Safari’s Saft Adds Much Needed Features

February 05 2005 – 03:44pm

Jason Kottke has posted about Saft, A Safari Plugin that saves time. Amongst the features it has (many of which I had wished for before) are:

Multiple Page Bookmarking

If I have a bunch of tabs open in Safari that all relate to a specific job or task, Saft adds to my Bookmarks menu a “Bookmark this group of tags” function (as well as other “why didn’t Apple think of that?” functions), which bookmarks all of the tags in that open window, and places them in a bookmarks folder. This already came in handy to me earlier today when a client handed me a list of websites and said “These are my competitors.”

Save and Load Browser Window

Want to read that whole window full of browser tabs, but can’t get to it right now? You can save the window, and reload it later. Saft will even remember the browser size and position.

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Shortcuts

You can set your Saft preferences so that just typing “a” into your address bar will take you to Amazon, or so that typing “dict blog” will bring you to Dictionary.com search for the word “blog” (a default Saft preference). Any such searches will also be loaded into your contextual menus, so that if you select a word in your browser and right-click, you can search for that term on any site you have set in your preferences.

Crash Protection

For those times when you have a bunch of tabs open Safari crashes. When you restart Safari, Saft will ask you if you want to restore those windows.

Type-Ahead Searching

Many browsers already have this, but this will highlight text on the page that matches what you type. Great for “clicking” on links without a mouse.

I tried the demo this morning and didn’t even flinch at the $12 price tag. Learning to use this along with Quicksilver, and you’ll wonder how you ever functioned before.