Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Safari

The Internet has come a long way since its early days in the 1960s, when it was a communications network for universities and the military. Today, that little network has morphed into an international information hub, an entertainment provider, and the world’s biggest mall. For that, we can thank the development of the World Wide Web—the visual, point-and-click face of the Internet.

Apple is obviously intrigued by the possibilities of the Internet. With each new release of Mac OS X, more clever tendrils reach out from the Mac to the world’s biggest network: Dashboard, the Wikipedia link in the Dictionary program, Web clippings, Back to My Mac, and so on.

But Apple’s most obvious Internet-friendly creation is Safari, a smartly designed window to the Web (available for Mac OS X and, believe it or not, Windows). Most people go on safari to see lions—but now there’s a great Safari in Lion.

Note

Safari is fast, sleek, and filled with delicious features. Safari is not, however, Internet Explorer or Firefox, and so some Web sites—a few banking sites, for example—don’t work well with it. For these increasingly rare situations, you might try the Mac version of Firefox, a free browser available at www.getfirefox.com.