How can people read Web articles when there’s Times-Square blinking going on all around them? Fortunately, you’ll never have to put up with that again.

The Reader button in the address bar is amazing. With one click (or press Shift--R), it eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos, or anything else.

The text is also changed to a clean, clear font and size, and the background is made plain white. Basically, it makes any Web page look like a printed book page or a Kindle page, and it’s glorious (Figure 12-5).

To exit Reader, press the same keyboard shortcut, or click the Reader button again.

Best. Feature. Ever.

The Reading List is a hide-able panel at the left side of the screen that lists Web pages you want to read later (Figure 12-6).

The Reading List doesn’t actually store the pages on the Mac; it basically stores a link to the page, just like a bookmark. You can’t read it later unless you’re actually online.

It does have some advantages over bookmarks, though. For example, it’s faster to flag a Web page you like—you don’t have to make up a name or location for it, as with a bookmark. The Reading List keeps track of what you’ve read; you can use the All/Unread buttons at the top of the list to view everything, or just what you haven’t yet read. You might treat the Reading List as a list of pages you’ll want to read once later, and use bookmarks for pages you like to revisit frequently.

To add a page to the Reading List, use one of these techniques:

Once you’ve added a page to the Reading List, you can get to it by clicking the button on the toolbar, or by choosing View→Show Reading List, or by pressing Shift--L.

To read the pages you’ve flagged for the Reading List, you can press Option--↓ or Option--↑ to move up and down your list.

Figure 12-6. To revisit a page you’ve set aside in the Reading List, just click it. Screen out the pages you’ve already read by clicking the Unread tab at the top. Delete an entry by clicking the button that appears at the right side when you point there.

If any app is going to remind you of an iPhone/iPad, it’s Safari. Once you enter full-screen mode by clicking the button at upper right (see Full Screen Mode, Safari), it’s almost exactly like surfing the Web on the iPad. For example:

Figure 12-7. Click the Downloads () button to view this list of recent downloads. Double-click an icon to open the download. Click the button to jump to the file wherever it’s sitting in the Finder. To remove an item from the list, click it and then press Delete. (The Clear button erases the whole list.) You can also drag an item out of this list and onto the desktop to park it there.

When you click a link to download something from a Web page, it visibly flies to the upper-right corner of the Safari window, where the Downloads button appears. You can then monitor the progress of the download at a glance—because the Downloads button fills up with blue as the download completes.

As Figure 12-7 shows, you can also view and manipulate a list of everything you’ve downloaded recently, all without leaving the comfort of whatever page you’re on.

To pause downloading, click the button next to the download’s name. Later, you can generally pick up from where you left off by clicking the Resume () button.

When you see a picture you’d like to keep, right-click it and choose Save Image to Downloads (or Add Image to iPhoto Library, or just Save Image As) from the shortcut menu. Safari stores it as a new graphics file, freed from its birthplace on the Web. (You can specify where Safari saves downloaded pictures on the Safari→Preferences→General tab. In that case, the shortcut menu’s wording changes to say, for example, “Save Image to ‘Pictures.’”)

The little orange SnapBack button (), which sometimes appears at the right end of the address bar or search box, takes you instantly back to your last page of search results.

The point here is that, after burrowing from one link to another in pursuit of some Google result or Amazon listing, you can return to your starting point without having to mash the Back button over and over again. (The SnapBack button doesn’t appear until you’ve actually clicked away from the first page you visited.)

The world’s smarmiest advertisers inundate us with pop-up and pop-under ads—nasty little windows that appear in front of the browser window or, worse, behind it, waiting to jump out the moment you close your current window. They’re often deceptive, masquerading as error messages or dialog boxes, and they’ll do absolutely anything to get you to click inside them.

If this kind of thing is driving you crazy, choose Safari→Block Pop-Up Windows, so that a checkmark appears next to the command. It’s a war out there—but at least you now have some ammunition.

