THE IPAD MAKES IT easy to get to the Web—just tap the Safari icon on your Home screen (circled). The first time you open the browser, you see an empty window, ready to host web pages. Tap the address bar so the iPad keyboard pops up, and then type in a web address.

Except for the ability to play videos created with Adobe Flash, Safari has most of the features of a desktop browser: bookmarks, a history list, cookies, a pop-up blocker, and more.

When you go to a web page, iPad-Safari behaves just like a desktop browser, too. It progressively highlights the web address as it loads all the elements on a page and gives you Apple’s “Yo! I’m still loading the page!” animated icon: .

Here’s a quick tour of Safari’s main screen, starting from the upper-left:

THE ABILITY TO OPEN multiple web pages within the same browser window—and switch around between them—has been a standard feature on desktop-browsers for years. It’s known as tabbed browsing, and it’s been part of the iPad’s Safari browser for the past year or so. (Browser tabs replaced the old way of juggling multiple pages on the iPad, wherein a screen full of tiny, tappable thumbnails represented your open web pages and you selected from among them. It was kind of awkward to use.)

Using tabs on your iPad works just as it does on your desktop or laptop computer: You start with one page open in the middle of your browser. To open a second page without closing the first one, tap the icon beside the first tab and enter the address for the second site. Safari opens the new page and adds a labeled tab (circled) at the top of the window.

To switch from one open page to another, tap the other page’s tab. To rearrange the tabs, drag them into a new order with your finger.

You can have up to 25 tabs open at once, although you can see only 10 of them at a time. When you look up and realize your browser has more tabs showing than the inside of a doctor’s filing cabinet, you can easily close unneeded ones: tap the on the tab and away it goes.

Can’t remember the name or address of a site you had open in a tab earlier in the day? You can jog your memory a couple of ways. For one, press the button (circled) to open a window listing recently visited sites. For a list that goes further back in time, check out your Safari History list (Call Up Your History List).

If you’re on a web page and see a link to a page you want to open in its own tab instead of replacing the current page, press and hold the link until a menu opens (shown on Jump to Other Web Pages). Then slide your finger down and tap “Open in New Tab.”

While having tabs busting out all over your iPad screen is a great way to see the sites in a hurry, you might prefer that Safari open new pages in the background until you have the time to look at them. If you’re in this camp, tap Home→Settings→Safari→Open New Tabs in Background→On.

AS SOON AS MANY new iPad owners unbox their tablets, they spend hours zooming and scrolling through web pages because it’s cool and fun to flick a finger across a piece of glass and see a web page respond.

Even though the iPad has a fairly large screen, it’s not quite the same experience as surfing the Web on your laptop’s 17-inch display or your even bigger desktop monitor. Many companies offer mobile versions of their websites that bump up the size of the page’s text and graphics so they’re easier to see on iPads and smartphones. Better yet, many sites have their own free iPad apps that capitalize on the touchscreen for things like site navigation.

But not every site out there caters to iPad or smartphone users. You’ll encounter plenty of regular old web pages that look perfectly fine, except that they’re just a wee bit small to read comfortably.

Fortunately, the iPad gives you three ways to read web pages more easily.

When you zoom in on a page and want to read a part that’s out of view, drag your finger on the glass to pull that section to the center of the screen.

You can also scroll around a page quickly by flicking your finger across the glass. As your finger flies around, you may inadvertently hit a link, but Safari knows you’re in transit and doesn’t open the linked page. To actually go to a linked page, stop scrolling and tap the link with your finger.

YOU KNOW HOW SOME web pages contain a really fascinating article you want to read—but the page itself is surrounded by so many ads, graphics, toolbars, and other pixel detritus that you feel like you’re in the middle of a carnival midway? (And don’t you hate that?)

The good news is that iOS 5 and later has a wonderful feature called Safari Reader. Like its cousin-in-code for the desktop, mobile Safari Reader strips away all the distracting and nonessential graphics and other elements on a page and presents the article in a nice, easy-to-read format. It’s like a pair of comfy slippers for your eyes.

The bad news? Not every website works with the Reader. In fact, some website owners hate browsers (and browser add-ons) that strip ads from their pages because that’s how they make money. Still, there are plenty of sites that work well with the Reader.

To tell if a web page supports Safari Reader, look up in the address bar for a icon. If you see one, tap it. Like magic, the icon turns purple (shown below), the distracting ads melt away, and only the essential text and images appear front-and-center. You can even adjust the font size by tapping the icon until you’re satisfied with the way things look.

