5 Safari extensions to ease your web browsing

5 Safari extensions to ease your web browsing

Browsing the web can be frustrating at times. Flash banners crashing your browser, hideous comments on youtube videos, etc. Safari has some simple extension which make your browsing experience a lot more fun.

Enhance YouTube with YouTube5 and YoutubeWide

Whenever visiting YouTube, there’s a couple of things I usually do:
- Select a higher quality
- Disable comments/annotations
- Click the expand button

That’s my usual routine and just think about the time you’re wasting every single time you watch a movie. There’s two Safari extensions which do these things for you: YouTube5, which disables the flash movie-player of YouTube, and loads the HTML5 player, without annotations! The other extension is YoutubeWide which expands the video window to the full width of Youtube.

Example of YouTubeWide and Youtube5 (click to enlarge)

Youtube5 for Safari can be downloaded on the author’s site.
YoutubeWide can be downloaded on the official Safari Extensions Gallery or on the author’s website.

Kill those flash banners with ClickToFlash

Flash can really enhance webpages and is ideal for visualizing certain charts and/or movies, but it’s rarely used properly and often freezes your browser, especially on OSX.

No worries, there’s a fix for that now: ClickToFlash. It replaces all your flash player embeds on a page with a placeholder. Clicking the placeholder will load your flash component. This way you can still use flash if it’s really needed.

ClickToFlash can be found on ClickToFlash.com.

An example of ClickToFlash at work on NYTimes.com. It really speeds up the site (click to enlarge)

Minimal extensions

A lot of sites look better with minimal design. A lot of community sites I visited have this problem, like Reddit or MacRumors. Cornell Campbell did a nice job at creating some Safari Extensions which minimizes the design of some of these sites. They practically replace the site’s own CSS with a custom stylesheet. You can find Cornell’s extensions on his site.

Example of Reddit’s default style (left, click to enlarge) and Reddit using RedditMinimal (right, click to enlarge)

Greystyled

There’s also some ‘greystyled’ extensions on the Safari Extensions Gallery which do the same to for example Instapaper.

More extensions

This was just a small portion of the available Safari Extensions. More extensions can be found on the Safari Extensions Gallery.