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:

• Reader view (). In this delightful view, all the ads, boxes, banners, and other junk disappear. Only text and pictures remain, for your sanity-in-reading pleasure. See “Reader View”.

• Address/search bar. A single, unified box serves as both the address bar and the search bar at the top of the screen. (That’s the trend these days. Desktop-computer browsers like Chrome and Safari on the Mac work that way, too.)

  This box is where you enter the URL (web address) for a page you want to visit. (“URL” is short for the even-less-self-explanatory Uniform Resource Locator.) For example, if you type amazon.com, tapping Go takes you to that website.

  But this is also where you search the web. If you type anything else, like cashmere sweaters or just amazon, then tapping Go gives you the Google search results for that phrase.

  Tip

  If you have a URL already copied to your Clipboard, just tap once in the address/search bar. From the options that appear, tap Paste and Go to paste the link and go to that site.

• Stop, Reload (, ). Tap to interrupt the downloading of a web page you’ve just requested (if you’ve made a mistake, for instance).

  Tip

  You don’t have to wait for a web page to load entirely. You can zoom in, scroll, and begin reading the text even when only part of the page has appeared.

  

  Once a page has finished loading, the button turns into a (reload) button. Click it if a page doesn’t look or work quite right. Safari re-downloads the web page and reinterprets its text and graphics.

• Back, Forward (, ). Tap to revisit the page you were just on. Once you’ve tapped , you can then tap to return to the page you were on before you tapped the button. You can also hold down these buttons to see the complete history list of this tab.

  Tip

  Since these buttons disappear as soon as you scroll down a page, how are you supposed to move back and forward among pages?

  By swiping in from outside the screen. Start your swipe on the edge of the phone’s front glass and whisk inward. Swiping rightward like this means “back”; leftward means “forward again.” Do it slowly, and you can actually see the page sliding in.

• Share/Bookmark (). When you’re on an especially useful page, tap this button. It offers every conceivable choice for commemorating or sharing the page. See “Creating New Bookmarks” for details.

• View Bookmarks (). This button brings up your list of saved bookmarks—plus your History list, Favorites, Reading List, and links recommended by the people you follow on Twitter. You can read about these elements later in this chapter.

• Page Juggler (). Safari can keep multiple web pages open, just like any other browser. “Manipulating Multiple Pages” has the details.

Zooming and Scrolling

If a web page is too small, 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. 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 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.

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 on the iPhone, 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:

• Scroll up a little bit.

• Return to the top or bottom of a web page.

• Navigate to a different page.

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

Typing a Web Address

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

• Your favorites await. When you tap in the address bar but haven’t yet typed anything, the icons of a few very special, most-visited websites appear (below, top). These are your favorites; see “The Favorites Icons”.

• Don’t type http://www. You can leave that stuff out; Safari will supply it automatically. Instead of http://www.cnn.com, for example, just type cnn.com (or tap its name in the suggestions list) and hit Go.

• Don’t delete. There is a button at the right end of the address bar whose purpose is to erase the current address so you can type another one. (Tap inside the address bar to make it, and the keyboard, appear.) But the button is for suckers.

  

  Instead, whenever the address bar is open for typing, just type. Forget that there’s already a URL there. The iPhone is smart enough to figure out that you want to replace that web address with a new one.

• Type .com, .net, .org, or .edu the easy way. Safari’s canned URL choices can save you four keyboard taps apiece. To see their secret menu, hold your finger down on the period key on the keyboard (previous page, bottom). Then tap the common suffix you want. (Or, if you want .com, just release your finger without moving it.)

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.”)

Searching in Safari

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

Safari produces a menu filled with suggestions that could spare you some typing—things it guesses you might be looking for. The result categories vary, but here are the kinds of tappable results you may get:

• Siri Knowledge. If your search term is something Siri knows about—a sports team, a famous person, an app, a movie or book name, an important concept—you may see a single, special, graphically rich listing right at the top. One tap takes you directly to the main page for that entity; sometimes it shows enough of the answer that you don’t even need to tap (see “ambulance” in ??? at left).

• Top Hits. The Top Hits are Safari’s best guesses at the websites you’re looking for. They’re the sites on your bookmarks and History lists that you’ve visited most often (and that match what you’ve typed so far).

  If you tap a Top Hit, you’ll find that the site appears almost instantly. It doesn’t seem to have to load. That’s because, as a favor to you, Safari quietly downloads the Top Hits in the background, while you’re still entering your search term, all to save you time.

  Note

  If you’re concerned that this feature is sucking down some of your monthly cellular data allowance unnecessarily, you can turn it off in Settings → Safari → Preload Top Hit.

