Safari Shortcuts at Your Fingertips Under Mac OS X Lion

Here’s a quick tip for those Mac OS X Lion users out there that prefer Safari as their web browser.

There are some really great touchpad gestures to speed you your web browser and keep you from mucking around with the mouse cursor or the keyboard.

If you want to go back to the previous page in a given tab, simply swipe two fingers from left to right across the touchpad. Conversely, if you want to go forward a page, swipe two fingers from right to left across the touchpad.

Another good tip to remember is how to manage the zoom on a webpage. If you want to zoom in on a particular area you can double tap the touchpad with two fingers to enlarge that section. Double tapping again with two fingers restores the webpage back to its default zoom. Alternatively, you can pinch to zoom in and out like you can on most smartphones.

Perhaps one of the neat yet under-utilised features is the ability to perform a dictionary lookup right on the webpage itself. Simply position the mouse cursor over the word you want to look up and double tap with three fingers. You should be provided with both dictionary and thesaurus entries for the selected word (assuming that it is in fact a word).