MacBasics: A look at Safari 2.0
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 23, 2005 at 10:15pm
Last week we talked about new features in Mail. This week it’s Safari’s turn.
The other day my PowerBook didn’t find the local wireless network very quickly, and I got a new message in the browser window. The message tells me my computer is not connected to the Internet and asks if I would like to use Network Diagnostics to try to figure out what happened. It appears that the Connection Doctor from Mail is really Network Diagnostics and is also incorporated into Safari.
And with a little snooping around, I found the actual application. It lives in Library/Core Services. And it works the same way as the Connection Doctor.
A column on the left shows you the status of tests the Network Diagnostics has run. In my case, the PowerBook has no current operating network connection. Safari accurately determines that there is no network connection and Network Diagnostics concurs.
I went through the questions Network Diagnostics asked, and it correctly diagnosed that I needed to turn AirPort back on. Almost immediately, Diagnostics noticed that the network connection had been reestablished and notified me that everything was back to normal.
I thought it was pretty neat. I haven’t read all the reviews of Tiger yet, but I haven’t heard anyone mention this feature. By the way, if you use a browser other than Safari, this feature doesn’t work.
Here are some quick looks at other new features in Safari (by the way, I’m not that smart. These are all taken from the “What’s New” portion of the Safari Help files.)
RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a quick way to look at summaries of Web sites you may be interested in. Every day I look at the summaries of several Mac-related news sites using RSS. What happens is that Safari takes the summaries of the articles on those sites and constructs a page containing all of them. If more than the summary interests you, you can click on the entry to immediately go to the full article on the Web site.
Macsimum News publishes an RSS feed, which you can subscribe to in Safari, or another RSS application, and read every day. Most other Mac sites, plus just about any other information site, has an RSS feed. Apple has multiple feeds, including one for changes in the knowledge base.
Private Browsing. Computers in public places will benefit from this feature. If you want to check your .mac email account from a public computer, or use a secure site that requires your password, or maybe you want to surf to a banking site, enabling private browsing will protect your private information. To enable this feature, in the Safari menu, pull down to Private Browsing. If you quit Safari, that turns Private Browsing off. Or you can pull down to Private Browsing to toggle the feature off.
E-mailing and Saving Web Pages. Two other new features allow you to e-mail the contents of a Web page to a friend, or save an archive of a web site. To mail the contents of a page choose Edit > Mail Contents of This Page. To e-mail just a link to a page, choose Edit > Mail Link to This Page. To save a Web page, just choose File > Save As and select from the options presented.
Parental Controls. Safari now allows parents to control what w=Web sites their children can go to. First understand that you cannot control what an administrator account can do with Safari. So if you have only one account on your machine, you can’t use parental controls. Second, you have to turn parental controls off, enter the sites into the bookmarks bar in Safari. Only those sites in the bookmarks bar can be accessed. Users can’t enter other bookmarks, use the Google search window or modify bookmarks. Maybe a little extreme, but it will control what your kids see on the Internet.
Other Features. You can now view PDF files directly in Safari instead of having to download them and open them in Preview or Adobe Reader. You can also now search your bookmarks via a search window at the bottom of the bookmarks window. And last, but not least, you can import bookmarks from other browsers. I found that this works with both OmniWeb and FireFox. But you have to know where the bookmarks are. Navigate to your home folder > Library > Application Support > OmniWeb > Bookmarks for Omniweb or home folder > Library > Application Support > FireFox > Profiles > (whatever your profile name is) > Bookmarks.
So there you have it—a mini-review of the new features in Safari 2.0, which runs only on Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”).
Don Foy is a past president and current Apple ambassador for the Upper Cumberland Macintosh User Group in Cookeville, Tennessee. He is also a former newspaper reporter who has been fixing Macs for 13 years. His first Mac was a Mac Plus maxed out with 4MB of RAM and a 17MB hard drive.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
