Google renewed a heated discussion when it said it was dropping H.264 support from Chrome’s HTML5 video tag last week, but it seems the company’s ready and willing to push its WebM alternative video format hard — not only is hardware decoder IP now available for the VP8 codec, but the project team is presently readying WebM plug-ins for Safari and Internet Explorer 9, neither of which include it themselves. As to the little matter of whether any of this is the right move for the web at large, we’ll paraphrase what Google had to say for itself: H.264 licenses cost money; Firefox and Opera don’t support H.264 either; and big companies like Google are helping the little guy by championing this open alternative. We have to say, the eternal optimist in us is cheering them on. Oh, and the linguist in us, too. Read Google’s own words at our source link, and decide for yourself.

Google defends H.264 removal from Chrome, says WebM plug-ins coming to Safari and IE9 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ll admit to having been pretty flighty about my choice of browsers in the past. Camino one month, Safari the next, Chrome the week after; I’ve been jumping from one browser to the next, chasing performance and features for quite a while now.

Recently though, I’ve made a commitment to spend less time worrying about what other tools might have to offer, and more time exploring the potential of those right in front of me. For good or ill, I’m casting my lot with Safari, and making sure I get the most from it.

Learn the Shortcuts

Like the guy in the movie says, “Learn them, know them, live them.” Shortcuts get you where you want to go, only faster. There are tons of shortcuts available in Safari. If you want to have a look at them all, there’s actually an HTML doc with an exhaustive list bundled right in with the browser. Setting out to learn them all at once would probably do more harm than good, so here’s a list of essentials to get you off to a good start:

• Tabs. I usually end up with a lot of tabs in my windows, so being able to deal with them without leaving the keyboard is nice. Pressing Control+Tab will select the next tab in the window, while pressing Command+W will close the current one.
• Bookmark(let)s. I’ll talk about some essential bookmarklets a bit later, but pressing Command+1 will activate the first bookmark, Command+2 the second, and so on.
• Opening Links. I’ll often just read through a page, clicking on interesting links and letting them load into tabs in the background while I continue on. To do this I’ve set my preferences to open links in new tabs on Command+Click. This is one of the few keyboard commands I’ve actually got mapped to my Magic Mouse, where it’s a three finger click (mapping gestures on the Magic Mouse requires a third-party tool like Better Touch Tool).
• Navigating Search. The next one isn’t strictly a Safari shortcut, but it really works well with all the rest. On its experiments page, Google has a Keyboard Shortcuts option that lets you navigate through the list of Google results using your keyboard. The J key selects the next result, and the K key will select the previous one. Combine this with Safari’s Search Results Snap Back ( Command+Option+S ) which will jump back to the last Google results page viewed in the tab, and I can go from TextMate to search results and back, all without touching the mouse.
• Reading. In other browsers, I’ve used the great Readability bookmarklet to pull out text content from a site. It gets rid of all the clutter on the page and loads the text of the article into a nice, easy-to-read layout. In Safari 5, this is baked right into the browser; you can toggle this Reader mode by pressing Command+Shift+R. For scrolling, simply pressing the Spacebar will scroll to the end of your current view, while Shift+Spacebar will scroll up.
• Address Bar. This last one is simple but important. Pressing Command+L puts focus on the address bar and selects its contents. I use this all the time for quickly grabbing a copy of the current URL, for entering a new one, or in combination with a press of the Tab key to get to the search field.

Plugins and Extensions

When it comes to plugins and extensions, I’d prefer to have none if I could. Maybe that’s just because every Add-On you installed used to slow Firefox down when that browser first came out. It’s less of a problem these days, but I still like to keep my plugin library short.

