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The web is an amazing and vast resource.  And we find ourselves using it more and more.  I was thinking the other day how I haven’t used the Yellow Pages or picked up a map in years.  It’s so much more convenient to just look things up on the web.

But when we surf the web, we’re at the mercy of web designers.  Sometimes the useful information we seek is rendered unreadable, unusable, or simply annoying by web designers who think they are being unique when they are actually just being a pain.

Older users of the web will remember GeoCities.  GeoCities was the first site to make personal web pages possible.  And there was an explosion of hideousness the world has seldom seen before or since.  Light yellow text on hot pink backgrounds with images of dancing hamsters floating through the text.  White text over a background of a printed circuit board.  The choices were limitless.  And people tried them all.

While things have calmed down a bit, it’s still far too common to come across a web page that’s just not readable.  Usually, I just move on.  But what if it’s something I’m really interested in?

Take a look at the following page.  It’s from Brandon Sanderson’s blog <http://brandonsanderson.com/>.  Brandon is a New York Times bestselling fantasy writer.  He blogs, has a podcast, and tweets about the writing process.  It can be interesting stuff.  Sadly, his blog design is truly horrible:

Yellowish-greenish text over a black background would be bad enough.  But they’ve added a background pattern behind the text in the same color as the text, just a lighter shade.  It’s bearable for a short entry like the one above.  But longer entries can be maddening to read and tiring for the eyes.

I used to select the text like this and copy and paste it into Text Edit where I had complete control of it.  Change it to black, Palatino, 13 point and I was able to see and read it comfortably.  And there are some other tricks that I was going to present here.  But Safari 5 came out instead.

Safari 5 to the rescue.

For pages that appear to have articles, posts or other lengthy text, Safari 5 has a new feature called “Reader”.  Notice in the address bar in the above image.  There’s a new blue-grey tag that says Reader.

Click on it.  And you’ll get something like the following:

The same information is now presented in a larger font, with serifed black text on a white background.  You can zoom in or zoom out on the text, email or print it.  When you’re done, dismiss it to go back to the original page.  If the article is spread out over several web pages, Reader will try to suck them all in and present them all in one continuous read.  So you won’t have to keep clicking Next to move on and it’s easier to print or email.

Position the cursor in the bottom section of the window to get the pop up icon window.  Click the X to dismiss the Reader view.  Or, click Reader again in the address bar.

If you go to a site and don’t see Reader in the address bar, Safari wasn’t able to find an article (because of the way the web page was formatted) and you’re on your own.  But it works most of the time.  And when it does, it’s a godsend for people who read a lot on the web, or who read the occasional badly designed site.

I have a love/hate relationship with ads.

I love finding out what’s new.  And ads are often the best way to find things the press hasn’t discovered or decided to cover.

On the other hand, ads are often intrusive, getting in the way when you’re trying to get something done.  Animated ads on the web add another level of annoying.  I tend to get car sick.  If I’m watching a video on a monitor, I’m fine.  If a video/animation is running to the side of what I’m reading, the motion can cause a bit of nausea.  That does not make for a fun browsing experience.

So began my quest for decent ad blocking software for the Macintosh.  I looked at every browser for the Mac (and there are more than you’d think).  And every ad blocking option for each of them.  (Surprisingly, some browsers have ad blocking built-in.)

After looking through all the options, I can safely say that none of them are perfect.  None do everything I’d like.  None block everything.  In the end, I came back to Safari (as the best Mac browser) and added an ad blocking hack.  But before I got around to writing it up, Apple released Safari 5.  No more hacks!

So we’re able to use a real extension that works correctly with Safari!

First, if you haven’t already done so, download and install Safari 5.

Next, enable extensions in Safari 5, you know, if you haven’t done so already.

Before we block us some ads, lets have a look at some.  Here’s a screen shot from <http://macdailynews.com/>.  macdailynews is an Apple fanboi site that dishes the latest news about Apple and it’s competitors and makes snarky comments about the competition and anything anti-Apple.  Anyway, here’s the shot:

To get the full effect, you have to visit the site.  As you scroll down, the right hand column fills with more ads.  All of them doing everything I hate in web ads:  Blinking, flashing, animating, singing, dancing, doing little skits with annoying British accents.

Now head over to <http://safariadblock.com/> and download AdBlock for Safari.  Once it’s downloaded, double-click on it in the download window.  You will be asked if you want to install it.  Just for fun, install it.

Let’s see how it went.  Go back over to <http://macdailynews.com/>.  You may have to reload it to get it to refresh.  You should be something more like this:

The site is now blessedly quiet.  Much more readable and enjoyable.

AdBlock for Safari isn’t perfect.  Some ads will get through.  But the most annoying ones will be rid from your browsing experience.  It uses a couple of lists of ad servers that are maintained on the web.  These lists are constantly maintained and AdBlock for Safari will automatically get a new copy whenever the lists are updated.  So it truly is a set it and forget it extension.

I hope it helps you better enjoy your time online.  If you like it and keep it, head back over to <http://safariadblock.com/> and make a small donation to keep the goodness coming.

Extensions allow you to add functions and features to a program.  And there are a lot of extensions out there for web browsers.

But Safari has lacked built-in support for extensions.  Leaving extension writers for Safari to develop tricks and hacks to get their add-ons to work.  Often these tricks and hacks would be broken in the next version of Safari.

Well, Safari 5 adds an official, sanctioned and supported mechanism for creating extensions.

But it’s turned off by default.  No doubt Apple thinks that if you don’t know how to turn them on, you probably shouldn’t be installing any.  Well, this is how you turn them on:

• Open Safari.
• In the Safari menu, choose Preferences…
• Click “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
• Dismiss the Preferences window.  (At the bottom.)

• You will get a new Develop menu in Safari’s menu bar.  In this menu, select Enable Extensions.

That’s all there is to it.

Sadly you can’t enable extensions and then turn off the Develop menu.  If you turn off the Develop menu, you not only disable the extensions, but you loose all the extensions you’ve installed.  So leave that Develop menu there.

When I started this blog, my idea for the first few posts was a short series of things that make browsing the web more secure and enjoyable (or in some case just more bearable).

Like all new things, it didn’t come together as quickly as I thought it would.  Research to make the articles complete and accurate ended up taking me on the long route to areas I hadn’t considered.  Then that route lead me back to my original ideas.

My real life got in the way, and I just didn’t get around to writing the articles I had planned.

That all worked out well though, because 2 days ago (Monday, June 7, 2010), Apple released the latest version of their browser, Safari 5.

Safari 5 changes everything for the better.  It includes a long list of security features and fixes, making it a “must have” update.  (One “feature” of the original web browser was that when you visited a web site, the browser would provide the site with a complete list of other sites you’d visited.  Every browser since has contained that same feature.  Safari 5 is the first browser to withhold that information.  Thank you Apple.)

The new version should show up automatically in OS X’s Software Update.  If it doesn’t, head over to <http://www.apple.com/safari/> to download it.  If you don’t have it, go get it.  We’ll be using it for the next few articles.