Keyboard shortcuts, both for the browser itself and for Web sites that take advantage of them, can be extremely powerful. Google Reader set the precedent for keyboard shortcuts by working through a stream of information using J to advance and K to move backward through the stream. The Big Picture, Ffffound, and now Tumblr’s Dashboard all follow this convention.
Glims, a plugin (read: input manager hack) for Safari, enables a lot of preferences around searching that Safari simply doesn’t have built-in. I originally installed it because I wanted to play around with Bing, Microsoft’s latest version of their search efforts. However, it came with a caveat that I can’t seem to find a solution to no matter what combination of preferences I choose. Keyboard shortcuts, such as those found in Google Reader, do not work when I have Glims installed.
So, I’ve uninstalled Glims – for now. The benefits of keyboard shortcuts in my most used Web applications outweigh those of trying out other search engines besides Google. I’ll be watching Glims for an update.