• Click to Flash. This is a “must have” in my opinion. Simply put, it blocks all unwanted Flash objects on the screen until I want them; when I do, I just click on the placeholder to load the Flash.
• 1Password. Another “must have” as far as I’m concerned. 1Password helps me get a handle on all my credentials by generating and remembering complex passwords for me.
• Ultimate Status Bar. This nice little extension gives Safari an auto-hiding, Chrome-style status bar that disappears when it’s not needed. It can also expand shortened URLs and display file size info.
• Type to Navigate. Type to Navigate lets me type the text of any link on the page to select and then open it. Pressing Command+G selects the next instance of the text on the screen and Command+Shift+G selects the previous. As a bonus, I can also press Command+I when focused on a link to send it to Instapaper. The potential for this one is huge, though I’ve noticed a couple pages it can’t quite seem to navigate

There is a crazy number of Extensions available for Safari these days, so do have a look and find the ones that best suit your needs.

Hidden Preferences

There’s one hidden preference that’s a required setting for me: forcing tabs. I hate having a bunch of new windows always popping up, so I set this option to force all new window links to open up in new tabs instead. To enable this, just open up Terminal.app (in your Utilities folder) and use the defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -boolean command.

Bookmarklets

I manage all my proper bookmarks over at Pinboard, but I do have a few key bookmarklets that I need to make sure are available from Safari:

• Read Later. This one sends the current URL over to Instapaper for later reading. I use it any time I come across something I know I’ll want to read when I get the chance.
• Send to Pukka. I use Pukka to manage all my bookmarks over at Pinboard. This bookmarklet sends the current URL, along with any selected text on the page over to Pukka, creating a new bookmark on Pinboard using the selected text for the description.

I’ll probably add a new shortcut or two as I need them, but for the most part, I’m happy with the functionality this provides. I spend so much time in the browser these days that it only makes sense to learn to be as efficient with it as I can. No matter which browser you use, do yourself a favor and take some time to learn the shortcuts, explore the preferences, and find the add-ons that best suit your needs.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Report: Web Worker Survey 2010

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I’ve used Safari as my default browser since 2008, but lately I’ve decided to give Google Chrome a shot at becoming my new standby. The main reason I chose to give Chrome a chance was that one of the sites I use every day loads like molasses in Safari, yet loads quickly in Chrome.

Since I know some of you are going to mention Firefox, I’ll tell you right now that I’ve ruled it out. It just doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll use Firefox on Windows, but on a Mac it’s just… weird. Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Interface

I suppose Chrome has an attractive interface, but I do think it looks better on Windows, partly because it feels designed for it rather than OS X (look at Chrome’s bookmarks manager and you’ll see what I mean). It just looks better with Aero.

Some aspects of Chrome’s tabs implementation annoy me. Mostly, I’m pretty happy with them, but there are two drawbacks. One being that, because the tabs take up the title bar, there’s less room to drag the window. This isn’t a problem for people who maximize their browser windows, but I like to keep my windows a certain size and I move them around a lot, since I’m always dragging images onto my desktop.

Another side effect of having the tabs in the title bar means that Chrome’s title bar doesn’t really function like one; you never actually see the full title of a web page unless it fits within the tab, which seems like a small complaint, but it’s still annoying.

Features

There were several features I missed from Safari when I switched to Chrome. Probably the one I missed most was Safari’s Reader view, which lets you reformat a long passage of text in an attractive drop-down that cuts out the clutter.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for Chrome that mimics Reader, and actually surpasses it in some ways. The extension’s called iReader and is available in the Chrome extensions gallery. When you hit the arrow keys to scroll through something in Reader for Safari, the cursor doesn’t disappear like it does in normal web pages, but it does in the iReader extension, which is less distracting for me.

Speaking of extensions, there aren’t any extensions I’ve come across for Chrome that aren’t available for Safari, or that I absolutely can’t live without. The opposite isn’t true. In fact, one of the unofficial Safari extensions that I love, ClickToFlash, isn’t available for Chrome, and it looks like that’ll be the case for some time.

