Chapter 11
In This Chapter
Surfing the Net
Opening and displaying web pages
Using a wireless network
Having fun with links, bookmarks, and History lists
Securing Safari
“The Internet in your pocket.”
That’s what Apple promised the iPhone would bring to the public when the product was announced in January 2007. In the years since, Apple has come tantalizingly close to delivering on that pledge.
For years, the cellphone industry offered a watered-down mobile version of the Internet, but the approaches typically fell far short of what people had come to experience while sitting in front of a computer.
Apple was a pioneer in replicating the real-deal Internet on a phone. Web pages on an iPhone look like web pages on a Windows PC or Mac, right down to swanky graphics and pictures — and at least some video and web-based games.
In this chapter, you find out how to navigate through cyberspace on your iPhone.
A version of the Apple Safari web browser is a major reason that the Net on the iPhone is very much like the Net you’ve come to expect on a computer. Safari for the Mac (and for Windows) is one of the best web browsers in the computer business. And in our view, Safari is one of the very best cellphone browsers, especially with its edge-to-edge full-screen design.
We start our cyberexpedition with a quick tour of the Safari browser. Take a gander at Figure 11-1: Not all browser controls found on a PC or Mac are present. Still, Safari on the iPhone has a familiar look and feel. We describe these controls and others throughout this chapter.
Before plunging in, we recommend a little detour. Read the online article on EDGE at www.dummies.com/extras/iphone to find out more about the wireless networks that let you surf the web on the iPhone in the first place.
We tell you how great web pages look on the iPhone, so we bet you’re eager to get going. We won’t hold you back much longer.
Apple brought the previously separate address bar and search fields together into a single convenient unified strip called the smart search field, following the path taken on most popular web browsers for PCs and Macs. When you tap the unified smart search field (as you will in a moment), the virtual keyboard appears. But you’ll also see icons for sites you frequent most often, and you can tap any of those icons to jump immediately to that site.
Otherwise, the moment you tap a single letter, you see a list of web addresses that match those letters. For example, if you tap the letter s (as we did in the example in Figure 11-2, left), you see web listings for Sports Illustrated (si.com), Staples, and Sears, among others. Tapping U or H instead may display listings for USA TODAY or the Houston Chronicle (shameless plugs for the media properties where Ed and Bob are columnists). Scroll to see more suggestions and the virtual keyboard slides out of view, as shown in Figure 11-2, right.
The iPhone has two ways to determine websites to suggest when you tap certain letters. One method is the websites you already bookmarked from the Safari or Internet Explorer browser on your computer (and synchronized, as described in Chapter 3). More on bookmarks later in this chapter.
The second method iPhone uses when suggesting websites when you tap a particular letter is to suggest sites from the History list — those cyberdestinations where you recently hung your hat. Because history repeats itself, we also tackle that topic later in this chapter. In Figure 11-2, results from Bookmarks and History are lumped together.
You might as well open your first web page now. It’s a full HTML page, to borrow from techie lingo. Do the following:
This icon is another member of the Fantastic Four (along with Phone, Mail, and Music).
If you can’t see the smart search field, tap the status bar or scroll to the top of the screen.
The web address is also called the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, for trivia buffs).
Safari automatically fills in the URL in the address field and takes you where you want to go.
It’s not necessary to type www at the beginning of a URL. So, if you want to visit www.theonion.com, for example, typing theonion.com or, in this case, even just onion.com is sufficient to transport you to the humor site or at least to a link that puts you a single tap from the site.
The smart search field and other menu options disappear when you start scrolling to read a page. In portrait mode, the URL at the top is still visible but it shrinks. In landscape mode, you don’t even see the URL because the site you’re visiting claims the entire page.
Either way, you get to see more of the content before you.
If you know how to open a web page (if you don’t, read the preceding section, “Blasting off into cyberspace”), we can show you how radically simple it is to zoom in on the pages so that you can read what you want to read and see what you want to see, without enlisting a magnifying glass.
