As much as I disliked Safari 4 Beta’s new tabs, because they made the browser incredibly hard to use in terms of tab management, the new final version is almost flawless.
Being that “almost” means you can’t middle click to close an open tab, instead, by default you have to do CMD+W or click the little close button on the left side of each tab, which kind of makes the whole “fastest browser on earth” thing silly, since you take a bit longer to operate it.
Thankfully, a nice guy called Joey Gibson made a small plugin that enables this simple feature. In order to install it you need to first get SIMBL and install it (if you haven’t already).
Then you need to install the MiddleClickClose plugin following the instructions on Joey’s site.
- Get the binary package: MiddleClickClose.zip
- Create ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins if it doesn’t exist
- Unzip the MiddleClickClose.zip into this directory. You should end up with a directory called MiddleClickClose.bundle
- Restart Safari
And finally you need to apply this fix that Joey also explains in this entry with a small change:
You can edit ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/MiddleClickClose.bundle/Contents/Info.plist, changing 5525.13 to 5528.16
Note: in order to open the “MiddleClickCLose” bundle, you need to right click it and select “Show Package Contents”.
Instead of the number Joey gives, use this one:
- 5530.17
When I loaded Safari it instantly told me that the plugin had been made for the wrong version of Safari, and showed me the version number of the current version, so it was a pretty obvious fix. Even so, some people are less tech savvy, so I figured I’d post this to help them out.
I take no credit for this fix and only did this for the community. If you want to give anyone credit, then go to Joey’s blog and thank him.
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
Apple Safari takes more resources compared to Opera and Firefox. sometimes it also freezes so i would still stick to Opera.