Enabling Safari Extensions for Safari 5, and syncing them with all your Mac computers
Ingredients:
- You will need your own dropbox account, which is an amazing and free online storage solution. You can utilise this nifty solution to sync not only Safari components, but 1Password, iBank and many others.
- Safari 5 Browser
- Snow Leopard for your Mac
OK, first think, on your mac, make sure you have the latest Safari browser, make sure you go to Preferences -> Advanced and tick Show Development menu in menu bar.
Close the preferences pane, go to the Develop menu item up the top, select Enable Extensions. Finally, go back to you Preferences pane and you will see the new Extensions section.
You can download extensions by going to safariextensions.tumblr.com/ and just downloading and clicking on an extension.
Now that you have your nifty extensions, to synchronise your extensions with other macs, you need to perform the following trick. Unfortunately, until Apple decide to add this feature to their MobileMe sync package, you will have to do this workaround:
Create a dropbox folder, like ~/Dropbox/Backups/Safari. Depending on whether you want to sync your entire Safari collection (bookmarks, extensions) or just the extensions, you can perform either a or b.
-
- create folder ~/Dropbox/Backups/Safari, move the entire ~/Library/Safari folder to the dropbox one, then in terminal, type : ln -s ~/Dropbox/Backups/Safari/ ~/Library/Safari
- create folder ~/Dropbox/Backups/Extensions, move the entire ~/Library/Safari/Extensions folder to the dropbox one, then in terminal, type : ln -s ~/Dropbox/Backups/Extensions/ ~/Library/Extensions
On the other computer, make sure you remove either the Safari or Extensions folders from your ~/Library and do the terminal ln thing again.
And there you go, nifty extensions synced cross-mac.
