Chapter 14. Safari

The iPhone’s web browser is Safari, a lite version of the same one that comes on the Mac. It’s fast, simple to use, and very pretty. On the web pages you visit, you see the real deal—the actual fonts, graphics, and layouts—not the stripped-down mini-web on cellphones of years gone by.

Using Safari on the iPhone is still not quite as good as surfing the web on, you know, a laptop. But it’s getting closer.

Safari Tour

Safari has most of the features of a desktop web browser: bookmarks, autocomplete (for web addresses), scrolling shortcuts, cookies, a pop-up ad blocker, password memorization, and so on. (It’s missing niceties like streaming music, Java, Flash, and other plug-ins.)

Now, don’t be freaked out: The main screen elements disappear shortly after you start reading a page. That’s supposed to give you more screen space to do your surfing. To bring them back, scroll to the top, scroll to the bottom, or just scroll up a little. At that point, you see the controls again. Here they are, as they appear from the top left:

Zooming and Scrolling

When you first open a web page, you get to see the entire thing, so you can get the lay of the land. At this point, of course, you’re looking at .004-point type, which is too small to read unless you’re a microbe. So the next step is to magnify the part of the page you want to read.

The iPhone offers three ways to do that:

  • Double-tap. Safari can recognize different chunks of a web page—each block of text, each photo. When you double-tap a chunk, Safari magnifies just that chunk to fill the whole screen. It’s smart and useful.

    Double-tap again to zoom back out.

  • Rotate the iPhone. Turn the device 90 degrees in either direction. The iPhone rotates and magnifies the image to fill the wider view. Often, this simple act is enough to make tiny type big enough to read.

  • Do the two-finger spread. Put two fingers on the glass and slide them apart. The Safari page stretches before your very eyes, growing larger. Then you can pinch to shrink the page back down again. (Most people do several spreads or pinches in a row to achieve the degree of zoom they want.)

Once you’ve zoomed out to the proper degree, you can then scroll around the page by dragging or flicking with a finger. You don’t have to worry about “clicking a link” by accident; if your finger is in motion, Safari ignores the tapping action, even if you happen to land on a link.

Tip

Once you’ve double-tapped to zoom in on a page, you can use this little-known trick: Double-tap anywhere on the upper half of the screen to scroll up or the lower half to scroll down. The closer you are to the top or bottom of the screen, the more you scroll.

image with no caption

Full-Screen Mode

On a phone, the screen is pretty small to begin with; most people would rather dedicate that space to showing more web.

So in iOS, Safari enters full-screen mode the instant you start to scroll down a page. In full-screen mode, all the controls and toolbars vanish. Now the entire iPhone screen is filled with web goodness. You can bring the controls back in any of these ways:

And enjoy Safari’s dedication to trying to get out of your way.

Tip

You can jump directly to the address bar, no matter how far down a page you’ve scrolled, just by tapping the very top edge of the screen (the status bar). That “tap the top” trick is timely, too, when a website is designed to hide the address bar.

Typing a Web Address

The address/search bar is the strip at the top of the screen where you type in a web page’s address. And it so happens that some of the iPhone’s greatest tips and shortcuts all have to do with this important navigational tool:

Otherwise, this address bar works just like the one in any other web browser. Tap inside it to make the keyboard appear.

Tap the blue Go key when you’re finished typing the address. That’s your Enter key. (Or tap Cancel to hide the keyboard without “pressing Enter.”)

Tip

If you hold your finger on a link for a moment—touching rather than tapping—a handy panel appears. At the top, you see the full web address that link will open. And there are some useful buttons: Open, Open in New Tab, Add to Reading List, Copy (meaning “copy the link address”), and Share. Oh, and there’s also Cancel.

You can never close all your Safari windows. The app will never let you get past the final page, always lurking behind the others: the Favorites page (previous page, top).

This is the starting point. It’s what you first see when you tap the + button. It’s like a page of visual bookmarks.

