Fixing Safari: ClickToFlash and Glimmerblocker

I love Safari in general. It’s speedy, looks like it was made on and for a Mac and has all basic features you need for your day to day browsing. All important web extensions such as Flash have plugins for Safari and best of all it doesn’t depend on XUL.

There are a few things though that bug me intently when it came down to Safari. First, there is no FlashBlock like Firefox has and seeing as how badly implemented Flash is and with easy pulls away a full core to software render HD-video on your screen. You should be able to disable Flash and only activate the flash movies you want as to keep your Mac below a threshold of 70 degrees Celsius and to not be bugged by every god damn flash movie around.

Thankfully someone decided it was time to nuke Flash too and started ClickToFlash which can be found on GitHub. Most people can just press the big ‘Download ClickToFlash 1.x.x here’ link, install the package and be done with it. Since I’m on 10.6 I decided to install XCode and compile the thing myself so after cloning the git repository I opened the .xcodeproj-file, selected “Base SDK, Release, Build Package’ and then hit Command+B combination. This creates a folder build > Release with an installer package, run it, restart Safari and rejoice.

The second annoyance I have to deal with are adds. All over the freaking internet, bugging the hell out of me, not even bothering to read them. Now there are a few AdBlock remakes for Safari, all implemented as InputManagers which tend to break after each Safari update and don’t function at all in their current state on 10.6.

However, someone with brains though ‘But, what if we run this as an HTTP-proxy on your Mac instead of an Input Manager?’ which would not only get you Safari ad free but quite a few other applications too. I was reluctant at first, to run a proxy on my Mac for ad filtering but since it was the only solution for 10.6 I decided to give GlimmerBlocker a whirl and I love it. GlimmerBlocker automatically reconfigures you network adapters for use with the HTTP-proxy and even has a feature to run a public proxy as to allow other machines or iPhone’s/iPod Touches to use the proxy on your machine.

GlimmerBlocker is found in the System Preferences and I’ve enabled all features except for the ‘Site Enhancements’ and added ‘Bjorn’s Add Filters’ to the package. This results in, first of all, a shitload of ads being blocked and some enhanced functionality for Safari, namely keyword expansion. So now I can type ‘gint teddybear’ in Safari’s address-bar and it will perform a lookup on Google International for teddybear, or ‘wiki teletubies’ or even ‘yt uman tetris’ and get my results just like browsers as Opera and Firefox can. You can also define custom Keyword Expansions, I have for example ‘g’ for google, ‘gnl’ for Google Netherlands, ‘w’ for wikipedia (instead of wiki) and ‘wnl’ for Dutch wikipedia, ‘lm’ of Last.fm Music search and ‘lu’ for Last.fm User search.

The beauty of GlimmerBlocker is that, because it is an HTTP-proxy it will never break Safari and you can update Safari as you please without having to fear the ‘Return of the Ads’.

So, if you use Safari daily, get your hands on both tools and enjoy. One little piece of advice, GlimmerBlocker does require a bit of a brain to operate.