Performance

It’s almost a crapshoot here. I can tell you that using Chrome feels faster than using Safari, but only a little. They both use the same rendering engine, WebKit, but they use different JavaScript engines, and from what I’ve learned about both Safari’s Nitro and Chrome’s V8, V8 is superior, but the difference in speed is also small.

On the interface performance side, I’ve noticed that when I have about six tabs open in Chrome, dragging the tabs around gets laggy. I don’t experience this lag with Safari, which I think has the best implementation of tab-dragging in any browser.

Bugs

I can generally say that I’ve experienced more bugs in Chrome than I have in Safari. For instance, in Chrome, almost every time I go back to a Google search result from, say, a Wikipedia page, the page doesn’t display and I’m left with the cute little dead tab face, then I have to re-enter the search in Google. It’s almost a deal-breaker for me.

There are other bugs, of course, but none that are as annoying or pervasive as the above.

Security

Chrome wins here, bar none. Safari is notorious for being a vector of vulnerability attacks, having famously been hacked in just 10 seconds at the annual Pwn2Own contest in 2009, while Chrome was the only browser that wasn’t hacked. However, security isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome, as there’s very little chance I’d get a virus anyway, since there aren’t many viruses developed for the Mac and I’m a pretty safe surfer.

Will I stay with Chrome?

After using Chrome for a couple of weeks and getting accustomed to all its quirks on the Mac, I’ve decided to switch back to Safari. There just isn’t enough reason for me to stick with Chrome, and the Google search bug mentioned above is a huge annoyance, one that outweighs the poor performance of Safari on the one page that had me considering a switch to begin with.

Did I make the right choice? How’s your experience with Chrome been?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
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Just released from Apple, Safari 5.0.2 addresses a few usability issues, as well as three security flaws that might get your Mac or PC pwned. For general usage, Safari 5.0.2:

• Fixes an issue that could prevent users from submitting web forms
• Fixes an issue that could prevent web content displaying correctly with Google Image results when Flash 10.1 is installed
• Establishes an encrypted, authenticated connection to the Safari Extensions Gallery

Two of the three security issues affect both Safari for OS X and Windows. As usual, the exploits can occur when “visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution.” Beyond that, the WebKit flaws relate to floating point data handling and run-in styling.

The third security issue is for Windows and sounds a lot like DLL load hijacking, “opening a file in a directory that is writable by other users may lead to arbitrary code execution.” HD Moore of Metasploit explains it more clearly.

Essentially, if you open a file type associated with [a vulnerable app] from a remote network share, the application will also try to load one more DLLs from the share, Moore explained. Even if the file that the user opened is completely safe, a malicious DLL can be supplied that will lead to code execution.

Because no user interaction is required, other than questionable web surfing choices, it’s strongly recommended Safari users update as soon as possible.

Apple has also released Safari 4.1.2 for OS X 10.4.

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Extensions have now gone public with the newly released Safari 5.0.1. Here’s a list of seven extensions you should install right away. Also, be sure to read our previous list of 25 extensions worth checking out.

AdBlock

Firefox users should recognize this popular extension. This one’s an offshoot of AdBlock for Chrome, which itself is an offshoot of AdBlock Plus, the original Firefox extension. AdBlock does what its name implies: block ads. I installed it just to block that obnoxiously huge banner ad on YouTube’s homepage. If you’re not the type to ever click on ads anyway, then why not cut down on the visual (and sometimes audible) clutter?

Type-To-Navigate

Type-To-Navigate is a mouse-hater’s dream. It lets you navigate links by simply typing the name of the link. So say I wanted to view the About page of a blog, I’d just type “about” and Type-To-Navigate will highlight the link and display an attractive popup of what I’d written (“about”). The only places where this extension doesn’t work are in text fields and when the link is attached to an image. However, it should find any text link with no problems. Another neat thing you can do with it is to press certain shortcuts while the link you’re searching for is highlighted. You can type ⌘G to find next, ⌘C to copy the URL, and ⌘I to send it to Instapaper.

