I made a Safari tutorial video a couple of months ago, I’ll link to it in the description
of this video, I’d definitely recommend that you give it a watch after you’ve watched this,
as I cover pretty much the entirety of Safari from start to finish. However, I did recently realise
that there were some useful tips related to Safari on the iPhone that I didn’t include. So, I’ll be
covering them in this video, 10 tips to help you get more out of Safari. Stick around to the end,
there’s a really sneaky one that I think will have caught a lot of people out in the past.
OK, let’s get into it.
Search within open tabs
In my previous Safari video, I talked about Tabs and Tab Groups, and explained how you
can use them to organise collections of tabs together into one place. Now I’ll be honest,
I’m the kind of person who usually closes all my tabs down when I’m done,
but I know that some people have hundreds of them open at any one time, and if that’s you,
this feature might be really helpful for you. For the sake of illustration, I’ve opened 20
tabs, here they are if I scroll through them. A bit of a mess right? Well, let’s say that I’m
looking for a specific tab from this list, let’s say I’m looking for the Pocket Lint website,
what I can do is up at the top of my open tabs, you’ve got a search field,
and I can tap into there and type in Pocket, and it filters out to the tab that I’m looking for.
Now, this seems to only work for the name of the tab, you can’t search for words within the
open webpage which is a real shame, although I do get how challenging that would be to implement,
but like I said at the start of this tip, if you’re the kind of person who always has
loads of webpages open, this could be a really good way of staying on top of them.
Swipe between open tabs
Another tab related tip, the way that I’ve always navigated through open tabs in the past has been
to tap this little button in the bottom right, and then scroll through until I find the tab that
I want to open, then tap on it. But what you can do, is at any time in Safari, if you have
tabs open, you can use your thumb to swipe over to them. Notice down here at the bottom,
the tab to the left and right of this one are just creeping into view? Swipe left or right down here,
and you can immediately move forwards and backwards through your open tabs,
much quicker and much easier than my method, especially if you’re only operating with
a few tabs at a time, and you need to quickly bounce between them all.
Automatically use Reader view
Reader view is another feature that I mentioned in my previous Safari video,
it creates a kind of Kindle-esque, distraction free page for you to view your article on,
and as a reminder, you get to it by tapping this button down here,
then choosing Show Reader. If you’re someone who visits a LOT of article sites on your phone,
it might be easier for you to have all sites automatically open up in Reader view,
and you can then choose to turn it off when you don’t want it, rather than the other way around.
To do this, head into Settings, then Safari, scroll down to the Settings for Websites section,
and where it says Reader, tap into there and toggle the switch on.
Now, what your phone is going to do, is attempt to use Reader whenever it’s available.
You’ll need to see how you get on with this, there’s no perfect solution.
There are going to be times where you don’t want Reader, and your phone is going to automatically
open the page in Reader mode anyway, it’s more a case of, does this mode work for you
better than the current mode of having Reader view off, and you choosing to switch it on?
Hide your IP Address
I’m going to cover a couple of security and privacy settings now, this is the first,
ensuring that your IP Address is hidden when browsing.
Your IP Address is kind of like your digital home address, it’s a series of numbers
that link right back to the device that you’re browsing on, and the internet connection
that you’re currently using to browse, and you pass over quite a bit of information as part
of your IP address. In fact, let me read you a passage directly from Apple’s own explanation;
“Normally, when you browse the web, your local network can use your DNS records to see the names
of the websites you’re visiting. In addition, the websites you visit may collect your IP address,
which allows them to determine your identity and approximate location
without your explicit permission. All this information can be aggregated over time into
a detailed profile about you that may be used for targeted advertising and other purposes.”
So, one way that you can try and protect yourself a little whilst online is to hide your IP address.
Head into Settings, then Safari, and scroll down to Privacy and Security, then choose Hide
IP Address. You can choose Trackers, which is if you’ve engaged with some form of online marketing,
marketers can use trackers to try and gather information about you and how you
interact with their marketing efforts. I would definitely recommend choosing at least this.
If you’ve got an iCloud Plus subscription of any type, you can also choose to hide your
iP address on websites also, which is the option that I’ve gone for, giving you the highest level
of web browsing privacy that you can get on your iPhone without using a dedicated VPN.
