Safari 4’s hidden preferences

Update 2009-03-04: One of my co-workers also pointed out the Secret Safari 4 Menu, which is also a bit of hackery, but makes it easy to make these tweaks without dipping into the command line (if that’s your preference).

Before the server was absolutely obliterated this morning, Caius over at Random Genius had posted a great list of hidden preferences he discovered in Safari 4. Justin Mecham also did a great write-up on his blog. I thought I’d repost them here as well just in case. These commands are all carried out in the Terminal, so if you aren’t comfortable with the command line, then maybe this isn’t for you. If you break your copy of Safari 4 then it’s up to you to fix it.

Some background from what I can remember from Caius’ post, he discovered the following strings in the new Safari binary:

• DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop
• DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign
• DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList
• DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest
• DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle
• DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView
• DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot
• DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

You can find these yourself if you open up the Terminal and run the following command:
strings /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari | egrep DebugSafari4

Anyhow, on to the hidden prefs! I’m not going to describe these in huge detail, for that I suggest you check out Justin’s excellent blog post.

Disable Tabs on Top:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

Disable the spinner progress indicator / Enable ‘pie’ progress indicator:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO

Disable the new progress indicator / Revert to Safari 3.x blue progress bar:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

Disable the Smart Address Field:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList -bool NO

Disable Google Suggest in the Smart Address Field:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest -bool NO

Disable CoverFlow in the Bookmarks/History view:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView -bool NO

Disable Top Sites:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool NO

Disable snapshop dimming in Top Sites:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot -bool NO

Obviously to revert any of these settings, specify “-bool YES”.

Props to:
http://swedishcampground.com/safari-4-hidden-preferences
http://observationpoint.org/articles/2009/02/24/hidden-preferences-in-safari-4-public-beta/