Customizing Safari with SafariStand

Safari is a great browser, but we can always make it better. SafariStand offers dozens of extra features for customizing Safari, as if they were build right in.

Installing SafariStand can be a little tricky:

2. Install SIMBL, a framework for SafariStand
3. Download SafariStand. Please note there are 4 different versions for Safari 3.0/3.1 on Tiger and Leopard, so please make sure you download the correct file.
4. Move SafariStand.bundle to “/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/”
5. Re-start Safari

OK, so it wasn’t that tricky–but still a little more difficult than a standard DMG.

You’ll now see a new menu titled “Stand” at the end of your Safari menubar:

One of the more visual features gives Safari a thumbnail tab bar, much like OmniWeb. Not my thing, but still cool:

SafariStand Settings Pane

Opening SafariStand Settings (Option+Command+,) is when things really start to get interesting. In the general pane you have settings such as switching tabs with your mouse wheel and auto-closing the downloads window.

On the key action page, there are two settings I absolutely love. The first is automating the find function by just starting to type. Firefox has had this for years, and I really love it.

The second is switching tabs with semi-colon (;) and period (.).

This makes switching tabs much easier because the other method for switching between Safari tabs with the keyboard is unnatural for my fingers.

Site Alterations can be interesting if you’re stuck with a webpage that you’d like to modify (Javascript, Popups, Java, Stylesheets, User-agents):

There are many other features included in SafariStand like highlighting View Source and managing bookmarks as shelfs.

SafariStand doesn’t do everything, but there are enough cool features it’s worth keeping around.

Tomorrow I’ll show you a cool trick you can do with SafariStand.