A Few Great Safari Extensions

Here are a few free browser extensions and bookmarklets that make the experience of browsing the Web and reading on a screen a tiny bit better.

Inquisitor

The first of two on this list developed by David Watanabe, Inquisitor is an add-on which makes web search dramatically easier. Yahoo bought it a few years back, but you can use it with any search engine. In addition to offering basic search suggestions, it shows the top three results for what you've currently typed in, similar to the Top Hit in Spotlight. But most valuable is its ability to search any site of your choosing, from Google and Yahoo to Amazon, Flickr, IMDb and Wikipedia. The program's preferences include a number of preset sites you can add to Inquisitor's shortlist, but you can have any site you want bookmarked by just typing the URL of its search results page. You can even assign key commands to different websites to make switching search engines very simple: for example, pressing "Command + Option + A" after you've entered a query could take you to Amazon's search results.

Safari140

Do you love sharing links on Twitter? David Watanabe's tiny, Safari-only Twitter app can help you immensely. Once you've installed Safari140, just press "Ctrl + T" on any page you're viewing and a pop-up box will appear, complete with a remaining character count and an input field already containing a shortened URL of the current page. Type whatever commentary you'd like to add, press "Enter" and your link's sent to your followers instantly.

Readability

Are you distracted by the blinking banner ads and general trash littering a website's design and surrounding an article you want to read? Install the Readability bookmarklet, and after a single click the page will transform into a much more legible column of text on a solid background, free of any distractions. Created as an experiment by the Web design firm Arc90, it made David Pogue's best-ideas-of-the-year list last week.

Quietube

Here's another bookmarklet which shares similar intent with Readability, but aims to scrub distractions from web videos rather than text articles. It also offers the ability to send Quietube URLs to your friends, so if you'd like to send a friend a nice YouTube video without exposing them to the horrible comments below it, this is a great way to do it.

One app I wasn't able to mention here, since it's paid, is 1Password, which I love and use frequently. Are there other browser extensions you'd like to add to the list?