Posted July 15th, 2004 @ 03:21pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: What is your preferred browser's favorite feature?
My Answer: It's easily the auto-fill capabilities, powered by Keychain. Very, very useful - saves me ten minutes or so each and every day.
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Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 4:04pm #
I, too, find auto-fill very convenient.
Specifically for Safari, though, it would be its implementation of the History feature, which is quite well-done.
Speaking of Keychain, anyway: I recently heard GNOME now has a feature called "Keyring" that does almost exactly the same as Apple Keychain, which brought up the topic of backing up Keychains and accessing them in emergency situations for me. Since I only have one OS X machine, whenever it doesn't work, all my passwords are left *inaccessible*. I sure hope GNOME Keyring will implement means to convert between the two formats, and maybe add a /portable/ command-line tool* so I can read passwords even when on Windows.
*) There doesn't happen to be a way to access the keychain from the OS X Terminal?
Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 4:14pm #
One word...
Tabs. I can't live with out tab browsing... or pop-up blocking... auto-fill tends to irk me... but auto-fill of usernames/passwords I do like.
Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 4:20pm #
There doesn't happen to be a way to access the keychain from the OS X Terminal?
Try 'man security' in the Terminal...it may have what you need:
Usage: security [-h] [-i] [-l] [-p prompt] [-q] [-v] [command] [opt ...]
-i Run in interactive mode.
-l Run /usr/bin/leaks -nocontext before exiting.
-p Set the prompt to "prompt" (implies -i).
-q Be less verbose.
-v Be more verbose about what's going on.
security commands are:
help Show all commands. Or show usage for a command.
list-keychains Display or manipulate the keychain search list.
default-keychain Display or set the default keychain.
login-keychain Display or set the login keychain.
create-keychain Create keychains and add them to the search list.
delete-keychain Delete keychains and remove them from the search list.
lock-keychain Lock the specified keychain.
unlock-keychain Unlock the specified keychain.
set-keychain-settings Set settings for a keychain.
show-keychain-info Show the settings for keychain.
dump-keychain Dump the contents of one or more keychains.
create-keypair Create an assymetric keypair.
add-internet-password Add an internet password item.
add-generic-password Add a generic password item.
add-certificates Add certificates to a keychain.
find-internet-password Find an internet password item.
find-generic-password Find a generic password item.
find-certificate Find a certificate item.
create-db Create an db using the DL.
leaks Run /usr/bin/leaks on this proccess.
Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 5:07pm #
Double-clicking to select a whole word to copy to the clipboard.
Might sound minor, but this one is the main reason I hate Mozilla. I switched to Camino as soon as the new version was out, it supports it kinda (not quite, b/c double-click/drag should select whole words only) -- works fine in PulpFiction, btw 🙂
Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 6:12pm #
Safari's "Activity Window". I do a lot of Flash development and it shows me all of the behind the scenes activity going on with the .swf that no other browser (that I know of) shows.
If you're working with web services and flash it's a great debugging aid.
Posted 15 Jul 2004 at 7:15pm #
Tabs. I can't live without it. It's very useful when you surf many of the same sites on a daily basis.
Posted 16 Jul 2004 at 1:47am #
Tabs are a nice feature, but all useful browsers have them. The clear winner for me is Safari's Activity Viewer. Simply excellent.
Posted 03 Oct 2004 at 10:56am #
Came across this page looking for a Gnome Keyring homepage - I've just written a quick hack to decrypt Apple keychains on the commandline, might be of interest to someone (as a migration tool perhaps?). http://matt.ucc.asn.au/apple/#extractkeychain is the URL.
And yeah, the keychain would have to be one of OS X's cooler features. Trawling through the Security-177 source, you get the impression that it's massively over-engineered 🙂 Though it works well.