How To: Enable Extensions in Safari 5 for Mac OS X

A quick how-to today: Apple released Safari 5 this week and one of the major new features is support for Firefox-style extensions. A few interesting ones have appeared (Instapaper!) but I couldn’t figure out how to add them at first. It turns out the extension support is hidden in a “Develop” menu!

Here’s how to enable Safari 5 extension support:

1. Install and launch Safari 5
2. Click the “Safari” menu and select “Preferences…”
3. Select the “Advanced” tab
4. Click the checkbox next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
5. A new menu now appears with the puzzlingly non-specific name, “Develop”
6. Click the new “Develop” menu and select “Enable Extensions”
7. You can now add extensions: Just double-click the “.safariextz” files you download
8. There’s also a new preferences tab called “Extensions”

And that’s it. It’s oddly obscure. I guess Apple doesn’t really want “the normals” adding extensions to Safari.