Not only can you now read in comfort, you can share the page in this form by tapping on the Safari toolbar and choosing to email it, print it, tweet it to pals, post it to Facebook, bookmark it, or add it to your Reading List (explained next). When you’re done reading with Reader, tap to return the page to its normal hot mess.

FIND A LOT OF great stuff on the Web, but have no time to read any of it? That’s where Safari’s Reading List feature can help. While it can’t actually add a few hours to your day, it can save links to the articles you find as you surf and have them waiting for you when you have time to read. Think of the Reading List as a set of temporary bookmarks for what you want to read.

The next time you’re browsing around in Safari and find an article that you just don’t have time to fully explore, tap and choose Add to Reading List from the menu (shown right). Safari now saves the article to your personal reading list.

Later, when you have time to read all the stories you saved, tap and then tap the Reading List icon () at the bottom of the drop-down box. You see a tidy list of all your saved articles. To read one, tap its title. (With the Reading List visible, you can add the current web page to the list by tapping in the top-right corner.) And as of iOS 6, Safari saves a copy of the page itself (not just the bookmark) so you can read it even when you have no WiFi or cellular connection available.

Safari divides the Reading List into two parts, All and Unread. All, as you may have guessed, shows every article you added to the list. The Unread list displays just the stories you haven’t tapped open and browsed. As you open, read, and move on from each saved article, the link for it automatically moves from the Unread list to the All list—saving you the trouble of remembering what you have and haven’t read.

To permanently remove a story from the Reading List, swipe your finger along the entry and then tap the red Delete button that appears.

If you find yourself reading stories on your computer, iPad, or other iOS device, like an iPhone, the Reading List gets even cooler if you use iCloud (Chapter 17). That’s because iCloud syncs your List among all your devices, so stories you save in one place, say on your iPhone, show up on your iPad and desktop or laptop computer as long as all the devices use the same Apple ID (Set Up an Apple ID). To get this feature, tap Home→Settings→iCloud, and then tap Bookmarks to On.

YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF so mesmerized by navigating the Web with a series of finger moves that you completely forget about the concept of clicking, as in clicking links so you can go to other web pages. In the old days, you did that with your trusty computer mouse. But on the iPad, you handle links differently: You tap them with your finger, much the way you’d click them if you did have a mouse.

As you know from desktop-computer browsing, not all links are blue and underlined. Some, in fact, are graphics, like pictures or icons.

As shown above, if you hold your finger down on a link for a moment—press it rather than tap it—a box pops up identifying the link’s full web address and offering four buttons. You can open the linked page in the current browser tab, open it in a new browser tab, add the story to your Reading List (Use Safari’s Reading List), or copy the link to the iPad’s clipboard to paste it elsewhere. (Cut, Copy, Paste, and Replace Text shows you how to copy and paste text.)

SOME PEOPLE LOVE THE iPad’s simple virtual keyboard, and some hate it because it feels like typing on a glass coffee table. And some use it only when buying things online while relaxing in the hammock out back. No matter how you feel about the keyboard, there’s one feature built into Safari that’s bound to please everybody: Autofill.

Autofill, as its name suggests, automatically fills in your name, address, and phone number on web forms (which are pages for things like shipping addresses)—saving you the drudgery of typing in the same information all the time. It’s convenient, reduces your keyboard time, and speeds up purchases for power shoppers. It can also help prevent typos.

Along with your contact info, Autofill can remember passwords for websites, but be careful with this. If you accidentally lose your iPad or someone steals it, the thief can retrieve your password, waltz right into your password-protected accounts, and steal even more from you.

That said, to turn on Autofill:

Now when you come to a web form that wants your info, you’ll see an Autofill button on the iPad keyboard; tap it instead of doing all that typing.

If you want to go ahead and use the password-supplying part of Autofill, tap the “Names and Passwords” button on the Settings screen to On. Now, whenever you hit a site that requests your password, Safari offers three choices: Yes, Never for this Website, and Not Now (the latter means you’ll get pestered again on your next visit). Say Yes and the browser logs you into the site automatically from then on.

To play it safe, say Yes only to non-money-related sites, like online newspapers. Tap “Never for this Website” for any bank, stock-trading, e-commerce, or other site that involves money or credit card numbers.

