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I included SafariPlus in my original list of the best free programs available on OS X and Windows. It’s an InputManager plugin for Safari on OS X, mainly for cookie management but also for blocking flash and gif animations. It’s best feature was however it’s ability to set “favourite” cookies and delete all none favourite cookies upon exiting Safari.

It was one of those gems that you don’t realise you need until you stumble across it, and then don’t realise the value of until you loose it. I mean, the threat of cookies shouldn’t require a tinfoil hat, we know they are mostly used in our best interest to personalise our experience of websites and increase efficiency blah blah, and while there are some organisations that try to use them to track our browsing habits, which can seem a little too infringing upon one’s freedom, at the end of they day despite the possibly selfish and greedy motivations, it’s only so they can provide more suitable content to meet our needs, yes to enable them to make more money, but nevertheless to meet our needs. Yet I still found an empty hole in my life upon discovering that SafariPlus was not compatible with Leopard – I had lost this control.

I searched high and low for an alternative, the best I could find was PithHelment, which is a great plugin for it’s many other features, but it’s ability to delete all cookies on exit by default proved simply not to work (at least under Leopard), so I spent many sleepless nights pondering what to do. Ok I maybe exaggerating a little, I mean what actually is the worst thing that can happen with cookies? The only real problem I can see is loosing control over your own information. Why should a website store information about me for future reference without my permission? …or share my browsing habits with anyone without my permission?

Anyway so I decided to see if there was an easy fix staring me in the face, starting by looking at SafariPlus’ Info file, which I changed it to XML a la the other plugins in my InputManagers folder – Growlmail and SIMBL, which amazingly, after a restart of OS X, did bugger all – so I gave up. However I later installed Inquisitor, and magically SafariPlus worked (…kind of). My guess is that Inquisitor changed the permissions for the InputManagers folder or something similar, but whatever it was – SafariPlus lives again!

(I said “kind of”, because it’s a little buggy – as in you can only save new favourite cookies one at a time by ticking one and then clicking on the Animation policy tab and then ticking the next one and then again clicking on the Animation policy tab and so on, but I can live with that.)

To be fair Inquisitor probably did most of the hacking, but I’d like to think my “hack” of the Info file helped too. So the buggyness is a bit rubbish, but the fact that SafariPlus is once again kind of working gives me hope for the future

(edit: ok SafariPlus isn’t deleting cookies on exit, but you can successfully delete all non favourites manually.)

SafariPlus (449 downloads)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.