Apple Opens Safari Extensions Gallery →

Apple today launched the Safari Extensions Gallery:

Extensions are a great way for you to add new features to Safari 5.0.1.

Most of my favorites aren’t available yet, but can still install if you enable enable developer mode. My top extensions:

• AdBlock for Safari

• NoMoreiTune

  NoMoreiTunes is an extension for Safari 5 which disables the script that tries to start iTunes when you visit a link to the iTunes Store.

• EmailTabURLs

  This extension adds a toolbar button and contextual menu items to Safari. Selecting one composes an email containing the URLs of all open tabs in all windows, or the active window

• SafariRestore

  Automatically restore your previous or saved browsing session, for best results, set Safari to open new windows with an Empty page.

• Gentle Status Bar

  Gentle Status Bar is a lot like Chrome’s status bar, but has been styled to match Safari and the standard bar’s behavior when modifier keys are pressed.

Tab Candy for Firefox →

The great Aza Raskin, on his blog:

With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs.

Unlike some of other concepts, Tab Candy is being targeted for Firefox 4.

I feel that Firefox is in the spot Opera was a year ago, an older rendering engine with a bunch of innovations on top. I keep hearing complaints from users regarding the responsiveness of their Firefox 3.x install. If they can’t overcome this technically, or at least the perception, I’d worry a bit.

All this aside, Tab Candy could be the first real innovation to tabs in a production browser in a long time.

Both Flock and Opera released a beta today.

Flock is Windows only, but the big news is that they moved to Chromium from Firefox as their base.

Opera continues to optimize their new rendering engine, and it does feel fast.

Enable Safari 5 Extensions →

Should have pointed this out before:

Enable Safari’s developer menu. (Preferences → Advanced → Show developer menu) Then enable extensions. (Develop → Enable Extensions)

/via Hacker News

Chrome is now stable for Mac and Linux.

Every few weeks I give Chrome a try, but even with extensions, it’s just too featureless for me. Still, it’s a very fast and simple browser.

Dear Google: Please fork WebKit →

Haavard makes a wish, Dear Google: Please fork WebKit:

Not only would Google be in complete control of its own engine, but it would be a major blow to virus and malware authors, and it would give a much-needed boost to open Web standards.

It’s a little confusing that WebKit seems like Apple’s Safari nightly - which it isn’t. Google has its Chromium pages, which are for development versions of Chrome.

In a way, by creating the V8 JavaScript Engine, Google has already started doing this. Also, the fact that Chrome already surpassed Safari in desktop browser share, would give them leverage to make their forked WebKit the new reference point.

However, the real battle is in mobile browsing, where the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch combination is still kicking Android’s butt.

Still, complete vertical control is a trend Google has been following since Chrome was introduced, so I won’t be too surprised if this fork does happen in the next year.