Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Snow Leopard Edition

Chapter 12. Safari & iChat

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.

But Apple’s most obvious Internet-friendly creation is Safari, a smartly designed window to the Web (available for both Mac OS X and, believe it or not, Windows). This chapter is all about Safari—the compass icon in the Dock points the way to your Internet adventure—and iChat, the unsung superstar of the chat-and-conferencing universe.

Safari

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

That must be what Apple was thinking when it wrote its own Web browser a few years ago, which so annoyed Microsoft that it promptly ceased all further work on the Mac version of its own Internet Explorer.

Safari is beautiful, fast, and filled with delicious features (Figure 12-1). Safari is not, however, Internet Explorer, and so some Web sites—a few banking sites, for example—refuse to acknowledge its existence. For these situations, you might try the Mac version of Firefox, a free browser available at www.getfirefox.com.

To move your Web bookmarks over from Windows to the Mac, see Sound Effects. Then, when you’re ready to get going, read on.

Browsing Basics and Toolbars

You probably know the drill when it comes to Web browsers. When you click an underlined link (hyperlink) or a picture button, you’re transported from one Web page to another. One page might be the home page of General ...