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Filed under: Utilities, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Browsers

10 Safari plugins that could make you drop Firefox

Wait, Safari has plug-ins? Yes, it's true! When it comes to choosing a browser, a lot of people consider Safari because of its speed and standards support, but ultimately settle on Firefox for one reason: plug-ins. Firefox has a plugin for everything, and it's hard to live without them once you get used to the added functionality. Some of the best plugins have Safari equivalents, though, so take a look at these and see if it changes your mind about Apple's browser.

Glims

Glims is the pinnacle of Safari plugins, adding a whole Swiss Army knife of features to your browser. Glims does tabs really well, letting you open links in a new tab instead of a new window, and choose whether new tabs open on the left or the right. It restores tabs from previous sessions.

It adds thumbnails to Google and Yahoo! search results. It lets you change search engines, and adds configurable search suggestions. And, as if that weren't enough for one plugin, It also allows you to enable full screen mode. You can adjust all of these features in the preferences, so don't skip Glims just because it sounds like more than you need.

Saft

Saft is a direct Glims competitor, offering a slightly different (and a bit more extensive) set of features. The two plugins tend to conflict, so take a look at what both have to offer before you decide which one to install. It's also worth noting that the full version of Saft costs $12.

Read more →

Filed under: Utilities, Yahoo!, Search

Inquisitor search plugin now available for Firefox

Safari users have been enjoying the search-as-you-type extension Inquisitor for a long time, and now Firefox users can, too. Although it was originally developed independently for Safari by David Watanabe (creator of apps like Acquistion and Newsfire), it was acquired by Yahoo! back in May. Apparently, that resulted in a preview of a Firefox version, which seems to work just as well as its Safari counterpart. If you like the idea of instant search results, displayed as you type, give it a try.

Inquisitor for Firefox
is still in preview, so you'll have to sign up or log in to download. Once installed, it goes in your list of search engines, and is enabled by default. If you decide you don't like it, just click the Inquisitor icon next to your search bar and switch back to whichever search engine you were using before.

The only drawback of the latest versions of Inquisitor, depending on how you look at it, is that they use Yahoo! Search by default. You don't notice this so much when you're going straight to a webpage from the Inquisitor results, but you definitely do when you perform a full search. (You can choose between Yahoo! and Google in the add-on's preferences, however.)



[Via Cybernetnews]

Filed under: Macintosh, Yahoo!, Search, Browsers

Inquisitor 3.2 adds languages and improves performance

A few months back, Download Squad's Danny Mendez wrote about Yahoo!'s acquisition of popular Safari InputManager Inquisitor. At the time, Danny was worried that Yahoo's purchase would make the tool unusable with other search engines, but those fears were unfounded, and Inquisitor continues to work well with either Google OR Yahoo.

Inquisitor is cool because it adds Spotlight-like functionality to the default Safari search box (it's kind of like the Awesome Bar for Firefox 3), along with easy access to other search results from places like Flickr or IMDB or Wikipedia. The design is also utterly kick-ass.

In the new release, users who choose to use Yahoo! search engine will see much, much faster results, thanks to integration with Yahoo's new BOSS platform. Like, instantaneously fast. Like, fast enough to make me consider changing my default search engine fast.

Inquisitor now supports eight languages in addition to English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

The interface has also become more streamlined and looks really, really great.

Inquisitor is free and available for Mac's running OS X 10.4 and up.

Filed under: Internet, Browser Tips, Search

Peers soups up the Firefox search bar (like Inquisitor for Safari)

Peers
Like all modern web browsers, Firefox has a little search bar that lets you quickly access popular sites including Google, Yahoo!, Dictionary.com or Wikipedia. But the search bar is still a two-click solution. You enter your query and then visit another web site with a page of results before clicking through to your final destination.

Peers is a Firefox extension that saves you one click by showing search results as you type. Just select your search engine of choice and Peers will provide a drop-down list with clickable search results as you enter your query.

The browser plugin does for Firefox much of what Inquisitor does or Safari.

If you want to install peers on Firefox 3, you'll need to disable extension compatibility checking, which is easy to do, but can cause some problems if you're not careful. We can confirm that Peers works fine with Firefox 3 RC 1. But trying other extensions that are not designed for your version of Firefox can break your browser.

[via CyberNet and Mozilla Links]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Yahoo!, Search, web 2.0

Yahoo acquires Inquisitor: Oh no?

inquisitor preferences
The bright developer behind Inquisitor has announced today that Yahoo! has acquired the rights to his program, which searches for and suggests results as you type. It's very similar to Spotlight except that it searches the Internet instead of your Mac's HDDs.

We worry that Yahoo! might ruin Inquisitor by preventing it from working with other search engines, but the developer insists he will remain the lead mind behind the program. He will not be working with Yahoo! as their official employee, so at least he's keeping his creative freedom. Though we don't know if the company will allow him to apply that freedom to the program since it's technically Yahoo's now.

Our suggestion, if you use Inquisitor, is to turn off the search for updates feature, which may lead you to accidentally update the program to a crippled version. If you're happy with the way Inquisitor works, there's no point in risking an update. Otherwise, don't agree to an update without researching the changes first. We wouldn't want you to restrict Safari's search bar to Yahoo. No one deserves that.

Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Freeware

Inquisitor brings Spotlight to Safari

If you use Mac OS X, you're probably familiar with Spotlight, which searches your hard drive and displays results as you type. Well, why not bring that same capability to web searching? Inquisitor is a free OS X app that adds "search as you type" functionality to Safari. Install Inquisitor, restart Safari, and when you start typing in Safari's search bar, Inquisitor will display up to three links and several suggested keywords as you go.
Inquisitor

This, of course, works best if you have a fast computer and fast Internet connection. I found Inquisitor to be a bit slow on my 800mhz iBook G4 (hey, we can't all have the latest and greatest). And of course, it would be simply impractical for Inquisitor to search the entire web as you type; instead it pulls its results from Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and several other sources.

If you don't have Safari, there's also a free web-based version, currently in beta. I actually found the web-based version to be faster than the Safari version.

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