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Recent versions of Safari don’t play nice with the Inquisitor search plugin. The only sensible fix seems to revert Safari to an older version.

Inquisitor is supposed to plug into Safari’s search bar to display a list of search engines instead of Google suggestions. However, after installing Safari 4.0.3 (or higher) that won’t work anymore. Google suggestion are being displayed on top of the Inquisitor drop-down!

Here is how to revert Safari back to version 4.0.2 once you’ve installed the latest version by mistake:

1. Get a copy of the Safari 4.0.2 installer. This ain’t as simple as it sounds. Apple’s website offers the latest version only, and all usual download sites refer to Apple’s website only. You have to search the interwebs for a file called Safari4.0.2Leo.dmg. I was lucky enough to find a copy on an anonymous website, but Rapidshare or friends should do fine as well.
2. Once you got the file, you should double check it’s SHA-1 digest against the one given in the Apple security announcement APPLE-SA-2009-07-08-1. Execute openssl sha1 Safari4.0.2Leo.dmg an the command line and compare the output to

   SHA1(Safari4.0.2Leo.dmg)= 48676afbb5c5bacac8610ba13f6851d3b266cb69

   If your output is not the same, the file has been tampered and you should not install it!

3. Next you’ll have to patch the version number of Safari’s current installation. Otherwise the installer will refuse to revert Safari. To do so open the files

   /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Info.plist
   /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/version.plist

   and replace the version numbers with lower numbers. Anything lower than 5530.19 should do fine. You might have to change access rights to be able to edit these files.

4. Now, you may eventually run the Safari 4.0.2 installer!

PS: As an Inquisitor user you might also be interested in turning off Inquisitor’s Yahoo suggestions. Being tracked by Yahoo instead of Google is “vom Regen in die Traufe geraten” as we’d say in German. To cover up your traces, open /etc/hosts and add the following lines

0.0.0.0 sugg.search.yahoo.net
0.0.0.0 clients1.google.com

this blocks the URL that are used to retrieve both Google and Yahoo suggestions.