Browsing the Internet is an important enough part of many of our lives that it seems necessary that any good browser be easily customizable to reflect and ease our Web habits. Previously, Safari supported plug ins, but these were always clunky and rather limited in scope; as soon as Safari 5’s extension capabilities were rolled out, Pimp My Safari, which had been a go to site for the fairly small Safari modding community, closed shop. In addition to Safari 5’s uptick in performance and its formidable new built in ad blocking function, which will delight some readers and terrify some web publishers, the biggest change present in Apple’s latest overhaul of its Safari browser is the long overdue addition of Extensions.

Highlights :

• Even though Safari 5 has its own in house ad blocking system, there is an AdBlock for Safari extension; there’s also a sidebar ad blocker for Facebook.
• There’s also a nifty Gmail checker similar to what we’ve seen for Firefox and Chrome.
• A few people have made URL shortening extensions.
• SafariRestore is simple, but very useful: It allows you to restore a previous browsing session. (SafariExtensions notes that “At the moment, the MIME type is set incorrectly on the [SafariRestore] extension itself; instead of clicking on it, right click the link and choose “Save Linked File As…”, then double click it in Finder (or in Explorer, for Windows users) to install it.”)
• Finally, Safari’s lack of a regular page reload button has always vexed and upset us.

There’s a little manual hacking to do, but it’s as simple as clicking through some menus.
1.  Click the gear icon on the right side of your Safari menu bar.
2.  Click preferences.
3.  Click advanced.
4.  Check the box marked Show Develop menu in menu bar
5.  Click the develop menu and then click enable extensions

The Safari Extensions Tumblr is currently the best resource for exercising your Safari browser’s newfound extension freedom.

Bonus tip : There’s no reason to keep the Develop menu cluttering your menu bar if you don’t need it. You can disable the Develop menu and that won’t affect Extensions. They stay enabled even with that menu gone.