My secondary browser: Safari

For over six months now, I’ve been running my web applications in Safari on my Mac at work and my PC at home (yes, you did read that correctly, Mac at work and PC at home!). I run Gmail, GDocs, Remember The Milk, and others within Safari while I use FireFox to browse the web. I have keyboard shortcuts that run safari.exe/safari.app with the URL of the service I want to use. I can’t imagine browsing the web without Web Developer, FireBug, Google Toolbar, spell checking and RSS feeds of specific tags of my delicious bookmarks as a LiveBookmark. It would be as if I want back to using Internet Explorer or something.

When Safari for Windows became available in early 2008, I decided to try it. It was fast, but I hated the interface (especially the dimming of the page when you try to Find a word). The interface was too minimalistic. If I wanted less crap on my browser window, I’d hit F11, thank you very much. What’s a fast loading, standards compliant, minimal interface browser good for? You guessed it: WebApps! I use Safari for my web applications.

Water-logged about logging in

One of the annoying aspects of web applications is authentication, you have to login. Things become even more annoying if you use multiple accounts. Anyone have more one Gmail account? Thought so.

Everyday scenario: I log into my secondary Gmail account that I send my WordPress web sites 404 errors to and new mail pops up from Gmail Notifier in Growl. I click the email and it launches my “primary web browser.” In this case it’s FireFox, and I’m already logged into Gmail with my secondary account. What happens? FireFox goes to my seconfary account’s Inbox. I have to log out and re-login in order to view my new email! Using a second browser that is only logged into my primary account solves this probem.

Advantages of using a separate browser for web applications

• It’s sand-boxed: Your browsing of other pages won’t crash browser and thus deleted the email to your mother
• It’s fast: WebKit renders HTML faster than Gecko (Mozilla)
• You’re primary user account is not logged out, it is always there when you need it.

Shrugging Chrome

I shrugged when Google announces its Chrome browser this week, I’ve practically been using it for months now. However, I look forward to see where this goes and will value any increase in performance and productivity a Google browser will give me when using their web applications as well as others.

I have to admit as much as I like my library, Indianapolis Marion County Public Library. I do not care for the web interface with it’s URL session ids and timeouts and JavaScript linking! So I try to stay out of the website until I want the book. I saw LibraryLookup on 43 Folders. I tried LibraryLookup, but was annoyed with the ISBN interface. BookBurro looked promising but it only worked on 20-some library. I’m not a member of any of those libraries.

I decided to roll my own Firefox Search Plugin–which is very simple to do. You just have to know the query keywords for your library (such as isbn, keyword, title). The IMCPL is an IPAC system and uses “UTL” for its title keyword. Just drop this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Title Browsing or this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Keyword Search in your Firefox Search Plugins folder and restart Firefox. You will need Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or greater for this.

The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firfox\SearchPlugins

The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is for OS-X that’s /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/{user name}/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/{profile number}.default/searchplugins/

That’s all there is to it. Here are the few lines of the code for the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library for title browsing:

<search
name="IMCPL"
method="GET"
action="http://catalog.imcpl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp"
queryCharset="utf-8">

<input name="term" user>
<input name="index" value="UTL">
<input name="spp" value="50">
</search>