Once you’ve rebooted your Mac into a state of 5.0.1 bliss, you’ve probably navigated to extensions.safari.com to download some of the hottest upgrades available for your speedy browser. Simple one click installs can immediately enhance your online experience, but for those unwilling to download every extension known to Apple, we’ve got a few recommendations.
Don’t forget! Apple’s official gallery is quite small at the moment, so you may want to browse through the official unofficial list at http://safariextensions.tumblr.com/.
Federico’s Recommendations
AutoPagerize: Ever wondered why Ars Technica writes a 20-pages review of the iPhone 4 and breaks in 9 pages? Because they want you to click (and thus accumulate pageviews) or subscribe to the paid plan to remove pagination. With AutoPagerize all you have to do is read and scroll: once you’ve reached the bottom of a page, the extensions loads the next one right below it. Like infinite scrolling.
Coda Notes: We talked about this before. A neat little extension that lets you annotate we pages and send the annotations via email. I’m using it for MacStories 3.0 design sessions.
comicSansBeGone: Helvetica takes over Comic Sans on the web. Finally.
Exposer: Exposè for Safari’s tabs, with awesome animations. A little bit slow when you have 10 - 15 tabs opens, but good. Can’t wait for future updates.
Flickr Original: it puts a “go to original image” option in the usual contextual menu on Flickr.com. Handy.
VimeoEmbiggener: Wider Vimeo videos and no sidebar. A cleaner experience.
Turn Off the Lights: watch videos online, turn off the lights so you won’t be distracted by the web page.
YoutubeWide: Same as a VideoEmbiggener, but the sidebar still shows up.
———-
Cody’s Recommendations
AutoPagerize: Yes I’m with Federico on this one. I don’t use it to read articles on the actual site, but I do use it so I can send paged articles to Instapaper as a single page for later, focused reading.
Google Reader Compact: Being in Google Reader all day, it’s nice to cut the crap and get straight to the content. It’s perfect for Safari.
Old Google Image Search: I can somewhat deal with Google totally ripping off Bing with their search results sidebar (which I find completely useless), but they totally went too far with the infinite scrolling thing in Google Images. It’s not a 100% fix, but you can bring the old paginated view back with this awesome extension.
———-
Unofficial Extensions
Not every extension we have installed in Safari comes from Apple’s site. I’m a huge fan of Instafari, NoMoreiTunes, Tynt Blocker, Release the Fail Whale, Ashes (direct download link), and Optimize Legibility.
Let us know what must haves you use in the comments below.