Camera, Microphone and Location access
The other privacy setting I want to ensure that you’re aware of is making sure that your phone
asks you for permission before giving access to things like your camera,
your microphone and location. I think this one is hugely important, there are some sites that
will attempt to gain access to your camera and microphone the second that you click on the site,
and Safari is built to help ensure that this doesn’t happen to you.
Head into Settings, then Safari, head down to Settings for Websites, and ensure that Camera,
Microphone and Location are all set to Ask. You could choose Deny for all of them if you wish,
but if you ever do browse to a website where you need to access your camera or mic for example,
this is going to mess things up for you, so I’d recommend going with Ask for all of them.
Then, when you visit a website where camera access is needed for example,
a popup will appear asking you for permission, and you can either allow or deny.
Search with your voice
Siri is still super hit and miss across all of iOS, although it is getting better all the time,
but one area that I don’t think gets enough credit is Apple’s voice integration with things
like search. So, to search for something on the web using Safari on your phone,
you just tap in the bar at the bottom, and instead of typing in a web address, you type a search term
and hit enter. Well, try tapping this little microphone icon instead, and then speaking out
your term. It’s really, really impressive, I’ve been trying to catch it out with some pretty
challenging terms and it’s handled all of them really well. No need to hit enter when you’re
done, just stop talking and Safari will recognise the pause as you wanting to view the results.
Here’s a few examples.
Live Text within Safari Images
Live text is a great new iOS function that allows you to use your phone to interact with text in
the real world, for example if you walk past a poster for a show that you’re interested in,
you can hold your phone up to it, and the live text functionality
of your camera will allow you to extract the text from the poster
and either copy it into a note, or use it to visit a website for example.
The same function works on text within images in Safari. So here’s an example of an image
in Safari, and let’s say that I want to visit the website that’s shown at the bottom of the poster.
Instead of opening a safari page and typing it in, I can just tap and hold on the image
to select the text, then choose Lookup, and I can jump straight to the website in Safari.
Choose what size image to upload in Safari
If you’ve ever had to upload an image in Safari, say for an application or something like that,
you’ll know how annoying it is when you click upload, only to be told that your
image is too large. Thankfully, Safari on your iPhone can do this for you.
Here’s a website where I can upload an image. So I’ll tap Upload, then choose Photo Library,
then choose an image. Notice when I select it, down here at the bottom, it says ‘Actual Size’,
which for this image is greater than 5MB. But what if I’ve got a 5mb limit on the site that I’m on?
If I tap on Show Selected, and then tap on Actual Size,
you can see that I can resize the image to a small, medium or large file size,
all of which are significantly smaller than the original image size. You can also do this
for multiple files at once, just follow the same process with multiple images selected.
AirDrop pages to your Mac or iPad
iCloud tabs is, in theory, a way of viewing the pages that you have open on other devices,
so if you’re browsing something on your phone for example, you put your phone down,
you should in theory be able to then go to Safari on your
Mac and pick up where you left off. But, I find it’s a bit hit and miss.
What can be easier, is if you’re browsing something on your phone for example,
and you suddenly decide you’d like to view that same page on your Mac,
is to airdrop it. Choose Share, then AirDrop,
and then the device that you want to share to, and you’re good to go, it’s as easy as that.
Changing your default browser to and from Safari
I said at the start of this video that one of the tips was kind of sneaky, well here it is.
Safari is my default browser, although I do have Chrome installed. If I head into Settings,
and then Safari, nowhere in the settings menu does it allow me to make Chrome my default browser.
But, head back into Settings, then go to Chrome,
and there you can indeed choose to make Chrome your default browser, so I’ll select that option.
Now, with Chrome as my default browser, head back into Safari settings, and low and behold,
there’s an option appeared for me to make Safari my default browser. Sneaky right? If I choose it,
and then come back out, the option has gone. It’s one of those, totally legit but pretty
sneaky functions that Apple have included as a way of keeping you within the ecosystem.
I really like Safari so I’m fine with it, but if you’ve ever wanted to change
your default browser on your phone, at least you now know how to do it.
End
So there you go, 10 tips to help you get more out of Safari. Like I said at the
beginning of the video, I’d definitely recommend checking out my original Safari tutorial video,
I’ll include a link to it in the description of this video. What do you think,
any useful tips that I’ve not included here? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.