The new track pad on the Macbook air adds many of the touch gestures that many of you have become accustom to on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In addition to adding these features, the track pad is larger than those you’ll find on the Macbook or Macbook Pro.

While many of the examples that apple displays in their videos focus on how to use the new gestures with photos or some files, the gestures are great with Safari.

Increase Font Size in Safari

To increase the size of the font on any web page that you’re looking at simply place your two fingers on the trackpad in a pinch position and separate your fingers across the track pad. Repeat this if you want the text to be even larger.

Do the opposite of this (Pinch your fingers in) on the track pad to reduce the size of the text on any website.

Navigate Forward and Backwards

The gesture that I find myself using most often is the swiping my fingers left or right to advance back and forth on the pages that I’ve visited in Safari.

Swipe three fingers to the left to move back a page and with three fingers to your right to move forward.

NOTE: All of these gestures currently only work on the track pad on the Macbook Air

One of the great features about Safari is the ability to adjust the toolbar to fit more with how you use a web browser.

I know one of the buttons that I use often when using Firefox or Internet Explorer while at work is the Home button. I often find myself looking for it after opening a new tab in Safari and when its not there I just don’t know what to do.

Add the Home Button To Safari

To add the Home button to Safari’s tool bar I just need to follow the steps below:

1. Open Safari and click View on the menu bar.
2. Select Customize Tool Bar
3. A list of items you can insert onto your tool bar appears
4. Click and drag the Home button to Safari’s tool bar and drop it in the location of your choice.
5. Click Done

Never worry about typing in your Home address again, its now just a click away.

You can follow the steps listed above to add autofill or other buttons to Safari’s menu. Rearranging the menu bar is that easy also.

Check out Safari Hints and Tips Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Subscribe to our RSS feed for additional Apple product hints, tips, and reviews.

The Safari Tip of the Day is Private Browsing. Lets face it, there may be times when you don’t want to record everything that you do while browsing the internet. You may be navigating to confidential business sites, doing your online banking, or browsing on a friends computer and just want to keep the information Private.

KEEP IT CONFIDENTIAL

Safari makes keeping your browsing private simple. Open Safari, click Safari from the menu bar and then select Private Browsing.  A confirmation window will appear letting you know that when you close out of your Safari session, your bookmarks, search items, and even downloads will be cleaned from the system.

Don’t forget to keep your sessions confidential when you need it most!

Be sure to check out our other Safari Hints and Tips.

Most all browsers today have build in search capabilities and Safari is no different. No need to browse to Google or Yahoo’s home page to start your search as you can quickly enter your search phrase into the browser and hit search, propelling you closer to item your looking for. Unfortunately, Safari web search doesn’t include some of the great spotlight search functions like auto-suggest or previews of some of the information you’re looking for. But to our great luck there is a Safari plug-in that makes such capabilities available.

ENHANCE YOUR SEARCH: INQUISITOR

Inquisitor is a Safari plug-in that will provide you with Spotlight like search functionality for your web searches. One of the great things about Inquisitor is how fast it is. Start typing anything into the search field and auto-suggest items with details about the pages it is suggesting start popping up below the search field. Inquisitors suggestions are also great examples of how to setup your search phrases to get optimal web search results.

SETUP

After you’ve downloaded and installed Inquisitor you can fire up Safari, start a new search in the browser search field, and see how Inquisitor works. If you’d like to change some of the settings for Inquisitor select Preferences from the Safari menu and then click the Search tab. Here you can add the amount of suggestions displayed, what search engine to use, or other search related features.

Be sure to check out the other Safari Hints and Tips articles to take full advantage of Keyboard Shortcuts and learn how to let Safari read the web for you.

You may have noticed a menu item in many of your applications called Services. This is OSX’s way of letting you know how you can make applications interact with each other. One feature of Services that I find both interesting and useful in Safari is the Speech option.

START READING

I often find myself reading news articles from multiple news sources online that are covering the same article. I like to see how they’re different and see if one media source is applying any additional information that another may be missing. Safari and Mac OSX Speech option is perfect to allow me to essentially read two articles at once. Safari reads out loud the first article while I continue on to the next one.To get Safari to start reading for you:

1. Find a website you’d like Safari to read back to you
2. Select the text you’d like to read
3. Click Safari on the menu bar
4. Highlight Services, Speech, and then click “Start Speaking Text”

Thats all it takes and your mac will quickly start reading back to you the contents of the website. This is a great way to get multiple things done at once. I personally enjoy having Safari read back recipes to me while I’m cooking, or reading back blog articles on my google reader page. How would you use this feature? Don’t forget, you can create a keyboard shortcut to Start Speaking Text with just a few clicks on the keyboard.