As of the the 8th June 2009, Safari 4 is out of beta, and wordpress‘s insert-link dialogue works! So this article is now superfluous — good stuff.

I’ll leave the article here to help clarify what WebKit is and how to use it, but if you’re looking to get wordpress‘s insert-hyperlink dialogue working with Safari 4beta then all you need do is download the full release version of Safari 4 from Apple’s site.

And now for the original article…

If you’re a Mac and wordpress user, and you’ve tried out Safari 4 Public Beta, then you will have noticed that you can’t add hyperlinks in wordpress‘ visual editor (Geek Guides has documented the problem nicely here).

Now there’s a fix — the latest WebKit on top of Safari 4 Public Beta works fine, with no problems in wordpress‘ visual editor. Here’s the proof (you may need to take my word for it: this _is_ Safari 4):

Note that the Insert/edit link dialogue box isn’t greyed out — result!

To achieve this, first install Safari 4beta from Apple’s site and reboot. Then install the latest WebKit nightly build for Mac OS.

Now you have two versions of Safari. One calls itself Safari and that’s as downloaded from Apple, the other calls itself WebKit and is the browser from Apple, but with the latest WebKit plugged into it. Here they are in my dock — the brassy compass is the WebKit version of Safari.

Now all that’s left to do is to enter Safari‘s Preferences and set the default browser to be WebKit:

and you’re sorted. Of course, if you don’t want to do the above then it’s still good news: if the latest WebKit sorts the problem, then Safari 4 should, in time, pick up the fix. Good stuff.

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That was case for me — as adding hyperlinks in wordpress caused the browser tab to hang (documented by Geek Guides here). However, if you’re thinking about returning to Safari 3.2.1 because you can’t input hyperlinks in wordpress‘ visual editor then think again — you may not need to — as there is now a work-around.

You still need to downgrade?

What doesn’t work

What doesn’t work is downloading Safari 3 and installing that — the installer complains that you already have a newer version on the hard drive and so won’t continue.

What works

Is to re-run the Safari 4beta installer (fetch it from apple.com if you don’t still have it) and run the uninstall from there.

One reboot later and you’re back running Safari 3.2.1.

Safari image by timmargh.

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