In fact, if you see a bunch of icons here already, it’s because your phone has synced them over from Safari on a Mac; whatever sites are on your Bookmarks bar become icons on this bookmarks page.

You can edit this Favorites page, of course:

Tip

You don’t have to use the Favorites folder of bookmarks as the one whose contents appear on the Favorites screen. In Settings→Safari→Favorites, a list of all your Bookmarks folders appears. Whichever one you select there becomes your new Favorites folder, even if its name isn’t “Favorites.”

In an effort to conserve time and bandwidth (yours and theirs), many websites supply mobile versions to your iPhone—smaller, stripped-down sites that transfer faster than (but lack some features of) the full-blown sites. You generally have no control over which version you’re sent.

Until now. Suppose you’re in Safari, and some site has dished up its mobile version, and you’re gnashing your teeth. Hold down the in the address box; tap Request Desktop Site. (The same button appears when you tap and scroll the bottom row to the right.) As you’ve requested, the full-blown desktop version of that site now appears.

Searching in Safari

The address bar is also the search box. Just tap into it and type your search phrase (or speak it, using Siri).

To save you time and fiddling, Safari instantly produces a menu filled with suggestions that could spare you some typing—things it guesses you might be looking for. If you see the address you’re trying to type, then by all means tap it instead of typing out the rest of the URL. The time you save could be your own:

Tip

If you’ve set your search options to use Google, then there are all kinds of cool things you can type here—special terms that tell Google, “I want information, not web page matches.”

You can type a movie name and zip code or city/state (Titanic Returns 10024) to get a list of today’s showtimes in theaters near you. Get the forecast by typing weather chicago or weather 60609. Stock quotes: Type the symbol (AMZN). Dictionary definitions: define schadenfreude. Unit conversions: liters in 5 gallons. Currency conversions: 25 usd in euros. Then tap Go to get instant results.

This crazy feature lets you search within a certain site (like Amazon or Reddit or Wikipedia) using Safari’s regular search bar. For example, typing wiki mollusk can search Wikipedia for its entry on mollusks. Typing amazon ipad can offer links to buy an iPad from Amazon. Typing reddit sitcoms opens reddit.com to its search results for sitcoms.

None of this will work, however, until (a) you’ve turned the feature on (Settings→Safari→Quick Website Search), and (b) you’ve manually taught Safari how to search those sites one time each.

To do that, pull up the site you’ll want to search (let’s say it’s reddit.com) and use its regular search bar. Search for anything.

That site’s name now appears in the list at Settings→Safari→Quick Website Search. (Usually. Many sites don’t work with Quick Website Search.) From now on, you can search that site by typing, for example, reddit sitcoms. You’ll jump directly to that site’s search results.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks, of course, are links to websites you might want to visit again without having to remember and type their URLs.

To see the list of bookmarks on your phone, tap at the bottom of the screen. You see the master list of bookmarks. They’re organized in folders, or even folders within folders.

Tapping a folder shows you what’s inside, and tapping a bookmark begins opening the corresponding website.

Note

Actually, what you see when you tap are three tabs at the top: (Bookmarks), (Reading List), and (Twitter links and RSS feeds). The latter two are described later in this chapter.

You may be surprised to discover that Safari already seems to be prestocked with bookmarks—that, amazingly, are interesting and useful to you in particular! How did it know?

Easy—it copied your existing desktop computer’s browser bookmarks from Safari on the Mac when you synced the iPhone (Chapter 16), or when you turned on Safari syncing through iCloud. Sneaky, eh?

Creating New Bookmarks

You can add new bookmarks right on the phone. Any work you do here is copied back to your computer the next time you sync the two machines—or instantaneously, if you’ve turned on iCloud bookmark syncing.

image with no caption

When you find a web page you might like to visit again, hold down the icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Add Bookmark. (Or do it the long way: Tap the to reveal the Share options, one of which is Add Bookmark.) The Add Bookmark screen appears (previous page, right).

