear standard format

Just fire up Safari and in the File menu select –Export Bookmarks…-, you will be presented with a menu in which you can select where to save the file and some options. By default Safari saves the file on standard html format so what you have is a list of links with all you bookmarks. You can copy the html code and paste it onto almost every type of document.

In some cases the option –Export Bookmarks…– will not appear in the menu, there is a terminal command (below) that you can use to activate this functionality.

At a terminal menu (when safari isn’t running) type:
% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Reason 2:

Send the website pages you’re visiting to an email address

I love the way Safari and Mail integrate on Mac OS X. Whenever I am visiting a website that I want to record apart from the bookmarks there is other option that I normally use, I send the website to one of my email accounts.

Sending a website page as email message is pretty easy, just press CMD+i and the website page will appear as email message ready to be send.

I have created several email addresses for this purpose, so I have one for research, another for current projects, and another for my personal stuff. I have also created a group on my Address Book with my friends that own a mac, so I can send them sometimes interesting articles and tutorials. Lamentably PC users will not be able to take advantage of the legendary easy of use of both products, Mail and Safari.

Reason 3

Tabs

Tabs are now a standard way of managing windows in internet browsers, even IE7 uses tabs, but tabs in Safari have been implemented in a remarkable way. You can do many things with tabs in Safari, drag and drop, open a tab in a new window, open all bookmarks in a folder in tabs, bookmark all open tabs with a simple command (CMD+CONTROL+N), and many more options.

Working with tabs is so simple that anyone could figure it out with a little practice yet you always discover something else that it is so cool, after all this is characteristic of Apple products, they always have aces on the sleeve.

Reason 4

PDF support and Preview integration

Another brilliant feature of Safari is its PDF viewer and the integration with Mac OS X Preview. Whenever I want to save a document I use –Save as PDF– on the print menu (CMD+P) in Safari. Saving a website page as PDF document also allows light editing such as highlighting or adding text and shapes to the documents in Preview.

Reason 5

Speed

I have a relatively fast computer set, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, even if at the end of the day it is just a laptop, my MacBook Pro is pretty quick. However launching Firefox 2 takes ages and it just never responds fast enough, I am always waiting for it to be ready and let me type something in the URL bar. I know there is Firefox 3, and I know Opera is pretty good too, but Safari always feels responsive and ready to shoot.

Of course all these reasons can be extended to many more, for instance you can create your own keyboard shortcuts and have all these actions/commands ready just a keystroke away.