Tips and Tricks
Small History
I created a TIPS & TRICKS section for Apple Macintosh hardware and software on my site many, many years ago to archive some of the unique and useful fiddly bits that you can do with your Mac — you could say a few of them are hacks, but are safe hacks nonetheless — and all of these can be found by searching the internet, but I wanted one place for the useful ones I found.
There are sections for specific OS’s, of course the OS 7 – 9 are no longer available — I hope no one is still running OS 9 except Hollywood (yes, they still do).
There are sections for software: both Apple and 3rd Party; Finder, Maintenance and Prevention, Organization, and Fun — these are all things to make your Mac life more enjoyable, safe, and productive.
As I work on making the Tips & Tricks section easier for everyone to navigate I found one that I recently needed to use again.
Disable PDF in Safari
I do not like opening PDF files in my browser — it takes too long for them to load and I cannot view them after I shut down the browser — I like downloading them and viewing them at my leisure — this allows me to download as many as I choose in a short period of time and I can open them up in my preferred application without any waiting or slow navigation through the pdf file itself — this speeds up my productivity as time is money and on any day at any hour or minute we can easily get sidetracked and forget what are main task was if we have to wait any extended period of time for anything, so I click the link, download the file, and move on.
You can use a simple Terminal edit to disable Safari from natively browsing PDF files, so that you can use Acrobat or any other PDF viewer that you might have available.
Quit Safari
Run Terminal or iTerm and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
Restart Safari.
If you want to revert this process, you can quit Safari, run Terminal and type the same command with the value NO instead of YES.
- Peace
- Gerald Davnport