You have two tasks here:

It’s easy enough to massage your Bookmarks list within Safari—to delete favorites that aren’t so favorite anymore, to make new folders, to rearrange the list, to rename a folder or a bookmark, and so on.

The techniques are the same for editing bookmark folders as editing the bookmarks themselves—after the first step. To edit the folder list, start by opening the Bookmarks (tap ), and then tap Edit.

To edit the bookmarks themselves, tap , tap a folder, and then tap Edit. Now you can get organized:

Tap Done when you’re finished.

image with no caption

Tip

As you’ve just read, preserving a bookmark requires quite a few taps. That’s why it’s extra important for you to remember iOS’s gift to busy people: the “Remind me about this later” command to Siri (“Remind Me About This”). You’ve just added a new item in your Reminders list, complete with a link to whatever page you’re looking at now. (Feel free to be more specific, as in “Remind me about this when I get home.”)

The History List

Behind the scenes, Safari keeps track of the websites you’ve visited in the past week or so, neatly organized into subfolders like This Evening and Yesterday. It’s a great feature when you can’t recall the address for a website you visited recently—or when you remember it had a long, complicated address and you get the psychiatric condition known as iPhone Keyboard Dread.

To see the list of recent sites, tap ; then, on the tab, tap History, whose icon bears a to make sure you know it’s special. Once the History list appears, just tap a bookmark to revisit that web page.

Some people find it creepy that Safari maintains a History list, right there in plain view of any family member or coworker who wanders by. They’d just as soon their wife/husband/boss/parent/kid not know what websites they’ve been visiting.

You can delete just one particularly incriminating History listing easily enough; swipe leftward across its name and then tap Delete. You can also delete the entire History menu, thus erasing all your tracks. To do that, tap Clear; confirm by tapping Clear History. You’ve just rewritten History.

There’s a third tab button on the Bookmarks screen, too: .

It’s the Shared Links button. It lists every tweet from Twitter that contains a link. The idea is to make it easier for you to explore sites that your Twitter friends are recommending; all their web finds are collected in one place (facing page, right).

Tip

In Safari, “shared links” has another meaning, too: The makes it easy to share the URL of a particularly juicy web page. On the Share sheet, you get the usual set of links: Copy, Mail, Message (to send by text message), Twitter, Facebook, and so on. But remember that iOS is extensible. Depending on the apps you’ve installed, you may see all kinds of other share-this-link options on this screen.

At the bottom of the Shared Links () tab, iOS offers a button called Subscriptions. It’s a reference to RSS feeds, which are something like subscriptions to websites. You don’t have to remember to go visit your favorite blogs or news sites; notification blurbs about their newly posted articles come to you.

Here’s the procedure:

  1. In Safari, open a site that offers an RSS feed. News sites of all kinds offer RSS feeds (nytimes.com, usatoday.com, engadget.com, and so on).

  2. Subscribe to it. To do that, tap , then , then Subscriptions, and then Add Current Site (facing page, left).

  3. Read. When you want to see what’s new, tap , then . That’s right: Blurbs representing newly posted stories appear on the tab (shown above at right), mixed in with all your Twitter links. That’s not ideal, especially if there are hundreds of Twitter links—but at least you’ll never be without a place to check for interesting stuff to read.

image with no caption

To delete a subscription, tap , then , then Subscriptions; tap next to the subscription’s name, and confirm by tapping Delete.

The Reading List

The Reading List is a handy list of web pages you want to read later. Unlike a bookmark, it stores entire pages, so you can read them even when you don’t have an Internet connection (on the subway or on a plane, for example).

The Reading List also keeps track of what you’ve read. You can use the Show All/Show Unread button at the bottom of the screen to view everything—or just what you haven’t yet read.