Try these neat tricks:
When we surf the web on a desktop PC or laptop, we rarely go to a single web page and call it a day. In fact, we often have multiple web pages open at the same time. Sometimes, several pages are open because we choose to hop around the web without closing the pages we visit. Other times, a link (see the next section) automatically opens a new page without shuttering the old one. (If these additional pages are advertisements, they aren’t always welcome.)
Safari on the iPhone lets you open multiple pages simultaneously and presents all those open pages in the elegant three-dimensional tab view shown in Figure 11-5, left, loosely reminiscent of Cover Flow in iTunes on a Mac or a Windows computer. Tap the pages icon (labeled in Figure 11-1) to bring up the tabs. Then scroll from one tab to another as though you’re flipping through Rolodex cards. Tap a page to have it take over the full screen, as shown in Figure 11-5, right.
To close one of your open web pages, tap the X, which appears in the upper-left corner of each page in tab view (refer to the figure on left). Or use what feels to us like a more satisfying gesture: Swipe from right to left.
Surfing the web would be a real drag if you had to enter a URL every time you want to navigate from one page to another. That’s why bookmarks are so useful. And it’s why handy links are welcome too. Because Safari functions on the iPhone in the same way browsers work on your PC or Mac, links on the iPhone behave much the same way, too.
Text links that transport you from one site to another are underlined or appear in a different color from other text on the page. Merely tap the link to go directly to that site. But tapping on some other links (as well as pressing and holding) leads to different outcomes:
You already know how useful bookmarks are and how you can synchronize bookmarks from the browsers on your computer. It’s equally simple to bookmark a web page directly on the iPhone:
As you see in Figure 11-6, you have many options beyond bookmarking when you tap the icon (though not all the options are visible in the figure). You can tap Message, Mail, Twitter, or Facebook. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo (Chinese variations of Twitter) are also available, if you added a Chinese keyboard in Settings (see Chapter 2). Or you can tap Add Bookmark, Add to Reading List, Add to Home Screen, Copy, or Print. You can also use the wireless feature called AirDrop to share the page with people nearby via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
But we’re talking bookmarks here, so tap Add Bookmark and the screen shown in Figure 11-7 appears, with a default name and folder location.
To open a bookmarked page after you set it up, tap the bookmarks icon at the bottom of the screen (labeled in Figure 11-1) and then tap the appropriate bookmark.
If the bookmark you have in mind is buried inside a folder, tap the folder name first and then tap the bookmark you want.
If you tap another share icon option instead of Add Bookmark (refer to Figure 11-6), you can then tap
If a bookmarked site is no longer meaningful, you can change it or get rid of it:
Apple includes a helpful feature called iCloud Tabs that lets you venture into cyberspace to look at web pages open on your other iOS devices and computers.
You get to iCloud Tabs by tapping the pages icon and then scrolling all the way to the bottom, past the carousel of cool-looking 3D tabs. You’ll then see your list of open links, segregated by device, as shown in Figure 11-8. Tap any listing to access that page on your phone.
When in the Pages view, tap Done to return to the last web page you were looking at before tapping the pages icon. Tap + instead to return to the icons representing all your bookmarks and frequently visited pages. Tap Private to close all your existing pages before turning on private browsing, which we get to later in this chapter.
If for some reason you don’t see iCloud Tabs after tapping the pages icon, head to Settings, tap iCloud, and make sure that the option for Safari is turned on.
Sometimes, you want to revisit a site that you failed to bookmark, but you can’t remember the darn destination or what led you there in the first place. Good thing you can study the history books.
Safari records the pages you visit and keeps the logs on hand for several days. Tap the bookmarks icon, tap History (likely second down on the list), and then tap the day you think you hung out at the site. When you find the listing, tap it. You’re about to make your triumphant return.
Alternatively, on the Home page, tap Settings⇒Safari⇒Clear History and Website Data. In both instances, per usual, you have a chance to back out without wiping the slate clean.
