Star Performer - Safari plugin

Star Performer
If you’ve ever tried to watch video in a background Safari window while, say, writing an email in Mail, you’ll have discovered that the video becomes pretty unwatchable. Safari appears to throttle the amount of CPU time given to content in a background window. Generally, this is a good idea – otherwise Safari would grind to a halt with multiple windows open – but in cases like the above, it’s a total pain in the ass.

I decided to do something about it – mostly due to wanting to learn how SIMBL worked, rather than any burning need to have background video.

Star Performer is a horrible hack SIMBL plugin that tricks Safari into thinking a window is in the foreground. Windows start with normal behaviour by default – select File->Make Star Performer to toggle the behaviour.

Source is included. There might be a couple of bits of interest in there – whether it’s using SIMBL, poseAsClass and fake instance variables, or displaying bezel style floating windows. It’s by no means perfect – let me know if you improve it or borrow anything.

[Update: Interesting – recent Webkit nightlies no longer throttle background video. Which is a good thing, though it does render Star Performer somewhat redundant. Oh well…]

· 2006-09-05 ·

  1. Thanks! Added to http://pimpmysafari.com/, hope thats OK!

    — Jon Hicks    Sep 6, 05:09 AM    #

  2. Safari mauling video playback in the background has been annoying me for a while. Thanks for this, however short-lived it may be. ;^)

    — Jeff    Sep 6, 10:24 AM    #

  3. Doesn’t seem to play nice with Saft. I have Saft installed and when Safari starts it doesn’t open any windows at all (and the File -> New Window command doesn’t seem to work either).

    — matonmacs    Sep 6, 09:27 PM    #

  4. Same problem here, except I don’t use Saft. My other SIMBL plugins are SafariStand and Taboo.

    — #cb    Sep 7, 09:31 AM    #

  5. CF was more beatuiful than that iTunes integration… ;) congrats

    — Dave    Sep 12, 05:27 PM    #

  6. Congratulations on the sale to Apple. :D
    (Not sure why you disabled comments.)

    — Si Brindley    Sep 12, 08:27 PM    #

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