Tip

To make matters even sweeter, iCloud synchronizes your Reading List on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and so on—as long as you’ve turned on bookmark syncing. It’s as though the web always keeps your place.

image with no caption

To add a page to the Reading List, tap and then tap Add to Reading List (above, left). Or just hold your finger down on a link until a set of buttons appears, including Add to Reading List.

Once you’ve added a page to the Reading List, you can get to it by tapping and then tapping the Reading List tab at the top (). Tap an item on your list to open and read it (above, right).

Tip

When you get to the bottom of a Reading List item you’ve just read, keep scrolling down. The phone is nice enough to offer up the next article in your Reading List, as though they were all vertically connected.

By the way, some web pages require a hefty amount of data to download, what with photos and all. If you’re worried about Reading List downloads eating up your monthly data allotment, you can visit Settings→Safari and turn off Use Cellular Data.

Now you’ll be able to download Reading List pages only when you’re on Wi-Fi, but at least there’s no risk of going over your monthly cellular-data allotment.

Link-tapping, of course, is the primary activity of the web. But in Safari, those blue underlined links (or not blue, even not underlined links) harbor special powers:

image with no caption

This, of course, is part of the peek and pop feature described in Peek and Pop. Once you’ve opened the preview bubble, you can either retreat (lift your finger; remain where you were) or advance (press even harder to fully open that page).

Quite handy, really.

Saving Graphics

If you find a picture online that you wish you could keep forever, you have two choices. You could stare at it until you’ve memorized it, or you could save it.

To do that, touch the image for about a second. A sheet appears, just like the one that appears when you hold your finger down on a regular link.

If you tap Save Image, then the iPhone thoughtfully deposits a copy of the image in your Camera Roll so it will be copied back to your Mac or PC at the next sync opportunity. If you tap Copy, then you nab a link to that graphic, which you can now paste into another program.

Tip

If Save Image isn’t one of the choices, there’s a workaround: Tap Open in New Tab, touch the image in its new tab for about a second, and then choose Save Image from the sheet that appears.

Saved Passwords and Credit Cards

On desktop web browsers, a feature called AutoFill saves you an awful lot of typing. It fills out your name and address automatically when you’re ordering something online. It stores your passwords so you don’t have to re-enter them every time you visit passworded sites.

But on the iPhone, where you’re typing on glass, the convenience of AutoFill goes to a whole new level.

The phone can memorize your credit card information, too, making it much easier to buy stuff online; in fact, it can even store this information by taking a picture of your credit card.

And thanks to iCloud syncing, all those passwords and credit cards can auto-store themselves on all your other Apple gadgetry.

To turn on AutoFill, visit Settings→Safari→AutoFill. Here’s what you find (next page, left):

Tip

Once you’ve stored all these passwords and credit cards, it sure would be nice if you didn’t have to enter them into other Apple gadgets, wouldn’t it? Your Mac, your iPad, and so on?

Fortunately, the iCloud service can synchronize this information to Safari running on other Apple machines. iCloud Sync has the details.

image with no caption

Manipulating Multiple Pages

Like any other self-respecting browser, Safari can keep multiple pages open at once, making it easy for you to switch among them. You can think of it as a miniature version of tabbed browsing, a feature of browsers like Safari Senior, Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft Edge. Tabbed browsing keeps a bunch of web pages open simultaneously.

One advantage of this arrangement is that you can start reading one web page while the others load into their own tabs in the background.

Tap the button in the lower right. The Safari page seems to duck backward, bowing to you in 3D space. Tap +.

You now arrive at the Favorites page (next page, left). Here are icons for all the sites you’ve designated as Favorites (see The Favorites Icons). Tap to open one. Or, in the address bar, enter an address. Or use a bookmark.

image with no caption

Tap again. Now you see something like the 3D floating pages shown above at right. These are all your open tabs (windows). You work with them like this:

You can open a third window, and a fourth, and so on, and jump among them, using these two techniques.

Tip

Although not one person in a thousand realizes it, you can search your open Safari tabs’ website titles and URLs. Tap the button and hold the phone horizontally (landscape mode). There’s your secret search box.