Most of us spend a lot of time using search engines on the Internet. And the search engines we summon most often are Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing, at least in the United States. If you’re in China, chances are you search Baidu. In any event, all these search options are available on the iPhone, as is another resource called DuckDuckGo, a search engine that claims not to track you. We’ll take DuckDuckGo at its word, and assume that the claim is all it’s quacked up to be (sorry, we couldn’t resist).
Although you can certainly use the virtual keyboard to type google.com, yahoo.com, or bing.com into the smart search field, Apple doesn’t require that tedious effort. Instead, just type your search query directly in the box.
In Settings, you can also enable Search Engine Suggestions so that you can browse and search from the same aforementioned smart search field.
When you want to conduct a web search on the iPhone, tap the smart search field. You immediately see icons for your favorite web destinations, with Apple betting on your frequent return visits. But when you start typing in the smart search field, a Google (or other) search mission commences, with a Top Hit(s) — an educated guess really — shown at the top. Apple bases its guess on your bookmarks and browsing history.
You see other search suggestions as you start tapping additional letters. In Figure 11-9, for example, typing the letters le yields such suggestions as Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Lebron James. Tap any search results that look promising, or tap Go on the keyboard to immediately land on the Top Hit. Or keep tapping out letters to generate more search results.
As you can see in Figure 11-9, any Bookmarks and History results are also shown. On This Page matches may be displayed too (though you may have to scroll down to see them).
You can capture most pictures you come across on a website — but be mindful of any potential copyright violations, depending on what you plan to do with the image. To copy an image from a website, hold your finger against the image and tap the Save Image button that slides up, as shown in Figure 11-10. Saved images end up in your Recently Added album in the Photos app, from which they can be synced back to a computer. If you tap Copy instead, you can paste the image into an email or as a link in a program such as Notes.
It’s all too easy to get distracted reading web pages nowadays, what with ads and other clutter surrounding the stuff you actually want to take in. So pay attention to the horizontal lines that often appear in the smart search field, as shown in Figure 11-11 (left). Tap those lines to view the same article without the needless diversions, as shown in Figure 11-11 (right).
Don’t want to leave any tracks while you surf? Don’t worry, we won’t ask and we won’t tell. Turn on private browsing for a “what happens in Safari stays in Safari” tool. Those truly bent on staying private will also want to tap Clear History and Website Data, as we mention earlier in this chapter.
To go incognito, tap Bookmarks so that you see a tabbed view of open pages, and then tap the Private button, in the bottom-left corner. You’re given the option to close your existing tabs before turning on private browsing.
Your history is wiped clean, open tabs don’t appear in iCloud Tabs, and your AutoFill information is not stored anywhere. To remind you that you’re browsing privately, the Safari interface takes on a darker shade — a not so subtle message here, we suppose, that you might be engaging in a shady or naughty activity. We don’t pass judgment. Besides, we assume that you’re just a private soul, and we certainly respect that.
To return out of hiding, tap the bookmarks icon and then tap Private again.
Along with the riches galore found on the Internet are places in cyberspace where you’re hassled. You might want to take pains to maintain your security.
Return with us now to Settings, by tapping the Settings icon on the Home page. Now tap Safari. You’ve already discovered how to change the default search engine and clear the record of the sites you visited through Settings. Now see what else you can do:
If this concept wigs you out, you can take action: Tap Block Cookies to block cookies from third parties and advertisers, a reasonable middle ground. You can choose otherwise to always block cookies or to never block them. Or choose to allow cookies from the current website you’re visiting or any of the websites you visit. Tap Safari to return to the main Safari settings page.
If you don’t set the iPhone to accept cookies, certain web pages don’t load properly and sites such as Amazon and organizations you belong to will no longer recognize you when you appear at their doors.
Taming Safari is just the start of exploiting the Internet on the iPhone. In upcoming chapters, you discover how to master email, maps, and more.