Speed Dial For Safari Mac
Jun 16, 2017 I've been using Speed Dial 2 for years and, frankly, can't imagine my Chrome experience without it. I look forward to continued improvement! Jun 18, 2017 This is one of my essential chrome extensions. I bought the pro version at the beginning and absolutely love it. It continues to get some really nice attention and updates.
I have to admit that I am a Safari user. Mainly because of battery life and because I don’t like Firefox’s design. I have also never experienced any of the Safari is the new IE issues everyone seems to be complaining about these days in any Development work I’ve done. But while I am usually quite happy with Safari, there is one big annoyance: the new window/tabs page. You can either use topsites, or favorites, but both look very unclean and certainly don’t make it easy to recognize websites. Favorites only displays icons for a few sites and they are not visually coherent. Topsites displays a preview of the site, which end up as login screen for most sites — there are some workarounds for that at least. None of this is really any good.
When I was using Chrome as my main browser the new tabs page was always a delight, thanks to the Speed Dial 2 extension (seems like there is a version 3 now, and I think the origial speed dial is this Firefox add-on). It is great to quickly open your most used sites or even better the ones you can never remember the URL of — try to remember that you have to start typing panel to get the suggestion of the URL for the DreamHost admin site panel.dreamhost.com for example. The other thing I have been missing from Chrome are custom search engines, which are really useful to make a quick WolframAlpha query or get a quick translation. But luckily I finally just found an easy solution to both issues.
Custom Search Engines with DuckDuckGo Bang
First to custom search engines in Safari. Until Yosemite, there was Glims, but that’s gone. But when I tried switching from Google to DuckDuckGo again recently, I found the killer feature of DuckDuckGo: bang. Bangs allow you to use hundreds of custom search engines with DuckDuckGo by typing an exclamation mark and a short code like !wa 100F or !leo heimat. It really rescues DuckDuckGo; sadly sometimes it just doesn’t get as good results as Google, especially for people or news. But now you can just use !g for a quick Google search every once in a while.
- On your iPhone, you can keep a list of the people and numbers you dial most often in Favorites. Consider Favorites the iPhone equivalent of speed-dialing. Merely tap the person’s name in Favorites, and your iPhone calls the person. You can set up as many favorites as you need for a person. So, for example,.
- But unlike speed dial on Opera, Safari Dial is an online app. The sites are presented with screenshots of the pages. No registration is necessary, and your unique homepage can be accessed from multiple computers. This online app also works fine on Firefox (and probably other browsers), and makes a good alternative to Firefox's Speed Dial extension.
Safari Speed Dial with local Homepage
Speed Dial For Safari Mac Download
For the speed dial, the solution is a simple local homepage, i.e. a simple HTML file on your system that is set as the homepage. This can then be set as the new tabs/window page. What held me back from this approach so far, was that, unlike favorites or topsites on a homepage as the new tab page, the URL field of the browser is not selected, forcing you to click before you can type your URL, which can be very annoying. You can of course hit ⌘ + L to get to the URL field, which is better but still not ideal. So why not put a little form on the site and redirect it to search DuckDuckGo — making sure the search field has the correct name q and an autofocus attribute. You have to use the empty bang ! to directly type a URL and there is no autocomplete from history, but it covers a bunch of cases and otherwise ⌘ + L is not too much of a hassle. The form will have no submit field but be submitted on hitting enter — which we can identify by scanning for keyCode 13 with JavaScript. The favorites will simply be in a list that is populated by a little JavaScript. The whole HTML for the site is this:
Now for the bit of JavaScript the favorites will be saved in a SITES.json file which contains the name and url for each favorite. We will save the JSON object directly into a variable, so we don’t have to import it later. We will then import it directly to the HTML with a script tag.
The main script will be added directly into the HTML after the imported JSON. It simply loops over the favorites list from SITES.json and populates it with list items of the form li>a>img. We don’t need to use any jQuery to keep it plain and simple. The images will be stored in an img/ directory and simply use the name attributes converted to lowercase and stripped of all whitespace as filenames. It’s all pretty straight forward:
Speed Dial For Safari Macbook
After adding some CSS, we have a clean and beautiful speed dial page. You can find the full code on GitHub and see it live here.