  

• Google Search. The next category of suggestions: a list of search terms you might be typing, based on how popular those searches are on Google (or whatever search service you’re using). For example, if you type chick, then this section proposes things like chicken recipes, chick fil a, and chicken pox. It’s just trying to save you a little typing; if none of these tappable choices is the one you want, then ignore them.

  Note

  You can turn this feature off, too, if it makes you feel spied upon. (Behind the scenes, it’s transmitting your search term to Apple.) You do that in Settings → Safari → Search Engine Suggestions.

• Bookmarks and History. Here Safari offers matching selections from websites you’ve bookmarked or recently visited. Again, it’s trying to save you typing if it can.

• On This Page. Here’s how you search for certain text on the page you’re reading.

  Scroll to the very bottom of the results list to find the On This Page heading. It lists one result, called Find “ambu” (32 matches) (or whatever you’ve typed so far). Tap that line to jump to the first appearance of that text on the page. (There’s a less hidden way to start this process, too: Tap and then Find on Page.)

  Use the and buttons to jump from one match to the next (below, right). Tap Done (or anywhere on the web page) to return to your regularly scheduled browsing.

You can tell the iPhone to use a Yahoo, Bing, or DuckDuckGo search instead of Google, if you like, in Settings → Safari → Search Engine. (DuckDuckGo is a search service dedicated to privacy. It doesn’t store your searches or tailor the results to you. On the other hand, it’s capable of searching only about 50 web sources—Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, and so on.)

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.

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 15), 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.

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 (below, right).

You have two tasks here:

• Type a better name. In the top box, you can type a shorter or clearer name for the page. Instead of “Bass, Trout & Tackle—the web’s Premier Resource for the Avid Outdoorsman,” you can just call it “Fish.”

  Below that: The page’s underlying URL, which is independent of what you’ve named your bookmark. You can’t edit this one.

• Specify where to file this bookmark. If you tap Favorites, then you open Safari’s hierarchical list of bookmark folders, which organize your bookmarked sites. Tap the folder where you want to file the new bookmark so you’ll know where to find it later.

Editing Bookmarks and Folders

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:

• Delete something. Tap next to a folder or a bookmark, and then tap Delete to confirm.

• Rearrange the list. Drag the grip strip () up or down in the list to move the folders or bookmarks around. (You can’t move or delete the top folder, Favorites.)

• Edit a name and location. Tap a folder or a bookmark name. If you tap a folder, you arrive at the Edit Folder screen, where you can edit the folder’s name and which folder it’s inside of. If you tap a bookmark, you arrive at the Edit Bookmark screen, where you can edit the bookmark’s name, the URL it points to, and its location folder.

  Tap Done when you’re finished.

• Create a folder. Tap New Folder in the lower-left corner of the Edit Folders screen. You’re offered the chance to type a name for it and to specify where you want to file it (that is, in which other folder).

Tap Done when you’re finished.

Tip

As you’ve 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 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.

To add a page to the Reading List, tap and then tap Add to Reading List (below, left). Or just hold your finger down on a link until a set of buttons appears, including Add to Reading List. (At this point, iOS may politely ask if you want all future Reading List stories to be downloaded to your phone, rather than simply bookmarked.)

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).

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 Automatically Save Offline.

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 your Wikipedia addiction pushing you over your monthly cellular-data allotment.

The History List ()

Behind the scenes, Safari keeps track of the websites you’ve visited in the past week or so, neatly organized into sections 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 , and then . Once the History list appears, just tap a bookmark to revisit that web page.

Link-Tapping Tricks

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

• Long-press a link to open a handy panel. Its options include Open, Open in New Tab, Add to Reading List, Copy, and Share.

• Hard-press a link (iPhone 6s and later models) to peek at whatever page that link opens, as shown on the next page.

  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 Photos so it will be copied back to your Mac or PC at the next sync opportunity. If you tap Copy, then you nab a copy of that graphic, which you can now paste into another program.

Passwords and Credit Cards

Most of us are familiar with password hell. You’re supposed to create a long, complex, unguessable password—capital and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, with a few Hindi characters thrown in if possible. For each site. And you can’t reuse a password. Oh, and you have to change them all every month.

It’s not possible. Not even security experts have that kind of memory.

Fortunately, Apple has come up with a system that comes very close to the ideal: complex, secure passwords—without your having to remember any of them!

And since typing on glass isn’t fun for anyone, iOS can also autofill your name, address, and credit card information on websites, too.

Memorized Passwords

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

You’re not expected to remember that. Safari asks, “Would you like to save this password in your iCloud Keychain to use with apps and websites on all your devices?”

If you tap Save Password, iOS memorizes it for you (and syncs it to your other Apple computers, if they’re on the same iCloud account). Next time you’re logging in, Safari’s AutoFill offers to enter that password with one tap on the QuickType bar.

If you have several accounts for the same site, you’ll see two buttons on the QuickType bar (previous page, top right). And if you have even more, you can tap the little button to open the Passwords screen described in a moment.

Tip

In iOS 12, in fact, the QuickType bar can also present you with the passwords from third-party password-keeping apps like LastPass, Dashlane, and 1Password.

Safari may even offer to log you in completely, filling in your email address and password (previous page, bottom right). It’s a miracle.

The Master Password List

You can view a master list of the actual memorized names and passwords. It waits for you at Settings → Passwords & Accounts → Website & App Passwords (below, left). You have to prove your identity with Face ID or Touch ID before you’re allowed to see them.

On this screen, you can change any saved password, too; tap it and tap Edit. To add a password manually, tap . Or, if a login no longer pleases you, swipe leftward across it, and then tap Delete.

Tip

New in iOS 12: If you long-press one of the passwords in this list, you’re offered a Copy button and, even handier, an AirDrop button (facing page, right). That’s a great way to share a password with someone else nearby who has a Mac, iPad, or iPhone. Like your Wi-Fi password.

This list, by the way, might display the occasional symbol. That’s flagging passwords you’ve used more than once, for different sites. Almost everyone does that, because who’s really going to memorize 300 different passwords? But security experts frown on the practice, because it means that once a hacker gets the password for one of your accounts (from some corporate data breach, for example), he’s got access to your other accounts, too. Since iOS can remember and fill in your passwords all by itself, you might as well avoid that fate.

Tip

Here’s a quick way to look up a password: Ask Siri! “What’s my Netflix password?” “Show my Citibank password.” Or even “Show my passwords” (to get the whole list). You’ll still have to prove your worthiness with Touch ID or Face ID before you get to see them, but that’s still infinitely faster than bumbling around in Settings.

Automatic Text-Code Entry

iOS 12 comes with a lot of improvements, but it would be hard to find one that removes more of life’s irritations than this one.

You know how, when you try to log onto certain websites, they first send your phone a text message to prove that you’re you? (It’s called two-factor authentication. Security experts like it. People hate it.)

Yeah, you get the notification that a text has come in. But then you have to either memorize the six-digit code they just sent you, or switch into Messages, find the text they sent you, and copy the code to your Clipboard. And then go back to Safari, tap in the “Enter code here” box, and paste it. Augh.

Not anymore. Now, whenever one of these sites sends a code by text, iOS finds it in the text message, identifies it, and offers to paste it directly into the site (or the app). It’s fantastic.

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.

To Open a New Window

Tap the 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 (facing 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.

To Switch Among Windows (Horizontal)

If you turn the iPhone 90 degrees, so that it’s in landscape orientation, you get a special treat: tabbed windows, just as on a laptop. Now you can pop between sites by tapping their little tabs. (That’s if Settings → Safari → Show Tab Bar is turned on.)

In fact, in iOS 12, these tabs even display their favicons—tiny logos that identify them visually. In Settings → Safari, turn on Show Icons in Tabs.

iCloud Tabs

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 syncing has to be turned on in System Preferences → iCloud on the Mac, and Settings → [your name] → iCloud on the phone or tablet.

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, 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 on the facing page: the before and after. Which looks easier to read?

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

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.

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.

Private Browsing

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.

To begin, 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. Safari records nothing while you surf.

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.

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; here are a few highlights:

• AirDrop, Message, Mail, Twitter, and Facebook. Pretty obvious; they share the link of your current page with other people.

• Reminders. 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 for when speaking to your phone would be socially awkward.

• Add to Notes. 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, or even add it to an existing Notes page.

• Save PDF to Books. You can turn anything you find on the web into an electronic book that you can read later in Books (Chapter 11)! That way, you gain a wide variety of reading tools (notes, highlighting, dictionary) and organizational tools (collections) that aren’t available in Safari.

• Copy. Copies the page’s address, to paste it into some other app.

• Open in News. Turns the article you’re reading into a nicely formatted “magazine” page in the News app (“News”). If it’s not an article-style post, you just get an error message.

• Add to Home Screen. Is there a certain website you visit every day? This button adds that page’s icon right to your Home screen. It’s a shortcut that Apple calls a web clip. You’re offered the chance to edit the icon’s name; tap Add. When you return to your Home screen, you’ll see the icon; you can move or delete it as you would any app.

• Find on Page. Here’s your search command.

• Create PDF. Converts the page into a PDF document with only a single button: the button, so that you can send it to someone. And the Markup button () is here, too, for adding annotations first.

• Request Desktop Site. Here’s a less-hidden version of the button described in “Request Desktop Site”.