Well, I think it will be, at least. I was wrong about my day–it did get better. Last night, I fell asleep watching Mythbusters. Woke up at 0100h with a headache so bad I couldn’t even lift my head, let alone get up. Fell back to sleep until 0200h, woke up again and my head still hurt, but it wasn’t quite as bad, so I got up, got in the shower (a hot shower will sometimes help a tension headache), then got into bed. Around 0300h, I fell asleep again, but woke up at 0645h still hurting. By the time I’d installed Safari, I had an even worse headache and a hate-on for a web browser that I haven’t felt since the last time I was forced to use IE6 (IE7 is slightly less horrible) for more than the time it took to download Firefox. I wanted to like it, but in its default state, I just couldn’t. It’s hard to search for ways to disable something when you have no idea what the thing is called, but when you have a whole lot of help from an Apple fan geek with tons of Windows experience, too, it’s really pretty easy. 😉 Not only did L. send me links with the names of the “features” (annoyances) that I might want to disable, but he gave me the most important information of all in telling me the thing I needed to edit (it’s something like about:config in FF) was called a…plist. Hell, he went all the way and then some, and even sent me a link to a plist editor for Windows!
Turns out that Apple doesn’t really want users disabling their shiny new features, but after I read the stuff that L. had sent, I got 99% of what I wanted from Safari (still have to mess with hosts for ads, and I’m not sure how I’ll manage Flash/scripts, but we’ll see). Apparently, a plist is just an XML file, so all I needed to do was add a few entries for the features I didn’t want, then set their values to “false”, and that’s exactly what I did. The only thing I didn’t get that I wanted was to have no history at all saved, but I did set it for only one day, and since I won’t use Safari more than one session a day (sometimes not even that–depends upon whether I boot to XP to use MSN or not), that works out just fine for me! I turned off practically everything in the lists that L. gave me, except for the “tabs on top” thing because I actually quite like that. I did turn it off, just to see which way I liked better, but turned it back on because it’s easier to see the individual tabs that way, plus it looks kind of cool. I got rid of Google Suggest, and deleted the bookmarks that Safari had imported from IE and FF (without asking me whether I wanted to do that, BTW), and turned off Cover Flow view, Top Sites and Fancy URL Completion (whatever the hell that is–I do know I don’t need “fancy”!) In a perfect world, I’d just start Safari in “porn browsing” (okay, so it’s really called “Private Browsing”) mode, but I don’t know how to do that, or whether it’s even possible. According to everything I had time to read in between ironing shirts and talking to B., you can turn off the prompt asking whether you’re sure you want to switch to private browsing, but you can’t make it start in private mode by default. If it were Linux, I’d use a script, and I think I could do the same in OSX, but I don’t know how I might go about doing that in XP, so for the time being, I’ll just remember to switch to porn mode–sorry…private mode–when I first start it. Even if I forget, it’s going to keep only a single day’s history, and I can live with that. Bless L.’s thoughtful heart; being able to start typing without a list popping up in my face, and having some extra control over the way my browser works was like….like when B3 and I were little, and he’d annoy me for hours on end (little brothers tend to do that), and I couldn’t give him hell because he was just a bored little kid even though I kind of wanted to kick him, but then something would catch his attention and he’d go somewhere else. I’d think, “YES! Thank GOD!” Yeah…like that. Thank $deity for L.; he knocked it right out of the park again, and I didn’t even have to ask.
Plist editor, and anything that begins with “Debug”, I added myself.
Look, ma–no stuff in my face! I can type in a URL without a bunch of crap jumping out! Yaaaaayyyy! 🙂
I never use the Google search box (FF has it, too, and I always remove it), but just to make sure that Google Suggest is really gone, I checked. Yep–bye bye, yet another annoyance!
Yay for iPhone gurus and Mac fanboys who also happen to be Windows power users (he’s a sysadmin) and know BSD, too. Okay, so just yay for the funny one who knows the tune of “Laundry Night” and took the time to help me today. Awwww! ♥
