Safari Size Guardian
Many Tricks

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Safari Size Guardian 1.0 runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

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It's Your Browser

Block window resizing

Peace of mind is just one click away

There are at least two things a respectable web site should never do:

  • Resize browser windows via JavaScript
  • Open links in new "_blank" windows

And this is not just about being impolite, it's actually outright stupid to annoy users with more or less erratic browser behavior. After all, you want them to come back, right? Still, some web designers just don't get it.

That's why most browsers have controls to switch off that kind of offensive behavior. Safari, however, only has a hidden preference for redirecting new-window links to new tabs, while there's no way whatsoever to disable JavaScript window resizing.

That's precisely the gap Safari Size Guardian fills. Unfortunately, there's no official Safari plugin interface, so we had to implement this as a SIMBL bundle, but it gets the job done. Install Safari Size Guardian, and unsolicited JavaScript window resizing in Safari will be history.

Why is having to use SIMBL a drawback? Here's the gist: SIMBL bundles are input managers. More precisely, they are software bundles that are injected into applications by a meta input manager (namely SIMBL), and that's a safety plus in comparison to stand-alone input managers. But they still are hacks, and as such, they represent an inofficial backdoor to implementing plugins, which may break with any Safari or system update.

In a way, choosing between input managers and JavaScript window resizing means picking the lesser of two evils. And if you don't feel capable of properly assessing the risks of using an input manager, you may be better off not using Safari Size Guardian at all.