Invisible Status Bar

Another neat extension from the developer of Type-To-Navigate, Invisible Status Bar gives you a Google Chrome-like status bar that pops up when hovering over links, and even tells you how big a file is when you’re hovering over a download link.

MouseGestures

This feature was originally pioneered by Opera back in 2001, and it’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to get it into Safari (at least officially). If you’re unaware, mouse gestures are where you hold down a button on the mouse (normally the right or middle button) and move the mouse to perform a gesture. Gestures can do things like go back a page, or reload. MouseGestures only offers four gestures right now: up, down, left, and right. Assignable actions run the gamut from going back a page to closing the active tab. Unfortunately, there are no customizable gestures like in Opera yet.

WOT (Web Of Trust)

Another popular Firefox extension, WOT offers better security when searching the web by ranking pages based on their content, with other WOT users providing the rankings. The green WOT symbol means the site is safe, and the red means it’s unsafe, with several degrees of safety in between. The only annoying thing about it is that it pops up a little indicator in the top left of the window whenever you visit a new site, but fortunately, it doesn’t popup when you visit a site you’ve already visited.

Gmail Counter

For those who don’t use anything other than Gmail’s web-based interface, this extension is rather useful. It adds a new toolbar icon that shows how many unread messages are in your inbox. Clicking on the icon also takes you to your inbox, so you can get rid of your Gmail bookmark, if you have one.

Reload Button

This one was made by the venerable, and über-critical, John Siracusa, to address his annoyance with the location of Safari’s reload button since version 4. It adds a reload button to the toolbar that’s freely movable, unlike the default reload button. There isn’t much else to say about it, unless you like Safari’s default reload button, in which case, what’s wrong with you?

You could install most of these from the Extensions Gallery, but I’ve elected to link directly to the developers websites, as Apple doesn’t have individual pages for extensions yet.

Have you been playing around with Safari extensions? What are your favorites so far?

Related GigaOM Pro Research (subscription required): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

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Apple today announced the release of Safari 5.0.1. What’s significant in this point release is that Apple has turned on support for the Extensions Gallery. When Safari 5 was released in June, it included support for extensions so that developers could start building them, but without access to the Extensions Gallery, users had no easy way to find and install those extensions.

The Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible from the Safari menu or via extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, with no need for a browser restart. Extensions can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari.

Safari Extensions are built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards. Every Safari Extension is signed with a digital certificate from Apple to prevent tampering and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions work in a sandbox, so they can’t access information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.

While the Safari Extension Gallery is launching with a range of extensions from the likes of Bing, the New York Times, Twitter and eBay, it’s nowhere near to matching the usefulness of Chrome’s, let alone Firefox’s gigantic range of useful extensions. Apple’s decision to include extension support in Safari is a smart one, but until developers start porting the most useful extensions to Safari, I’ll find it tough to switch from my favorite browsers.

You can download Safari 5.0.1 for both Mac and PC for free from Apple.

What Chrome or Firefox extensions would you like to see ported to Safari?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

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Apple has opened up the Safari extensions gallery for third-party submissions in preparation of opening the gallery to the public. While you can install extensions now, you need to first know where to download them.

It’s a good bet that the average user probably doesn’t know anything about the extensions yet. We’ve compiled a list of 25 of our favorites, but Apple’s gallery will open up extensions to a wider audience, much like its downloads page did for third-party Mac OS X apps.

If you are a developer, submitting your extension is fairly simple. Apple has a form to fill out in the Safari Dev Center, and it’ll send an email to let you know when you’re extension has been received. When we walked through the submission process, Apple sent us this email:

“Thank you for submitting your Safari Extension.

Apple reviews all submissions and reserves the right to omit, edit, or reject any submission. Please note you will not receive any further notifications.

We appreciate your interest in Safari.”