IF YOU CONFIGURED YOUR iPad to sync your desktop’s bookmarks when you first set up your tablet (see Activate and Set Up Your iPad Over WiFi), you’ll find Safari already stuffed with bookmarks (Favorites)—that is, a list of sites you can revisit with just a tap on the screen, so you don’t have to remember and type in their URLs.

If you ripped your iPad out of its box as soon as you got it and haven’t yet introduced it to your Windows PC or Mac (or signed up for iCloud), you can easily copy your existing desktop browser’s bookmarks from Internet Explorer (Windows) or Safari (Macintosh); Sync Bookmarks has instructions.

To see all your bookmarks, tap at the top of Safari’s screen. The Bookmarks box appears. Some bookmarks may be floating loose in the list, while others are neatly filed in folders, or even folders within folders. Tap a bookmark to open the website it points to; tap a folder to see what’s inside.

Add New Bookmarks on the iPad

As you surf, you can add new bookmarks right on your iPad. Any sites you bookmark there get copied back to your computer the next time you sync up. And if you have your iCloud settings configured to handle bookmarks across all your iOS devices and your computer, iCloud shares the sites you find on your iPad with those devices, too.

To add a cool new site to your Bookmarks list, tap at the top of the screen, and then tap the bookmark icon in the bottom row of the drop-down box. On the Add Bookmark screen, you have these choices:

• Rename it. Some websites have hideously long names, like “Uncle Earl’s Good-Time Five-String Finger-Pickin’ Jam Session,” but you can change that. Tap the top box on the Add Bookmark screen and rename the site something shorter, like “Banjos.”

  The box right below that—which you can’t mess with—displays the site’s official web address.

• File it. The third box in the Add Bookmark window gives you the option to file the bookmark loosely, in a folder (see Edit and Organize Bookmarks and Folders), or on the Bookmarks toolbar, which always sits at the top of the browser window for quick ‘n’ easy access. Tap the Bookmarks link to open Safari’s list of bookmark folders. When you find the one you want, tap the folder’s name to deposit your bookmark there, where it awaits you the next time you want to visit that site.

Tip

If you make a mistake as you tap in a URL and don’t notice it right away, you don’t have to backspace all the way to the typo. Press your finger down on the text until a magnifying glass and a flashing insertion cursor appear, then drag your finger to the error, lift your finger, and correct the mistake. Then go back to where you were.

ARE YOU ONE OF those people who has shortcuts to your absolute favorite websites right on your computer’s desktop? If so, you probably want to continue the tradition on your iPad’s Home screen. Not a problem.

When you’re at a site you want to save, tap at the top of the Safari window and choose “Add to Home Screen” from the menu. The site’s icon now sits on your iPad’s main screen. And don’t worry about filling up your Home screen pages—you can have up to 11 and flick among ’em—and, if you run out of Home screen real estate, you can consolidate icons by storing them in folders; see Edit and Organize Bookmarks and Folders for instructions.

THE IPAD’S BOOKMARKS () hold more info that you might think. In addition to storing your collection of favorite sites and Reading List, this feature records your browsing history.

The History button on desktop browsers has saved many a soul who can’t remember the name of that really informative site they saw the other day. Safari on the iPad doesn’t let you forget your history, either (well, not without some extra work—see Surf Securely), and it, too, quietly keeps a list of the sites you recently surfed.

To see your web trail, tap and then tap the clock-shaped History icon at the bottom of the drop-down box (right). This is where Safari stores links to your past sites, in subfolders with names like “Earlier Today.” Tap a bookmark within a subfolder to go back in time—or at least back to that site. The link won’t be in the History folder forever (time does march on), so you may want to bookmark the site for real before it slips away. Safari purges History links after a month.

SAFARI LISTS BOOKMARKS IN the order you save them, and that may not be the easiest way to find them—especially if you wander around the Web saving site addresses every day. iPad Safari is ready for this inevitability, as well as the probability that you’d like to delete old bookmarks every once in a while.

Editing your bookmarks—and folders of bookmarks—is quick and efficient on the iPad. To edit a bookmark or folder, tap the button, and then tap the icon at the bottom of the drop-down box if it’s not already selected. Now, tap Edit. To edit bookmarks inside a folder, tap , tap open the target folder, and then tap the Edit button.

Here’s what you can do to bookmarks and folders after you tap Edit:

Tap when you finish.

