Is Safari a drag & drop application?

March 5, 2008 1:03 AM

Can I drag & drop Safari from one hard drive to another? I accidentally deleted the application:-( I don't have the original install DVD with me right now, but I do have a backup on an external drive that's about two weeks old. So, I dragged the Safari.app that was on that to the Applications folder on my Powerbook. Everything seems to be functioning okay.....or am I inadvertently running a browser with a bunch of loopholes & missing parts?

To make a long story short, I was lazy and wanted to get rid of a pesky plugin fast (SafariBlock, which seemed nifty and useful at the time, but an annoying box kept popping up about SIMBL/browser incompatibility, so I decided to get rid of it). I dragged the Safari application to the AppZapper icon, and trashed everything - stupidly thinking, that I could re-download Safari via Apple's website.

I'm using version 3.0.4 on Mac OS 10.4.11.

posted by invisible ink to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Yes, what you describe is perfectly fine. Safari will happily run from wherever you choose to put it, whether copied from a backup or installed by the OS installer and then moved. The only gotcha preventing Safari from being a completely stand-alone browser is its dependence on the WebKit framework (which doesn't impact your scenario).
posted by RichardP at 1:08 AM on March 5, 2008

Response by poster: Free tech support at 1:20AM, in less than six minutes! I love AskMefi:-)
posted by invisible ink at 1:17 AM on March 5, 2008

That SafariBlock plugin lives in either ~/Library/InputManagers/ or /Library/InputManagers/ so it may be there still.
posted by mumkin at 1:31 AM on March 5, 2008