Essential Safari Extensions

Using Safari as my main browser seems to surprise a lot of people thesedays. I think writing less and less code, and thus not being exposed to Safari’s dev tools frequently enough stop me from having to grudgingly install Chrome. One thing Safari does lack is the vibrant eco-system of extensions which Google’s browser enjoys.

That said, I’ve managed to cobble together a set of extensions which keep me sane spending 8 hours a day in my browser:

1. Ghostery - This one has been covered to death recently, but it’s still the best 3rd party content blocker I’ve found for Safari. Be sure to disable Ghostrank in the preferences if you don’t want your browsing behaviour sold to advertisers.
2. UserCSS - A bog standard Custom CSS tool, I mostly use it for getting rid of obnoxious bits of the sites I visit most frequently,
3. UTM Stripper - Tiny extension that removes Google Analytics tracking parameters from URLs, mostly because they’re irritating when copying and sharing URLs, but also because I’d rather as few parties as possible be involved in the transaction which occurs when I click a link.
4. NoMoreiTunes - This extension stops iTunes from launching when one visits an iTunes Preview page in the browser, instead it adds an ‘Open in iTunes’ banner to the top of those pages and prevents the browser being usurped by the worse piece of software on my mac.
5. Friends Feed - This extension removes the stuff in my Facebook news feed which has no right to be there, stuff my friends liked being the primary annoyance this solves. You can start by just fading those entries out to get an idea of what the extension is ridding you of before going fully nuclear.
6. Detox - Twitter insists on hijacking URLs in tweets with perhaps the most unreliable short URL service on the web. I swear at least one in ten t.co links I click results in a failure to direct me to the page I wanted. This extension removes t.co as a middleman and instead sends you straight to the URL you clicked on, you know - like how the internet is supposed to work.

Published on 7 January 2016 – OSX – Safari