14 DAY TRIAL // Mac OS X 10.7 Lion boasts live Spotlight previews of web pages, Softpedia has learned. The feature comes in handy when searching for something that you’ve recently come across during a web browsing session, or to kick-start a new session from where you left off, on the spot.
After using Safari to browse the web, you can use Spotlight - the system-wide search function built inside Mac OS X - to bring up recent browsing sessions with the key words you can remember.
Even if you quit Safari, Spotlight still remembers what you’ve been up to and allows you to kick off a new browsing session by selecting one of the recently visited web pages.
However, the neat thing is the live preview of said web page, which better enables the user to visualize the search and determine which of the displayed results is the one he /she is looking for.
Lion does this using QuickLook, a system-wide quick preview feature that allows users to instantly preview any kind of file supported by Mac OS X, whether it’s a video file, an audio file, and now web pages too.
An example of that can be found in the screenshot below.
For example, if I want to go to the Games section of our web site, I can just hit the ‘Games’ button right in the preview window and Safari takes me there.
Upon introducing the Lion Developer preview earlier this year, Apple said “We’re taking our best thinking from iPad and bringing it all to the Mac with Mac OS X Lion, available in summer 2011.”
A second developer preview has been seeded since, and the final shipping version of the software is expected to launch at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.