Thanks to the miracle of iCloud syncing, the last windows and tabs you had open on that other gadget (even if the gadget is turned off) show up here, at the bottom of the page-juggling screen (tap to see it). They’re sorted into headings that correspond to your other Apple gadgets.

The concept is to unify your Macs and i-gadgets. You’re reading three browser windows and tabs on your phone—why not resume on the big screen when you get home and sit down in front of your Mac?

You won’t see these tabs unless the Macs have OS X Mountain Lion or later. And, of course, Safari has to be turned on in System Preferences→iCloud on the Mac, and Settings→iCloud on the phone or tablet.

image with no caption

Reader View

How can people read web articles when there’s Times-Square blinking all around them? Fortunately, you’ll never have to put up with that again.

The Reader button in the address bar () is amazing. With one tap, it eliminates everything from the page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, toolbars, blinking, links, banners, promos, or anything else.

The text is also changed to a clean, clear font and size, and the background is made plain white. Basically, it makes any web page look like a printed book page, and it’s glorious. Shown below: the before and after. Which looks easier to read?

image with no caption

To exit Reader, tap again. Best. Feature. Ever.

Tip

Once you’re in Reader view, a tiny AA button appears at the right end of the address bar. It opens the same font panel that’s built into iBooks (illustrated in Tip). That is, it offers you a choice of type size, font, and background color.

The fine print: Reader doesn’t appear until the page has fully loaded. It doesn’t appear on “front page” pages, like the nytimes.com home page—only when you’ve opened an article within. And it may not appear on sites that are already specially designed for access by cellphones.

You’ll know when it’s available, because the address bar says “Reader View Available.” Can’t get much clearer than that.

Web Security

Safari on the iPhone isn’t meant to be a full-blown web browser like the one on your desktop computer, but it comes surprisingly close—especially when it comes to privacy and security. Cookies, pop-up blockers, parental controls...they’re all here, for your paranoid pleasure.

The world’s smarmiest advertisers like to inundate us with pop-up and pop-under ads—nasty little windows that appear in front of the browser window, or, worse, behind it, waiting to jump out the moment you close your window. Fortunately, Safari comes set to block those pop-ups so you don’t see them. It’s a war out there—but at least you now have some ammunition.

The thing is, though, pop-ups are sometimes useful (and not ads)—notices of new banking features, seating charts on ticket-sales sites, warnings that the instructions for using a site have changed, and so on. Safari can’t tell these from ads—and it stifles them, too. So if a site you trust says “Please turn off pop-up blockers and reload this page,” then you know you’re probably missing out on a useful pop-up message.

In those situations, you can turn off the pop-up blocker. The on/off switch is in Settings→Safari.

Tip

Of course, you can also install other companies’ ad blockers. Search the App Store for, for example, 1Blocker or Crystal.

When you’re signing up for a new account on some website, and you tap inside the box where you’re supposed to make up a password, Safari offers to make up a password for you. It’s a doozy, too, along the lines of 23k2k4-29cs8-58384-ckk3322.

Now, don’t freak out. You’re not expected to remember that. Safari will, of course, memorize it for you (and sync it to your other Apple computers, if they’re on the same iCloud account). Meanwhile, you’ve got yourself a unique, nearly uncrackable password.

Cookies are something like preference files. Certain websites—particularly commercial ones like Amazon—deposit them on your hard drive so that they’ll remember you the next time you visit. That’s how Amazon is able to greet you with, “Welcome, Chris” (or whatever your name is). It’s reading its own cookie.

Most cookies are perfectly innocuous—and, in fact, extremely useful, because they help websites remember your tastes (and contact info).

But fear is widespread, and the media fan the flames with tales of sinister cookies that track your movement on the web. If you’re worried about invasions of privacy, Safari is ready to protect you.