SAVING BOOKMARKS ON THE iPad as you go is fine, but over the years, you’ve probably built up a considerable collection of bookmarks on your desktop computer. In fact, you’re probably very attached to some of those links. The good news is, you can take them with you—at least on the iPad.

To copy your entire Internet Explorer or Safari bookmark library from your computer to your iPad, all you need to do is turn on a checkbox in iTunes. (Mozilla Firefox fans can sync up with apps like Firefox Home or Sync Browser.) Connect your iPad (either by Wi-Fi Sync or USB cable), click its icon in the iTunes window to get to the iPad settings screen, and then click the Info button at the top of the window, as shown below. Scroll down past other things you can sync, like contacts, calendars, and mail accounts, until you get to the section called Other. Now, do the following, depending on the type of computer you have:

This is the iTunes way to sync. If you have a free iCloud account, you can sync bookmarks across all your devices over the air, as Set Up iCloud on Your iPad explains.

As mentioned on the previous page, bookmarks you make on the iPad get synced back to your computer. But if things start to get too discombobulated and you decide you want to wipe out all the bookmarks on your iPad and start over with a fresh set from your computer, scroll down to the Advanced area of the Info screen (where it says “Replace information on this iPad”). Turn on the checkbox next to Bookmarks and then sync up to begin anew.

EVERY ONCE IN A while, you come across an image on a web page that you just have to have on your computer. It could be a cool photo of your favorite ball player, an image of a house on a real-estate site, or a wacky picture of a disgruntled Pekinese. On a desktop system, you just have to right-click (Control-click) the image with your mouse and choose “Save Image to Desktop.” But how do you do that on your iPad, where there’s no mouse, trackpad, or obvious way to right-click anything?

Easy. Press the desired photo or graphic with your finger. A box pops up with a whole bunch of options, like Open, Open in New Tab, Add (the page) to Reading List, Save Image, and Copy. Tap the Save Image button to download a copy of the picture to your iPad’s photo library (Find Pictures on Your iPad). From there, you can look at it any time you want or email it to someone (Share and Print Photos).

WHEN THE IPAD WAS announced in 2010, there was much grumbling about the fact that its browser wouldn’t play files in the Adobe Flash format—which is a large portion of the videos and browser-based video games on the Web. Some people thought the lack of Flash support would cripple the iPad’s chances of success, but even Adobe has announced a move away from Flash.

So those naysayers were wrong. It’s not a guaranteed cakewalk yet—the iPad still doesn’t recognize Flash, RealPlayer, or Windows Media files—but it can do a fair amount of streaming in other formats. For example, Safari can play most YouTube videos and QuickTime movies (like movie trailers), so long as they’re prepared in an iPad-friendly video format (Video Formats That Work on the iPad). It also plays MP3 and WAV audio files right off the Web. Here are a few sites to sample:

Just about any MP3 file plays perfectly fine in the Safari browser. If you’ve already exhausted your iPad’s music library, search for free mp3 music or check your favorite radio station’s website for an MP3 stream of its live broadcast.

As for video, even though Apple kicked the built-in YouTube app to the curb in iOS 6, you can still watch a ton of videos just by going to youtube.com and streaming them through YouTube’s mobile site. Not every YouTube video plays on the iPad, but many of them do. Meanwhile, you can replace the iPad’s old YouTube app with a standalone YouTube app, thanks to Google. It’s in the App Store, along with Apple’s Movie Trailers app for streaming video film previews.

WITH THE RISE OF mobile Internet-connected devices came the increased popularity of cloud computing—using programs that reside and store files online, up in the clouds, where you can get to them from any Web-enabled machine. That means you don’t have to drag around a seven-pound laptop stuffed with business software just to update a spreadsheet, because you can edit it online with an iPad—and it doesn’t have to be linked to an iCloud account (Chapter 17).

Not every cloud-computing site works with the iPad—Adobe’s Flash-based Photoshop.com site, which lets you edit pictures online, is one example. However, in Safari for iOS 6, you can now upload photos and other files stored on your iPad to sites like Flickr. (With Flickr, tap Choose File on the Upload page and select an image from your Photos app.)

Other sites may have limited functionality, like the ability to read files but not edit them. Still, if you need to look up something in a document stored online or check the status of an ongoing project, point your iPad toward the cloud.

Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs) is probably one of the most popular cloud-based suite of apps, partly because it’s free, partly because it can handle Microsoft Office documents, and partly because it belongs to the ever-growing Google Empire of Free Programs. To use it, you need a Gmail or Google account (also free, at www.google.com). With a desktop browser, you can create, edit, and share files, including word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and basic presentations.

Since all those files are online, you can call them up through your iPad’s Safari browser, too, but there are some limitations. For one, you can’t edit documents or presentations on the iPad, but you can download copies from Google Drive and edit them in apps like Pages and Keynote (Chapter 11). You can, however, do basic editing on your spreadsheet files.

And unlike Google Drive on a standard computer, on the iPad you can’t use the “offline” feature that lets you edit and save files even when you don’t have an Internet connection. But Google does have a Google Drive app for iOS in the App Store that lets you read (but not edit) files offline, so that’s a start.

After a slow start, Microsoft has jumped onto the cloud as well, with Office 365 (www.office365.com), a site that offers online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more. Office 365 subscribers (prices range from $4 to $20 a month) can view and do basic editing tasks online with the iPad. If you use the Web-based email services Outlook.com or Hotmail, you can also view Office email attachments through Safari.

Another cloud-computing company, Zoho (www.zoho.com), has a whole slew of business and productivity apps that work through your computer’s browser. Many of them are free for personal use; you just need to sign up for an account. Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show roughly correspond to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and they can open and edit files in those formats. The company built a website especially for mobile devices, too, at mobile.zoho.com; it has a less-cluttered interface than Zoho’s standard web page.

If you’re a big fan of cloud computing and already use services like Dropbox for file-sharing (www.dropbox.com) or Basecamp for project management (http://basecamphq.com), take a run through the Productivity section of the App Store for iPad-friendly programs that work specifically with those sites.

Dedicated Basecampers can choose from several programs, for example. Two of them, Satchel ($10) and Outpost 2 ($20), let you keep tabs on ongoing projects, tasks, and deadlines by checking in through your iPad.

THE WORLD WIDE WEB is more than 20 years old now, and there’s still no shortage of things to read on it. The only shortage you may find is time—as in no time to read all this cool stuff online. Thanks to the new iCloud Tabs feature in iOS 6, though, you might be able to squeeze in a little more reading wherever you happen to be by spreading it out among multiple devices.

That’s because the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser keeps tabs on your tabs (no matter what device you’re using to read web pages at the moment) and syncs them across all your compatible iOS devices and Macs hooked into the same iCloud account. So, you can start reading a long article on your Mac at home, pick it up on your iPad on the train to work, and finish it on your iPhone while waiting to pick up pizza for dinner.

To use iCloud Tabs, you need:

When you have tabs open in Safari on one device, tap or click the iCloud icon () in the Safari toolbar to see a list of tabs you have open on your other connected devices. Tap a tab in the list to call it up on your current screen. Now, isn’t that a lot easier than emailing links to yourself for your other devices?

ALTHOUGH IT MAY NOT be obvious at first, Safari in iOS 6 is a very sharing web browser. When you find a web page you like, you can share a link to it, print it out, or keep it around in various other ways. You do all of these wonderful things with a tap on the Action menu icon () in the Safari toolbar. When the menu opens, you see a Whitman’s sampler of icons. Here’s what each does with the web page currently open:

WITH YOUR IPAD, YOU can connect to all your favorite social networks whenever you hop onto a wireless network—because, after all, a large part of many people’s day is spent keeping up with friends and events on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and the like. Some sites even have their own iPad apps.

Chapter 8 has info about shopping the iTunes Store for iPad apps and instructions for installing them. Once you’re ready, here’s some of what’s out there:

THE WEB IS FULL of wonders—it’s like the collective consciousness and accumulated knowledge of everyone who’s ever used it, right there for you to explore. The Web is also full of jerks, criminals, and general-purpose evildoers, so you have to take care to keep your personal information safe in this Playground of Information. To see how Safari can help protect you, go to the iPad’s Home screen and tap Settings→Safari. Your defenses include these:

THE MOBILE VERSION OF Safari has been around longer than the iPad itself, having first appeared on the original iPhone in 2007. The browser has evolved and added new treats, like tabs and the Reading List, over the years, but some people still find Safari feature-weak compared to a desktop browser.

If you’re one of those who want more out of your browsing experience than what Safari gives you, pout not; you can install a different browser on your iPad. Just jump into the App Store (Chapter 8) and search for web browser to bring up some hits. To get you started, here are a few alternate browsers to consider: