This isn’t a step-by-step guide to surfing on mobile Safari, but rather a collection of little tips for surfing on the latest iPhone firmware (3.1.2, at the time of writing). I’ve never thought that the iPhone was a machine so complicated that you’d need to buy a book about it, but there are also so many little tips and tricks that are available to stock (read: non-jailbroken) users that a roundup every now and then can’t hurt.
‘open in new page’
If you’d like to load a tab in the background, Safari can actually accomplish this with relative ease. All you need to do is tap and hold on a link you’d like to visit, then tap on “open in new page” on the pop-up that follows. Your browser will open a new tab and begin loading the page, but you don’t need to wait around for it to finish. You can go back to your previous tab and keep on surfing (or keep opening extra tabs with ‘open in new page’), and the spinning wheel on the top of the status bar will disappear when your other tabs are fully loaded.
‘add to home screen’
One of the easiest ways to access web apps is by linking to them on the home screen. Just tap on the ‘+’ sign in Safari and tap on ‘add to home screen’ to create a shortcut. Unlike bookmarks, which will only affect the tab you’re currently in, home screen shortcuts will switch to the appropriate tab in Safari automatically. The downside is that they’ll also reload the page.
The moral of the story is this: if you keep a lot of tabs open on your iPhone, then home screen shortcuts are probably a good idea. If you only have a few tabs (3-4) like I do, then it’s probably just easier to load Safari up instead.
Copy and Save Image
Just in case someone out there missed the news when 3.0 came out: you can tap and hold on images within Safari to copy or save them to your camera roll. It’s a great way to easily download lockscreen wallpapers right from your iPhone.
Tap on the status bar
Safari’s address and search bar are only displayed when you’re scrolled all the way to the top of the screen, and one super easy way to get there (and this applies to most any iPhone app with a scrollbar) is to just tap on the status bar. One tap on the iPhone’s clock and you’ll zoom to the top.
Switching search engines
If, for some reason, you’ve decided you hate Google and want a louder, more exciting search engine, you can tell Safari’s search bar to use Yahoo! instead. That’s in the settings app, within Safari settings.
Two finger scrolling within text boxes
Before the Gmail web app was modified to auto-magically resize its text input box, the only way to scroll through messages that were bigger than the text box was to use two fingers and swipe. You no longer need to do this within Gmail, but for website comment boxes and the like (which may not resize properly as you type more text), you can swipe with two fingers inside the text input area to essentially function as PgUp and PgDown do on desktop computers. It’s not smooth, but it’s definitely easier than slowly crawling up the text input box by dragging the magnifying glass…
Web gadgets
I’ve already mentioned Gmail and Google Reader, but here are a couple of other Safari utilities you might not have heard of:
- Tabulate (via IntoMobile): advanced little bookmarklet that lets you tap on links and choose to open them directly, open them in a new tab, or queue links up to open all at once.
- InstaPaper: strips all of the relevant text from a webpage for easy downloading and reading later on.
- vtap (via Cnet): converts videos from other non-iPhone compatible sites on the fly. Search for a video, select one of the results, then wait a minute or two for the video to be converted for streaming right to your iPhone.
More Tips?
If you’ve got any extra safari-based tips to share, please leave them in the comments. I’d also like to add that, although I love seeing responses to my posts, it’d be great if we could just leave all the comments in this section purely as tips, so that we can keep this particular post as a resource, rather than a mini forum.
Continue reading:
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TAGS: safari
