Six Mobile Safari Tips That Will Improve Your Browsing Experience

Six Mobile Safari Tips That Will Improve Your Browsing Experience


iOS: While we love Chrome on just about any device — smartphone, desktop or otherwise — Mobile Safari offers a solid experience on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Because it’s Apple-made, you can do a lot more with it — especially if you know a few tricks.

Check out the video above to see these in action.

  • Swipe Through Your Browser History: You don’t need to resort to the back button to go backwards in your browsing history. Instead, just swipe from the left edge of the screen to the right and you’ll see the previous page.
  • Quickly Type Domain Extensions: In older versions of iOS, the keyboard used to have a .com button. Now that’s been replaced by a period. If you still want to type .com, .net, .org, and a few others quickly, however, you just have to tap and hold on the period to bring up those options.
  • Enable Private Browsing Mode: Don’t want your history to stay on your phone once you close a tab? Enable private browsing mode by pressing the tab button in Mobile Safari and then the Private button. You can then keep your existing tabs or clear them out, and you get a cool dark theme for the browser as well.
  • Clear Stored Web Site Data: If you don’t want web data stored on your phone, you need to do a little more than browse privately. Make a regular trip to the Safari section of the Settings app, head into the Advanced area, and clear out your stored data.
  • Search Within a Web Page: If you need to find a specific word or phrase on a web page, just search for it through the Mobile Safari address bar just as if you were performing a web search. Rather than pressing go, however, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see an option to search within that page. Results will be highlighted in yellow.
  • View the URL Before You Visit a Page: You don’t always want to click on a link if you don’t know where it might take you, but if you tap and hold you can find out. This will bring up a list of options, and up top you’ll see the full URL. If it’s not somewhere shady, click on it. If it is, pass.

Of course, Safari can do more than just these six things but these are some of our favourites. For those of you with connected Bluetooth keyboards, be sure to check out this full list of shortcuts. iOS 7 added a lot of new options and using them can really speed up your browsing.


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