A long long way from home

Apple recently released Safari 4 beta for the Mac, and I think it’s actually pretty good. What especially trigged my interest was it’s new tab system, and most of all the sheer speed of this thing. Loading and rendering pages is suspiciously fast. The Norwegian online IT magazine seems to agree with me on this. (originally from Maximum PC)

However, there is always some wrinkles.

Wrinkle number one was the “Top sites” functionality. It is really slow, and bogs down the browser experience. Luckily, it’s mendable. I found a great list of tips for disabling/re-enabling functionality over at Macosxtips.co.uk. To say goodbye to Top Sites just enter the following in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool FALSE

The other thing was a decent flash block. I usually don’t mind sensible ads on web pages, I even find good deals that way some times. But flash ads are way to annoying, so I want to block them. Firefox has a nice plugin called Flashblock, which I have been using for quite a few years now. It blocks all flash, and gives a clickable flash symbol that will display the flash animation/video. Very useful.

I have been looking for something similar to Flashblock for Safari, but only found SafariStand which is based on blocking/allowing for specific sites… Not very useful, really – or I didn’t figure out how to set it up properly. But after some more googling I finally found ClickToFlash which does the same thing as flashblock and to top it all off is free as in freedom. Me like!