I reckon there are 2 types of iPhone owners; those who buy a new iPhone, and immediately
head to the App Store to download Chrome, and those who don’t care and just use whatever
comes already installed.
Well, if you fall into the latter group, you’re using Safari, Apple’s own built-in web browser.
Safari, for a long time was considered inferior to Chrome in pretty much every way, even on
the iPhone, but in recent years, Apple has made enormous progress in making Safari not
only a good browser, but a fantastic one, especially if you’re bought into the Apple
ecosystem.
But like most default phone apps, you’re probably not using it to it’s full potential.
So in this video, I’m going to walk you through everything that you can do with Safari
on your iPhone, a full explanation of how it all works.
I’m making this video in early 2022 by the way, so this is relevant to iOS15, do ensure
you’re using at least that version, to ensure you can do everything we cover in this video.
Oh, and I’ve made some other videos about how to get the most out of other stock apps
like Notes and Reminders, I’ll link to them in the description of this video if you want
to take a look at them.
OK, let’s get into it.
## Navigation & Basics
Let’s start by opening up Safari using the Safari button, and talking about what we see
by default on the Start Page.
It’s worth pointing out that, if your’s looks different to mine, for example if your
address bar is at the top of the screen rather than the bottom, you can change much of this
in the Settings menu.
I’ll cover Settings at the end of the video, because I think it will make more sense once
we’ve talked about everything first.
So, the bulk of what you probably recognise as a browser window is down here at the bottom
of the screen, if I tap into this box, I can either input a web address and hit return
to visit it, or I can type in a search term.
So for example, I can type in [google.com](http://google.com) and hitting return is going to take me to
Google, or typing in how long do penguins live and hitting return is going to inform
me that for Emperor Penguins, it’s 15 to 20 years.
Who knew?
These buttons down here at the bottom left are your forward and backward buttons, used
to go forwards and backwards in your page history.
Tapping them once will take you forwards or backwards a single page, whilst holding them
down for a second will bring up your history, allowing you to choose a specific page from
your most recent browsing history.
This button in the centre is the Share button, which allows you to share the page you’re
currently viewing in a number of ways.
If you tap here on Options, you can see that you can send the page in the automatic way,
the most suitable way that Safari thinks you should be sending it.
But you can override this if you wish, and send the page as a PDF, a Reader PDF or a
Web Archive.
A Reader PDF by the way is just a version of the page that’s easier to read, using
the Reader function of the browser, but in a PDF form, so it’s a great way to share
an article with someone.
You can share to an individual, or you can share to an app such as Twitter, Notes, or
pretty much any other app you’ve got installed on your phone that allows some kind of integration
with a website.
You can Copy the web address, useful if you’re writing an email for example, and need to
reference a site that you’re viewing.
You can add a Bookmark, which is useful for sites that you view on a regular basis.
You can also manage your bookmarks into folders, which we’ll cover a bit later on in the
video.
You can add the site to your favourites, which is essentially your kind of top-level bookmarks
folder, or your ‘favourite bookmarks’ essentially.
I use this all the time across all of my devices, I find it really helpful to have everything
that I browse regularly, quickly available.
Tapping Find on Page will let you search for something within the page.
So for example, if you’re on a page with an instruction guide, but you know you’re
only interested in a specific section of the instructions, you could search for a relevant
term, and then jump straight to the bit that you need.
Where there’s multiple instances of a term within a page, you can use these up and down
arrows to scroll through and find all the instances of it, until you find the one that
you’re after.
Add to Home Screen is kind of like the ultimate bookmark option, for sites that you know you
want to visit on a really regular basis, you can add an actual link to that site on your
home screen, and it will display as an app icon like any other app.
You can change the title of it, to make it a bit easier to read when it’s on your Home
Screen also.
Add to Reading List will add this to your Reading List.
Your Reading List is exactly what it sounds like, it’s a list of web pages that you
want to read later.
So if you’re browsing around, and you see an article that looks interesting to you,
but you don’t want to read it right there and then, just add it to your reading list,
and come back to it later.
There’s a setting, which I’ve got switched on at present, that also automatically downloads
an offline version of everything that you add to your Reading List.
This is great if you’re about to get on a flight or somewhere where you know you won’t
have wifi or data, you can start to work through your reading list while you’re offline.
And because iCloud syncs this across your devices, you’d be able to view the offline
version on your iPad for example, automatically also.
## Markup
Markup is a pretty cool feature that some people will find invaluable, it creates a
PDF of the page that you’re on, and then gives you markup tools to allow you to edit
it.
Let’s take a few minutes to look at this in detail.
So, use two fingers to move around the PDF, if you use one you’re going to end up drawing
on the page.
Then for example, if I tap the pen icon, I can choose the pen width and opacity, and
if I tap on the colour icon I can choose the colour of the pen I’m about to use.
Same goes for the highlighter, the pencil and then this is your eraser.
This is your selection tool.
