Something something

• Safari Keyword Search and Safari 5.2

  1 year ago

  So I have a modestly popular Safari extension that enables keyword search from the address bar. This extension relies on an event called beforeNavigate, which is triggered whenever a user tries to load a url. This event has been available for extensions since Safari 5.1.

  The event is kind of tricky to work with for what I’m trying to do, since it is triggered after Safari has tried to parse whatever text was entered in the address bar into a URL. This means that when a user types g monkey, the event provides the URL http://g%20monkey/, making parsing harder than it should be, especially for the default keywordless search (which is Googles “I am feeling lucky”). In addition the search phrase a user enters cannot contain a colon symbol, as that causes Safari to show an error page before the event is triggered.

  These are minor annoyances but work-aroundable. The real problem is Safari 5.2, which unifies the search bar and the address bar into a single text field that is similar to (but much less capable than) the Omnibar in Chrome. What now happens is that anything that doesn’t look like a URL is turned into a web search, before the beforeNavigate event is triggered. That means that the data sent along with the event looks like http://google.com?q=g%20monkey. This could still be parseable by the extension, but it is impossible to know whether the user entered it as a keyword search or actually want to search google for “g monkey”.

  Needless to say this regression makes my extension broken and useless in Safari 5.2. I have reported this issue to Apple, and suggested three possible ways to fix it, in order of preference:

  1. Implement custom keyword searching from the addres bar in Safari, like other browsers has. This would obviate the need for my extension.
  2. Create a new API event that is triggered before the text entered into the address bar is parsed into a URL.
  3. Fix the API, so it works like it did in Safari 5.1.

  Fingers are crossed.

  #

Hello

My name is Arne Martin Aurlien and I write stuff here sometimes.

• I work as a frontend developer at Boost Communications
• I write Javascript mostly, and sometimes PHP if I must, also other things
• I live in Trondheim, Norway
• I have Veronicaa wife
• I’m on Twitter
• I’m also on GitHub
• Send me an am@aurlien.nete-mail

Here’s a few things I have made:

• Piknik: A pretty, full-screen color picker webapp thing
• Befunge: A Befunge-interpreter written in Javascript (code)
• Safari Keyword Search: A Safari extension for doing keyword searches from the address bar (code)
• These pretty flowers (Also these ones) (And this thing, whatever it is)
• The Bacon Pie (okay so maybe it’s more like a quiche)