If it seems as though a lot of Web sites are designed with type that’s too small to read, it’s not just you and your aging eyes. Often, it has to do with the high resolution of today’s screens, which work by packing their pixels together more tightly—and making everything look smaller.

Fortunately, Safari is extremely well equipped to help you with this problem. In fact, it offers many solutions:

Efficiency freaks generally prefer keyboard shortcuts to using the mouse, so Safari is filled with them.

Press Tab to jump from one text box or pop-up menu to the next on your Web page. Add the Option key to jump from one link to another (and when you highlight a link, press Return to “click” it).

You don’t have to be connected to the Net to read a favorite Web page. You can save it on your hard drive so you can peruse it later—on your laptop during your commute, for example—just by choosing File→Save As.

At that point, to save the entire page, along with all its images, movies, and so on, choose Web Archive from the Format pop-up menu. (Choose Page Source only if you intend to edit the raw HTML Web documents and then repost them, or if you just want to study the underlying code.)

Occasionally, you may wish you could view a little map that marks the path of the current Web page within its site. Ah, but Safari has already thought of that. See Figure 12-8.

Figure 12-8. If you -click the title bar (centered just above the address bar), Safari displays the “ladder” that shows the Web site’s internal folder structure. That can be handy when you want to jump to this page’s “parent” page.

Safari provides two ways of telling a friend about the page you’re looking at. You might find that useful when you come across a particularly interesting news story, op-ed piece, or burrito recipe.

If the customer-service comment form on that corporate Web site doesn’t give you enough room to rant properly, you can resize the text box right on the page—a very welcome feature. Figure 12-9 tells all.

Figure 12-9. This trick works on a Web page’s text fields—comment boxes, forms to send a letter to the mayor, and so on. You can resize such boxes by dragging the three diagonal ribbed lines in the lower-right corner of the text field. The rest of the page adjusts itself to the new text-box size, and you have room to say what you need to say.

What’s the first thing you see when you open Safari? Is it the Apple news Web site? Is it the Top Sites display (Figure 12-3)?

Actually, that’s up to you.

Choose Safari→Preferences→General tab. Here, the “New windows open with” pop-up menu offers choices like these:

Some pages are so long, dense, or poorly designed that finding the words on the page needs a whole ’nother search engine. Safari’s search-within-the-page function shines a light on the words or phrase you’re seeking.

To use it, press -F and then type your search word into the Find box (Figure 12-10). As Safari locates the word or words, it displays them within a bright yellow box and dims the background of the rest of the page. The Find bar also tells you how many times the word or phrase occurs on the page; you can jump to each instance. Click the to start over with new search terms, or click Done to close the Find box and return to your normal browsing activity.

Figure 12-10. Once you enter your search word (“Yankees,” in this case), the browser dims the page and highlights every instance of that word—making it much easier to find what you’re looking for across a crowded Web page.

The History menu lists the Web sites you’ve visited in the past week or so, neatly organized into subfolders like Earlier Today and Yesterday. (A similar menu appears when you click and hold the ◂ or ▸ button.) These are great features if you can’t recall the URL for a Web site you remember having visited recently.

You can also view your History in a more expansive view—in Cover Flow view, in fact—by clicking the at the left end of your toolbar. You enter the Bookmarks-management view, described in Figure 12-4.

Figure 12-11. If you’re having trouble reading the tiny type in a PDF, point your mouse to the bottom of it to invoke Safari’s PDF toolbar. You can zoom out, zoom in, open the file in the Mac’s Preview program, or even download it from the Web site with a well-placed click.

PDF files are all over the Web as, among other things, forms to download, online brochures, and scanned book pages. But they aren’t always especially readable in a browser window.

Unless, that is, you’re using Safari. The next time you’re squinting at a PDF in the window, point to the bottom edge of the document; you’ll see a toolbar like the one in Figure 12-11 appear. With these four icons, you can zoom out, zoom in, open the file in Preview, or save the PDF file to your Downloads folder.