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Provides: Additional contextual functions in Safari browser

Developer: Ricardo Batista

Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3 or later, Safari

Retail Price: $10

Safari Extender provides contextual menu features that expand upon what Apple provides. As such, Safari Extender is more than a convenience; it is a full fledged tool. It's wonderful, it's great, and it's only $10.

It's the little things. Despite all the bashing that people give Microsoft Internet Explorer, MSIE did have a few nifty features that I grew to love and depend on. One of them was the ability to Control-click on a page and be able to go forward or backward in my browsing as opposed to having to go up to the menu bar and click on the forwards or backwards button. Believe it or not, that was one of the main features lacking in Safari that really bugged me.

I felt for sure that when Safari 1.2 was released, it would have that feature. It didn't, and I was crushed. Like I said, it's the little things.

Now, before I continue, let me explain what I'm talking about for those who do not know. If you press and hold the Control key while clicking on something in most programs, a menu will suddenly pop up where the mouse cursor was, providing regular and/or new options. Most programs have this. In Safari, if you mouse down somewhere on a page (not where there is an URL link) you will see this:

On the other hand, if you mouse down over a link, you will see this:

The point here is that contextual menus are smart. They respond to what you click on. Also, if you have two or more buttons on your mouse, the button on the right is usually the same as pressing on the Control key. In Windows, they call this a Right-click. On the Mac they call this the one thing that Microsoft did right. The ability to right-click is sooo much easier than Control-clicking. However, Control-clicking is better than not control-clicking. If you haven't been doing this, start. It will open a whole new world of features in many of your programs.

[By the way, if your Safari Contextual menu isn't showing "Open Link in New Tab," go to your Safari Preference window (Safari -> Preferences...) and click on the "Tabs" button. I suggest you click all three options. For some reason, Apple chose to have this turned off as a default.] Back to the review...

If you install Safari Extender and click somewhere on a page, you will see this (the image was reduced in size a bit for better fit):

As can be seen, everything above the thin horizontal line is the same, below that line is what Safari Extender has added. (The "Go Back" and "Go Forward" only appear if you have pages to go back or forward to.) The Safari Extender selection mostly provides what you have in the Safari menu bar with some cookie control and printing control.

To simplify this review, I'm simply going to display the other menu selections with comments:

Here, whatever URL you have can be mailed to someone via your designated mail program, text, both, or a collection of URLs (the recipient of the last selection only receives the list of tabbed URLs, they cannot re-create the tabs directly from the mail).

As in all Contextual menus, not all options are available all the time. In the above screen shot, I had three tabs in my window, and the middle one was selected. Why would you use the option of moving tabs around? Consider this example: You went to Google to look something up, and one of the sites presented provided so many links, you didn't need the Google page anymore. By moving that tab to the front, you can more easily navigate your wonderful links. Toward the bottom, you see "Save Tab Set..." Imagine you are tracking a variety of items on eBay. You have each of them on its own tab in one Safari Window. You can save the set, quit Safari and turn off your computer. The next day, you can load a Tab Set you saved any time previously and all the pages that still exist will load just as you had left them.

This one had me confused; so much so, I ended up contacting Batista.org and asking Ricardo what it was for and what it did. Let me quote him: "The user agent is used to change the signature of the browser, this is how a server tells that you are using IE 6 on Windows, or Safari on a Mac. With certain banking or e-mail sites, the web designers test their code on a certain setup and deny you access if you are using some other browser."

The only thing I can find wrong with this feature is that it needs a check mark next to the specific User Agent you are currently using. As it is, there is no feedback in any way for the user to know what User Agent you are set to.

The last two are another pair that only show up as you do certain things. In this case, it shows all the places you've been in that tab (the image was reduced in size a bit for a better fit). Go to a different tab, and different parts of your history show up.

Safari Extender is one of those pieces of software that is wonderfully powerful and smartly priced. The powerful features it provides greatly expand your use of Safari, making Safari a much better program. Isn't that what it's all about? And remember, this is all just $10, a great bargain.

My only overall complaint with Safari Extender is that Ricardo Batista seems to be adding features faster than he's keeping up with the information in his website or the Read Me file that comes with the program, as can be seen with the User Agent feature. Other than that, I have no complaints, but I do wonder why Apple left these features out. Apple would be wise to purchase Safari Extender as part of the program. However, until they do that, active Safari users might consider this the best $10 ever spent to enhance a free program.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.