So if you create something, like say a highlight, and you want to select it to either make it
bigger, or change the colour of it, tap this, and then draw around what you want to select.
You can then make the required changes.
The ruler acts like a physical ruler, albeit you can’t really measure, but you can use
it to draw straight lines if you need to.
Tapping this little plus button down here gives you some additional options.
You can add some text, in the form of a text box.
Tap down here to change the font, size and justification and use these buttons to change
the colour of it.
Or you can add a signature, and you can preload your signature for future use, I’ve used
my iPhone more than once to sign some pretty important documents without having to print
anything out.
You can add a Magnifier, which is exactly what it sounds like, or you can add shapes
and arrows, the same options apply for changing their size, colour etc.
When you’re done marking up, choose Done, and then choose to either Delete the PDF,
or Save it to your files or share it on with someone in the usual ways.
Jumping quickly back out of Markup then, you’ve most likely got some options to Print, or
options like saving to Dropbox, although these are going to vary depending on what other
apps you’ve got installed, you can tap this Edit Actions button at the bottom to change
what you can do here.
## The Start Page
OK so, let’s have a look at the Start Page, the screen that’s going to open up by default
when you tap on the Safari icon for the first time.
The first thing I’m actually going to do, is I’m going to scroll all the way down
to the bottom here and tap on the Edit button, because you can customise this screen to show
you exactly what you want.
You can first of all choose whether you’d like the Start Page appearance to sync across
all of your devices or not, a nice feature that allows you to create it once on one device,
and then not have to worry about creating it again.
Then, you can choose what you’d like to see.
Let’s look at them all in a bit more detail.
You can choose to quickly see your favourites, essentially the bookmarks folder that you’ve
specified as being your favourites.
This is helpful, I’ve actually got all of my bookmarks in this, broken down into specific
folders.
You can choose to view your Frequently Visited sites if you wish, helpful if there’s something
that you view on a daily basis, this can be a good way of getting back to that page, without
having to bookmark it.
I don’t use this, but it’s there if needed.
You can view pages that have been Shared With You, this is actually really helpful if you’re
someone who gets content shared with you a lot, by a lot of different people.
It shows you a link to the page, and who sent it to you.
My only issue here is that this only seems to work with Messages, perhaps not an issue
if you’re in the US where I know Messages is a super popular app, but here in the UK
for example, Whatsapp is the app everyone uses, and there seems to be no integration
there.
You can view your Privacy Report, where Safari will let you know stats about how many ad
trackers it’s stopped from being able to profile you.
You can choose to view Siri Suggestions, where Siri will try and intelligently recommend
sites to you.
Then here, you can choose to see anything that you’ve added to your Reading List.
There’s another way to get to that by the way, if you don’t want to have this showing
on the Start Page.
And you can choose to view your iCloud Tabs.
This is actually really helpful, let’s say you were viewing a page on your iPad last
night before bed, but now you’re on the train heading to work on your phone, and you
want to pick up where you left off, but you can’t remember the site.
So long as the tab is still open on your iPad at home, you’ll be able to view it here.
And then finally down here, you can choose to either have no image, or an image of your
choice.
Strange that Apple don’t let you choose a custom image from your photo library, but
there you go.
## Browsing
OK, let’s head to an actual website to see what we can do.
First up, let’s tap the ‘little A big A’ button down here in the address bar.
In quite un-Apple fashion, I think this is quite cluttered and confusing, but there’s
actually only a few things you need to focus on here, so let’s look at them.
First of all, Show Top Address Bar does what it sounds like, it’s going to move that
address bar, that’s currently at the bottom, up to the top.
I can reverse the process also and move it back down to the bottom if I need to, just
follow the same steps to do this.
You can view a Privacy Report, which will show you things like the sites that you’ve
visited recently where a tracker has been stopped by Safari.
Apple are making a really big thing about online privacy, so there’s nothing to worry
about here, trackers have been around on the web for a long time now, and Apple are just
making quite a bit of noise about their efforts to stop them from being able to follow you
around the web as much.
You can then view the Website Settings for this site, and you can set specific settings
for a site if you wish, such as whether or not it should automatically switch to Reader
Mode.
My suggestion is to leave this all as they are by default, but they’re here if you
need them.
You can Request the Desktop version of this website, a feature that’s less and less
useful these days if I’m honest, most sites are now able to automatically optimise themselves
for the device that they’re displaying on, but if you know for example that the site
you’re browsing is giving you a lower-quality, mobile version of the site, you could force
the browser to request the desktop version instead.
Hiding the Toolbar does what it sounds like, you’re going to go proper full screen if
you press this, and can then just tap down at the bottom to get it back again.
You can translate the page into another language if you wish.
Now, this is an English site, and I’m an English speaker and reader, but the reason
it’s offering me German is because I’ve added German as a preferred language in the
settings.
Now, I only speak a minuscule amount of German, this was just for illustrative purposes, but
if you’re multilingual and you’d like to be able to translate from one language
to another, you can do that here.