Open Settings→Safari→Block Cookies. The options here are like a paranoia gauge. If you click Always Block, then you create an acrylic shield around your iPhone. No cookies can come in, and no cookie information can go out. You’ll probably find the web a very inconvenient place; you’ll have to re-enter your information upon every visit, and some websites may not work properly at all. The Always Allow option means “Oh, what the heck—just gimme all of them.”

A good compromise is Allow from Websites I Visit, which accepts cookies from sites you want to visit, but blocks cookies deposited on your phone by sites you’re not actually visiting—cookies an especially evil banner ad gives you, for example.

The Settings→Safari screen also offers a Clear History & Website Data button. It deletes all the cookies you’ve accumulated so far, as well as your phone’s cache. (That’s a patch of the iPhone’s storage area where pieces of web pages you visit—graphics, for example—are retained, to speed up loading the next time you visit.) If you worry that your cache eats up space, poses a security risk, or is confusing some page, then tap Clear History & Website Data to erase it and start over.

Private browsing lets you surf without adding any pages to your History list, searches to your Google search suggestions, passwords to Safari’s saved password list, or autofill entries to Safari’s memory. You might want to turn on private browsing before you visit websites that would raise interesting questions with your spouse, parents, or boss.

When you want to start leaving no tracks, tap to open the page-juggler screen; tap Private at the bottom-left corner.

Suddenly the light-gray accents of Safari turn jet-black—a reminder that you’re now in Private mode. Tap + to open a new page, and proceed as usual. From now on, Safari records nothing while you surf.

image with no caption

When you’re ready to browse “publicly” again, turn private browsing off once more (tap , and then tap Private). Safari resumes taking note of the pages you visit—but it never remembers the ones you opened while in Private mode. In other words, what happens in private browsing stays in private browsing.

If your child (or employee) is old enough to have an iPhone but not old enough for the seedier side of the web, then don’t miss the Restrictions feature in Settings. The iPhone makes no attempt to separate the good websites from the bad—but it can remove the Safari icon from the iPhone altogether so that no web browsing is possible at all. See Software Updates for instructions.

Five Happy Surprises in the Panel

So far in this chapter, you’ve learned the first step in bookmarking a page (tap ); in designating a new Favorite (tap ); and in saving a web article to your offline Reading List (tap ). That’s right: All these features await on the Share sheet.

But that same panel hosts a wealth of equally useful buttons that nobody ever talks about. So tap to open the Share sheet and follow along!

image with no caption

The AirDrop, Message, Mail, Twitter, and Facebook buttons are pretty obvious; they share the link of your current page with other people.

Remember how you can say to Siri, about a web page you’re on, “Remind me about this later?” (If not, see “Remind Me About This”.) There’s a button for that, here on the Share sheet. Great when speaking to your phone would be socially awkward.

Save PDF to iBooks

Well, how the heck about that? You can turn anything you find on the web into an iBooks document—an electronic book that you can read later in iBooks (iBooks)! That way, you gain a wide variety of reading tools (notes, highlighting, dictionary) and organizational tools (collections) that aren’t available in Safari.

Save to Home Screen

Is there a certain website you visit every day? This button adds the icon of your web page right to your Home screen. It’s a shortcut that Apple calls a web clip.

When you tap Add to Home Screen, you’re offered the chance to edit the icon’s name; finally, tap Add. When you return to your Home screen, you’ll see the icon; you can move or delete it as you would any other app.

Tip

You can turn part of a web page into one of these Web Clips, too—say, The New York Times’ “Most emailed” list, or the box scores for a certain sports league. All you have to do is zoom and scroll the page in Safari before you tap , isolating the section you want. Later, when you open the web clip, you’ll see exactly the part of the web page you wanted.

You can send a link to a web article (complete with opening sentences and an image) directly to a note in the Notes app—no copy and paste required. You’re invited to annotate the note before hitting Save (below, left), or even append it to the end of an existing Notes page (right).

image with no caption