Based on this reply it seems like the extensions Gallery may be subject to the same approval process as the App Store. Firefox has a similar review process for hosting addons at addons.mozilla.org, similar that is in that there is a process. Mozilla has been handling extensions for a long time, and has the process finely tuned. When submitting an addon for Firefox, the addon is available immediately and labeled “experimental,” and requires the user to acknowledge and accept the risk of using an addon that has not been reviewed by an editor. Mozilla has clear rules about what is acceptable and what is not, and has a page that addresses the review process directly. So far, I have not found the same for Safari.

Google Chrome also has extensions, but in a much looser, less controlled environment than Firefox or Safari. According to Google:

Most extensions won’t go through an approval process before being listed in the gallery. The exception to this rule are extensions which utilize the NPAPI interface, or extensions which access file:// URLs

Google’s rules are loose, but at least they are not vague. I hope that as development on Safari progresses, and the extensions gallery matures, the rules defining what is allowed and what is not are more clearly defined.

If you are interested in developing your own Safari extension, check out our beginner tutorial which walks you through creating a very basic “Hello World” extension.

View full post on TheAppleBlog

The best place to start with any new programming job is a simple “Hello World.” With this walkthrough for creating a basic Safari extension, we’ll create a skeleton to build a toolbar button from. If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you are already 95 percent of the way to your first Safari extension.

To learn more about using Safari, check out our Safari 101 screencast on TechUniversity (subscription required).

Get Registered

Safari Extensions need to be signed to be installed, so before writing any code, head over to the Safari Developer Center to register as a Safari Developer. It’s free to join, and binds to your Apple ID from your MobileMe or iTunes account. You will have to follow the steps in the online wizard to create your own signed certificate, which you’ll use to create your extension. Once the certificate is created, just double-click to install it. Safari will automatically use this certificate when building your extensions.

Enable the Develop Menu & Extensions

Building Safari Extensions starts inside of Safari, but to get there you have to enable the Develop menu. To do so, go to Safari Preferences, select the “Advanced” tab on the end, then check the last option on the page, labeled “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”

You’ll see the new menu appear, click on it, check “Enable Extensions,” and select “Show Extension Builder.”

Create a New Extension

In the Extension Builder, click on the plus sign in the bottom left hand corner, then select “New Extension.” Choose a place to put the source code for your extension; I always put my code in a “Code” folder under my home directory. Give it a meaningful name, like “Hello World.” In the new form, fill out the “Extension Info” section, and change the Bundle Identifier under “Extension Details” to com.theappleblog.helloworld. Under “Extension Website Access” set “Access Level” to All, and check “Include Secure Pages.”

Open the Project Folder

This is where it gets a little confusing. It seems like Apple would like you to be able to build the entire extension in Safari, but they only give you half the tools to do it. The next option on the list is “Extension Global Page,” in a drop down menu, but there is no option to create one. Once the extension project folder is created (it’ll be in that folder you selected when you created your new extension), you need to open it up and add a couple of files to it. Since we are building a toolbar extension, you will need two files: an image in PNG format, and an HTML file which will hold our JavaScript. You can download both the HTML and the PNG file to use here. Add those two files to the project folder, and switch back to the Extension Builder. Now, when you click on the drop down menu under Extension Global Page, you should see the option for “global.html”, go ahead and select that.

Next, in the “Extension Chrome” section, click the “New Toolbar Item” button. That should drop down a new form with seven options. Fill out the form like this example:

Write Some Code

Open the global.html file in your favorite text editor. In this file is all of the logic for the extension. When our icon on the Safari toolbar is pressed, it will send an event named “sayHello”. Safari will parse our global.html file and see if that event is defined. Since we are checking for that event with the line if (event.command === “sayHello”), our JavaScript will trigger whenever that button is pressed. It’s important that the command defined in the Extension Builder matches the event.command we are looking for in global.html. When the event is matched, Safari will run any JavaScript inside the if statement which, in our case, is a simple alert box.

