Making Safari 4 Usable

Updated: It looks like someone from Apple reads this blog, as they finally patched the vulnerability mentioned below, shortly after this entry was published.

So, Apple pushed out the Safari 4 update the other day. And once again I decided to try it out. I do that now and then, but so far it has always ended with me returning back to Firefox for some reason or the other. But this time it feels different. More to the point, it feels fast! Safari 4 is indeed a snappy browsing experience; it runs fairly well even on my old G5 iMac.

Usability-wise its pretty good, but there a a few tweaks needed:

1) Force opening of links in new tabs. Always.
Open the terminal and enter: defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true. Restart Safari.

2) Enable the status bar by selecting: View -> Show Status Bar

3) Consider installing Safari AdBlock, same idea as Firefox AdBlock Plus: http://burgersoftware.com/en/safariadblock

4) Disable 'Open "safe" files after downloading' in Preferences -> General. I'd like to decide for myself what is "safe" and not, thank you very much.

5) Disable Java until Apple patches CVE-2008-5353. WTF Apple, it's been SIX months already!