I was browsing Digg this afternoon and came across a post claiming Safari can download “ANY file from ANY website” which initially raised my eyebrow. It turns out that what the post really meant was there is an option in Safari to view all of the media and linked files on a page. Not as exciting I am sure you’ll agree, but the original author was still branding this as some sort of Mac-only amazing secret “hidden feature” which I thought was a bit rich considering it is a normal menu item there for anyone to see…
But anyway - for the curious non Mac-Fanboys amongst you (but if you are a Mac lover I am sure you can do this on Mac versions of Firefox too) - you can do something very similar in a vanilla install of Firefox as well which lets you view all of the images and links etc on the page:
- Right click on some white space on the page.
- Select “View Page Info” from the popup menu.
- Then simply select the tab you’re interested in.
The sort of information this dialog will show you includes basic meta information about the page, such as content-type, render mode (e.g. “quirks mode”), file size, any HTML forms and their fields and actions, the page’s links and media files, and any security and encryption information. Pretty useful stuff.
So here is a nice example of the Google UK home page showing us all of the included media … now I look at it Google was an awful choice for this as there is only one image on the page! Notice how Firefox gives us the option to “Save As…” directly to disk.
There are of course other ways of doing similar things using plug-ins, such as the highly recommended FireBug.