If you are familiar with JavaScript, you’ll be able to tell right away what you can do here. If not, just know that you can replace the line alert(“Hello World”); with whatever valid JavaScript you’d like.

With the Toolbar Items menu is filled out, you should be ready to build the extension. Click on the “Build Package” button in the top right corner of the Extension Builder. Save the extension to your desktop, then double-click on it to install it in Safari. You should notice a new button on the toolbar sporting the nifty TAB logo. Click on it, and you should see an alert window pop up saying hello.

Debug Workflow

If you don’t already have the global.html file open, go ahead and open it in your favorite text editor again. Change the text of the alert to say “Hello Jon,” or whatever you would like. Save the file without closing the text editor, then switch back to the Extension Builder and click “Reload.” Now switch to Safari and hit your button again, it should now display the new text in the alert window.

Build Something Awesome

This article has barely scratched the surface of what Safari Extensions can do. For more in-depth information, read through the Developers Guide on the Apple web site. I can’t wait to see what awesome extensions creative developers come up with.

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It must be “beat up on Apple” week. Not only has the company come under fire for new license terms in the iPhone OS that appear to block Google’s AdMob service, but some are crying foul over a new feature in the latest version of Safari, known as “Reader,” which strips out advertising from web pages. The complaints over the licensing terms for the iPhone actually have some merit, but the howls of outrage over the Safari feature — which one commentator described as “dropping a nuclear bomb on the entire web economy” — border on the ridiculous.

Just to recap, the Reader feature (which is only available on certain web pages) is triggered by a small icon in the browser address bar, which when clicked pulls up a separate window within the Safari browser that contains just the text of the page, with graphics but without any advertising. This is the source of the outrage, as it’s seen by some as a dagger aimed directly at the heart of web publishers that rely on advertising. Wired magazine says the feature was designed to push publishers into designing apps instead of just letting readers browse their content, while Ars Technica calls it another “evil genius” plan from Apple.

The feature is hardly a brand-new Apple invention, however; it’s based on open-source code from a feature called Readability, which does exactly the same thing and is available for multiple browsers. And there are (and have been for some time) plenty of other services that do similar things: one popular one, called Instapaper, saves a version of a web page that can be viewed later without any images or advertising. Another very popular web extension or plugin, known as Ad Block, does exactly what it says on the package: blocks all advertising from every web page a user visits.

Do these extensions and plugins remove advertising? Yes, although in the case of Safari Reader, Readability and Instapaper, the user downloads the entire page and presumably sees the ads before they decide to implement the feature. So are they killing the advertising-based content business? Hardly. The fuss over the Safari feature seems particularly absurd, since the browser has less than 5 percent market share (although it is much higher on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, for obvious reasons). As for the new feature being a surreptitious attempt to push content companies to develop apps, that seems a little Machiavellian, even for Apple — especially since only a fraction of readers are ever going to use the Reader feature.

As a writer for The Guardian put it, the best thing about these kinds of features and plugins is they force media outlets to recognize just how broken the reader experience is on a lot of websites, with giant ads everywhere and other design choices that are made for purposes rather than readability. As he notes, if Safari Reader and other features like it do nothing else, perhaps they will remind content sites that appealing to readers should be their primary goal.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future

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Apple’s new Safari 5 brings support for browser extensions, which the company plans to showcase on its own gallery in a few months. In the meantime, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorites.

To learn more about using Safari, check out our Safari 101 screencast on TechUniversity (subscription required).

Web & Utilities

AdBlock

The AdBlock extension is a great way to remove unwanted content from your browsing experience. Download the extension and load your web pages without as many intrusive ads. There’s even beta options to remove Google ads and YouTube ads.

BuiltWith Analysis

The BuiltWith Analysis extension provides an insider look into a website with one click. You can see what JavaScript libraries a site uses, who provides analytics as well as other nitty-gritty details that are totally public, but often obscured in tons of HTML source code.

