georgehe01: An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5

Thursday, March 10, 2011

An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5

It was fairly incredible to me that Safari still does not support extending its search bar with additional search engines beyond Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or that it does not support searching from the address bar like every other modern browser. There have been SIMBL-based extensions that add these missing features, but many of us shy away from these because they seem somehow unclean.

Thanks to Apple's official extension API introduced in Safari 5, there are now several native and free extensions that alleviate, if not entirely eliminate, these Safari shortcomings. The one I wrote is called PopSearch. It makes adding arbitrary search engines to Safari pretty easy; and using them, fast and convenient.

Now, you have to understand that native Safari extensions are not allowed to modify the address bar or the search bar, so PopSearch will still not let you search from the address bar. Instead, it does what seemed to me to b ...