The latest update to Safari (Version 12) brings a range of features intended to improve online security and privacy. Unfortunately one of the consequences is that only Safari Extensions available from the App Store are enabled and you will get a message that Safari no longer supports unsafe extensions and you are directed to the App Store.

Whilst I'm sure that extensions from major developers will migrate to the App Store I suspect that those Extensions provided by scientists may well not make the transition. This is a shame because some are very useful. However you can build the extension yourself to get around the problem.

This tutorial shows how to extract the code from an existing extension and then build it using Extension Builder.

 

Occasionally developers contact to ask about platforms/operating systems/versions/web browsers that are used by readers.

Recently I was asked about web browsers and so I contacted a number of scientific databases, scientific app developers, web sites. They were kind enough to provide information but asked that the details were not made public. The 12 sites range from 10's of thousands of hits per month to many millions hits of hits per month. The data shown below is from Jan 1st this year. It appears that Internet Explorer has almost disappeared as a mainstream browser.

Some people reported that they felt the drop in IE use was due to poor javascript performance.

Update

I've just been sent this image which also serves to underline the dramatic fall in the use of Internet Explorer (at least among chemists).

 

The ChemSpider Safari extension has been updated. It sports a cleaner interface and provides fixes a bug introduced by an update to ChemSpider.

Some time ago I described a Safari extension that uses the chemicalize.org to index a web page for chemical content.

For an example of a “chemicalized” page have a look at this

As you can see below all molecules mentioned in the page become links that on a mouse over reveal the structure, they also provide a handy ribbon of structures across the top of the page that is useful for quickly scanning and navigation.

A recent publication by Southan and Stracz, Extracting and connecting chemical structures from text sources using chemicalize.org. Journal of Cheminformatics 2013, 5:20 describes how this information is being used to provide better indexing of the internet in a chemically intelligent manner. They include a demonstration of a number of web pages and document sources that were indexed in this manner including PDF’s from the patent office.

chemicalize.org now has 15000 unique visitors a month – which is a huge growth compared to spring 2012. These users contribute to the database every day, making sure it’s up-to-date and contains new interests as well. The database today contains 327000 structures that were converted from 545000 names and identifiers coming from 367000 webpages.

These structures and links have now been uploaded to PubChem and if you are interested in what sort of molecules have been registered via chemicalize.org you can browse them on the PubChem website here