Invisible Status Bar

Google’s Chrome browser does away with the status bar at the bottom of your window and only shows it when you hover over a link. The Invisible Status Bar extension does the same thing for Safari!

Live CSS Editing

The Live CSS Editing extension provides a quick way to load up a page and test modifications to the CSS in real time.

Bit.ly Shortener

The Safari Bit.ly Shortener extension makes it easy to shorten a URL with Bit.ly. Simply load the URL in your browser and then click the button!

PageSaver

The Svay.com PageSaver extension will, in one click, save the visible portion of a web page as an image and automatically download it into your Downloads folder.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an extension for using a centralized place for posting to all of your blogs, supporting a variety of typical blog features including formatting, categories and tags. ScribeFire’s Safari Extension brings support for this right into Safari.

Snapper

Similar to PageSaver, Snapper also saves the currently viewable portion of a website as a PNG and automatically downloads it for you.

Type to Navigate

The Type to Navigate extension is pretty darn cool. If you’re browsing a page and there’s a link you want to follow, just start typing any word that’s contained within it. It’ll highlight the link and then you just press Return to load it. If it’s not the right link, press Command + G to move to the next one.

E-Commerce

Amazon.com Search Bar

If you frequent Amazon.com, you’ll want the Amazon.com Search Bar extension. It’ll add a new Amazon.com bar to Safari giving you one-click access to your shopping cart, wish list, the latest deals and a quick way to search Amazon.com.

InvisibleHand

The InvisibleHand extension will subtly let you know when it finds a cheaper price to a product elsewhere on the Internet. The list of supported retailers is fairly decent for the U.S., UK and Germany, but more are being added frequently.

Social

FaceBlock

The FaceBlock extension blocks all of the annoying ads on Facebook. I always feel a little sadness for the advertisers that are paying for impressions that I never have to see. Oh well.

safari140

This gem of an extension allows you to post directly to Twitter from within Safari. Links are automatically shortened by is.gd.

Share with Facebook

The Share with Facebook extension gives you one-click access to share your current URL with your Facebook account.

Webbla

If you use Webbla for managing your bookmarks, take a look at the Webbla browser extension, which allows you to quickly add or modify them.

YouTube Full Screen

This extension is a great way to enable full-screen support of YouTube videos if you’re using YouTube’s HTML5 player instead of its Flash player.

Productivity

Background Tabs

The Background Tabs extension will allow you to open a new tab in the background by simply pressing the V key.

Gmail Checker

The Gmail Checker extension will give you an icon and badge in your Safari toolbar to show unread messages on your Gmail account. Keep an eye on their website for updates because the next version will support Google Apps users.

GoMBoX

The GoMBoX extension transforms your Google Images experience by showcasing results in a Lightbox overlay, allowing you to see larger versions without having to leave your search results page.

Instapaper

If you love Instapaper, check out Instafari, a simple one-click way to save an article to your Instapaper account.

InstaPaper Greystyled and Article Tools

The Greystyled and Article Tools extensions provide you with a cleaner style for your Instapaper.com account. Once the extension is installed, just visit instapaper.com to see the changes.

Google Reader – Simplified

If you’re a fan of Google Reader and the GreaseMonkey scripts that give it a simplified look, check out Lucidica, an extension that’s based off Helvetireader.

Safari Reload Button

If you’ve ever wanted to move the reload button for Safari out of the URL window and into its own button, the Safari Reload Button extension does just that.

Search Preview

With the Search Preview extension, you can preview the web pages that show up in your search results. This extension works with Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Toodlethings

If you use Toodledo for your task management, the Toodlethings extension re-styles the web interface with clean buttons and easier to read fonts.

For more great extensions, check out the Safari Extensions blog and keep an eye on Apple.com for its showcase that’s scheduled to premiere later this summer.

Have you written your own extension or found others? Share them in the comments below!

View full post on TheAppleBlog