Apple adds Safari Extensions and Extensions Gallery

Apple on Wednesday released the newest version of their Safari web browser to, finally, fully support the use of third party extensions.

Along with the release of Safari 5.0.1, Apple introduced the Safari Extensions Gallery, a one stop shop for the best extensions available for use in Safari.

I used Safari from version 1.0 up until Safari 4 without giving much thought to any other browser that was out there. That was until Google Chrome was released for the Mac. (I’m a sucker for WebKit browsers, what can I say.)

While the speed difference between Safari and Chrome was small, Safari edged out Chrome in the beginning only to be passed by later releases of Chrome, the big advantage to Chrome was the ability to add extensions and use them right in the browser.

These extensions became part of my browsing routine and pushed Safari to the role of my backup browser in the event I needed two different browsers open at once.

The latest release of Safari changes this, however.

While I have grown quite attached to Chrome, this blog post is even being wrote up in Chrome, Safari 5.0.1 really gives Chrome a run for its money as now the feature set of Safari and Chrome becomes similar.

Comic Sans Be Gone, a new extension featured in Apple's Extensions Gallery.

In fact, an extension that I could never find in the Chrome gallery was a nifty little thing called “Comic Sans Be Gone”.

Comic Sans Be Gone takes any website that uses Comic Sans and replaces it with the lovely font known as Helvetica and, really, what more could anyone want than that?

One more update that Safari got with 5.0.1 was a fix for an issue with the Auto-Fill feature that was allowing hackers to grab name and city information from users. The oddity with this bug was that the only information accessible was information that started with a letter and not a number, however, this bug has been fixed so Auto-Fill away.

So if you haven’t already, update to Safari 5.0.1 and then head over to extensions.apple.com and take a look around then come back here and post your favorite extensions in the comments.