Dan Moren writing for Six Colors:

Safari Keyword Search is a little tool that allows you to define shortcuts for searching specific sites. For example, you could type “imdb George Clooney” to be taken directly to the IMDb search results for George Clooney, or “w iPhone 13” to go straight to the Wikipedia page for the iPhone 13. You can also define your own shortcuts, so, for example, I’ve defined “sc” as a Google search limited to sixcolors.com, which helps me quickly turn up articles here…

On iOS 15, Mobile Safari supports web extensions. That means this free and awesome tool is now available on the go, where it shortcuts are even more useful.

Speaking of WWDC and possibly-overlooked announcements… Dan Moren has a great round-up on Six Colors of some small-yet-significant things like iOS Back Tap, App Store review process modifications, improvements to Shortcut, and more.

Dan Moren writing for Six Colors:

News out of last week’s meeting of the CA/Browser Forum is that Apple has announced Safari will no longer accept HTTPS certificates older than about 13 months, as of September 1.

The rationale? Shorter certificate lifetimes are safer, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it prevents a valid (and perhaps abandoned) certificate from being stolen or misappropriated by a bad actor, then used to trick consumers. While there is a process for revoking known bad certificates, it’s cumbersome and many browsers don’t even check the revocation lists.

This may be annoying to many of us in the short-term (our certificate here at changelog.com is a few years old), but it’s a good thing for the security of the web. Suddenly, Let’s Encrypt’s 90 day expirations look both prudent and prescient.