To show you, let me quickly jump to a Spanish page, and I’ll then tap the translate button,
and you see that not only can Safari translate, but it allows me to choose the language, from
my preferred languages.
And then finally, I can choose Show Reader, which gives me this page in a visual mode
that’s much more akin to someone reading something.
The distractions of the main page are gone, it’s all very neat and tidy now.
If I tap again on the Reader button down here, I can choose the colour scheme, I can change
the font and choose my font size.
Super handy if you’re someone who struggles to read websites on your phone.
Reader view doesn’t work on 100% of websites, but on article pages, it generally does.
## Bookmarks, Reading List and History
We talked about sharing earlier on in the video, but to the right of that button is
this book icon.
Clicking on that gives us 3 options.
We can choose to look at our bookmarks, and then of course select a bookmark from the
list available there, dipping in and out of folders as we need to.
Tapping on the glasses icon takes us to our Reading List, so anything that’s been added
to the reading list will show in here.
At the bottom left, you can toggle between showing all, or showing just the unread content.
And then to the right of that is your browsing history, which you can search if you need
to.
You can also clear your browsing history using the clear button down at the bottom, which
also gives you the option to clear your history within a specific timeframe, say only your
history from the past hour.
## Tabs
So, the current window that you’re looking at is known as a browser tab.
You can have multiple browser tabs open at the same time, just like on your desktop computer.
Tap this icon down in the bottom right to access your tab options.
Tapping the ‘plus’ icon in the bottom left will open a new tab, and you can close
tabs using the ‘x’ up here at the top of a tab.
If you tap down here at the bottom, you can choose to open a Private tab.
You might know this by other names, it’s called Incognito mode on Chrome, and it basically
won’t keep a local log of your web activity, so anything that you browse won’t show on
your browsing history, in essence.
But, be aware that this doesn’t give you some kind of full web anonymity.
If you browse things you shouldn’t be browsing, your IP address and similar information is
still just as visible as it would normally be, so heed this as a word of warning.
A feature that was recently added to Safari is Tab Groups.
So let’s say for example, you need to browse a number of specific sites in relation to
your work, and you tend to open the same ones up every single day, but you would only use
them for work, not for your personal life, you could opt to create a tab group, perhaps
call it ‘Work Tabs’.
Let me do that now with some sites here.
You can create multiples, so if you’re a student for example, and you’re working
on a project where you need lots of research tabs open at the same time, but you don’t
want to have to have them open all the time, or have to open each one manually, just do
this, create a Tab Group, save it, and you’re done, and this will sync across all your devices.
Next time you want to view this set of Tabs, you can just choose it.
## Settings
OK, so that’s essentially everything you need to know about Safari on iOS, everything
that we’ve covered will give you the knowledge you need to be able to browse away, and use
Safari to it’s full potential.
But I did mention at the start of this video that I’d show you the Settings, so let’s
do that now.
We head to Settings, and then Safari.
Language lets you choose your preferred language, and add any additional ones in, like I mentioned
earlier, great if you’re multi lingual, you can choose a default language, plus any
others.
You can choose your Default Search Engine using this option here.
You can allow Search Engine or Safari Suggestions using these toggle options.
You can allow for quick website search by having it toggled on here.
The example that Apple give us, is that if you type in a site name and a term in the
same bit of text, your device can understand that you want to return a result for that
site, so ‘Wiki Einstein’ for example would search Wikipedia for the term ‘Einstein’.
I’ve found this sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.
Preload Top Hit means that Safari will begin loading the top result for a search term as
soon as you search, meaning that when you then tap the top result, it loads a little
quicker.
I actually prefer to have this switched off, we have fast internet so I don’t really
need it, but it’s there if you want it.
Autofill allows Safari the permission to autofill information about you, such as your name,
your address and even credit card information if you’ve got it setup, so do head into
here to find out what you’re allowing, as you may wish to toggle some of this on or
off accordingly.
Favourites is your list of favourite bookmarks, which you can sort by folders, like I’ve
done if you wish.
You can enable a popup blocker if you like, and stop sites from being able to automatically
pop up other windows when you visit their sites, without your permission.
Extensions lets you run Safari extensions, kind of mini apps that run while you’re
running Safari.
These have existed on desktop for years, and they’re really useful.
I use one called Honey for example, not a sponsor by the way, just something I genuinely
use, as a way of testing voucher codes when I’m at a store’s checkout.
Tapping More Extensions will take you to the App Store to view Safari extensions.
In Downloads, you can decide whether you’d like to store downloads locally, or somewhere
like iCloud drive.
Underneath that, you’ve got some options relating to Tabs, then some Privacy options,
your browsing history clear button, and then some accessibility settings at the bottom,
including the option to save your reading list offline.
## Conclusion
And that really, is it, a pretty thorough look at Safari for iOS.
What do you think?
Do you use Safari on your iPhone?
If not, why not, and what are you using instead?
Or if yes, what do you like about Safari?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
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.