Screen savers for your Mac aren’t limited to what Apple gives you out of the box. You can download a variety of different kinds of animations and fun screensavers that protect your Mac’s display when it sits idle for a long period of time.
But did you know you can also set a web page as your Mac’s screensaver? Indeed. We’ll show you how!
You might have never even thought about it before, but setting a website as your Mac’s screen saver is a pretty cool idea. It allows you to come back to an idle computer that’s already displaying the latest content from your favorite web pages, such as iDB.
Make any website your screensaver
So how can you do it? Here are the steps you’ll need to take:
1) Download and install the WebViewScreenSaver 2.0 screen saver file from Github.
2) After the install is finished, open the System Preferences app and launch the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences pane.
3) Open the Screen Saver tab.
4) Scroll down until you see the WebViewScreenSaver 2.0 option. Click on it to select it, then click on the Screen Saver Options… button.
5) Click on the Add URL button.
6) Google’s URL will be added by default. Double-click on it to edit it to any website you want:
Pro tip: You can add as many websites as you want. If you add more than one, then the screen saver will cycle through all of them.
7) Click on the Close button.
Now when your screen saver begins, your chosen website should load. There may be blocks of white or black on the sides of the display depending on the formatting size of the website, so keep this in mind.
Personally, I recommend setting more than one website for the screen saver, as this will make the websites cycle between one another. Ideally, that’s what you want a screensaver to do, because you don’t want your display sitting on the same image for too long. That’s the whole point of said “screen saver.”
Having a website as your screen saver certainly isn’t for everybody, but it’s pretty cool to be able to see all of the latest content of any website when you come back to your computer when you haven’t been at it for a while.
Personally, I think this works best with websites that actually have refreshable content, such as news sites and forums. This way, every time your screensaver begins, you see the latest content at a glance. It’s kind of pointless to set a web page that never changes as your screen saver, because if you do, it’ll always look exactly the same and there’s no real excitement there.
If you’ll be trying this on your Mac, let us know in the comments below!