The Ultimate Status Bar for Safari

Inspired by the Chrome browser, several extension developers have produced their own status bar replacements. We've seen a gentle status bar and an invisible status bar and the popup status bar for Safari.

Now we have the Ultimate Status Bar, and so far the name fits.

Karl Dearden of Interclue has just released the first public version of their new Safari extension and latest entry in the Safari status bar replacement arms race. In addition to the standard required feature of a status bar that appears only when you hover, it ups the ante with a number of other useful features.

First the important part, popping up. In my experience with trying out all of these extensions, popping up at all the right times can be a challenge. Different types of links, iframes, and other html fringe cases can throw some of these extensions for a loop. I've been using an early version of the Ultimate Status bar for over a week now, and in my experience, it does a great job at sniffing out the links to display.

And it doesn't stop there. The Ultimate Status bar also provides some unique features:

Shows the Favicon for the URL Un-shortens URLs Handles mailto links and other protocols Shows the types of files, like PDF, ZIP, etc. and the size of those files

All of those features are configurable, and you can select one of several themes in the preferences pane.

The Mac Dock theme is pretty cool. When you're not taking up space full time, it turns out that it's not a bad thing to dress up your status bar with a little bling.

Download the Ultimate Status Bar here.