Chapter 4
In This Chapter
Surfing the Internet with Safari
Navigating the web
Having fun with bookmarks and reading and history lists
Sharing websites
Searching the World Wide Web
Securing Safari
You feel like you’re actually holding the web right in the palm of your hand.”
When an Apple marketer says such a thing to describe surfing the web on the iPad, a lot of truth is behind it. The spectacular Retina display that was introduced with the third-generation iPad, in combination with the snappy Apple-designed A5X chip (third generation) or A6X chip (fourth generation) with quad-core graphics inside the machine, makes browsing on Apple’s tablets an absolute delight. The iPad minis with the Retina display and the original iPad Air got ever-more-powerful A7 chips. The iPad Air 2 gets an A8X processor. And the newest member of the iPad stable, the large-screen iPad Pro, gets an A9X chip (and M9 motion processor).
In this chapter, you discover the pleasures — and the few roadblocks — in navigating cyberspace on your iPad.
A version of the Apple Safari web browser is a major reason that the Net on the iPad is very much like the Net you’ve come to expect on a more traditional computer. Come to think of it, the Internet often looks a lot better on iPads with the striking Retina display. And the screens on iPad models without the Retina display aren’t too shabby either. Safari for the Mac and for Windows are two of the very best web browsers in the business. In our view, Safari on the iPhone has no rival as a cellphone browser. As you might imagine, Safari on the iPad is even more appealing.
We start our cyberexpedition with a quick tour of the Safari browser. Take a gander at Figure 4-1. Not all browser controls found on a Mac or a PC are present, but Safari on the iPad still has a familiar look and feel. We describe these controls and others throughout this chapter.
Before plunging in, we recommend a little detour. Find out more about the wireless networks that enable you to surf the web on the iPad in our web extras at www.dummies.com/extras/ipad
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Surfing the web begins with a web address, of course.
When you tap certain letters, the iPad has three ways to determine websites to suggest:
You might as well open your first web page now — and it’s a full HTML page, to borrow from techie lingo:
Tap the Safari icon docked at the bottom of the Home screen.
If you haven’t moved it, it’s a member of the Fantastic Four on the dock (along with Messages, Mail, and Music). Chapter 1 introduces the Home screen.
To accept one of the bookmarked (or other) sites that show up in the list, merely tap the name.
Safari automatically fills in the URL in the address field and takes you where you want to go.
Keep tapping the proper keyboard characters until you enter the complete web address for the site you have in mind and then tap the Go key on the right side of the keyboard.
You don’t need to type www at the beginning of a URL. So if you want to visit www.theonion.com
(for example), typing theonion.com is sufficient to transport you to the humor site. For that matter, Safari can take you to this site even if you type theonion without the .com.
If you know how to open a web page (if you don’t, read the preceding section in this chapter), we can show you how radically simple it is to zoom in on 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 for starters:
It’s all too easy to get distracted reading web pages nowadays, what with ads, videos, and other clutter surrounding the stuff you want to take in. So pay attention to the horizontal lines that often appear in the smart search field, as shown in Figure 4-4 (left). Tap those lines to view the same article without the needless diversions, as shown in Figure 4-4 (right). Tap the lines again to return the standard web view.
In this section, we discuss ways to navigate the Internet on your iPad by using links and tabs.
Because Safari functions on the iPad the same way that browsers work on your Mac or PC, links on the device behave in much the same way.
Text links that transport you from one site to another typically are underlined, are shown in blue, red, or bold type, or appear as items in a list. Tap the link to go directly to the site or page.
Tapping other links leads to different outcomes:
Use this method also to determine whether a picture has a link. Just hold your finger down on the picture; if it’s linked, you see the web address to which the link points.
As for the link options shown in Figure 4-5, here’s what two of them do:
You read more about the other two options — Open in New Tab and Add to Reading List — a little later in this chapter.
Not every web link cooperates with the iPad because it doesn’t support some common web standards — most notably, Adobe Flash video. If you see an incompatible link, nothing may happen — or a message may appear, asking you to install a plug-in.
This lack of support for Adobe Flash video is a void that is (frankly) unlikely to ever get addressed. Even Adobe is no longer embracing Flash for mobile devices. Apple does support the ever-popular HTML 5 standard for audio and video, which Adobe, too, is now backing.
When we surf the web on a Mac or PC, 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 we choose to hop around the web without closing the pages we visit. Sometimes a link automatically opens a new page without shuttering the old one. (If these additional pages are advertisements, this behavior isn’t always welcome.)
Safari on the iPad lets you open multiple pages simultaneously, via a brilliant rendition of tabbed browsing similar to the desktop version of browsers such as Safari.
After you have one page open, you have two ways to open additional web pages in Safari so that they appear on the tab bar at the top of the screen (rather than replace the page you’re currently viewing):
To switch tabs, just tap the tab. To close a tab, tap the gray X that appears on the left edge of the active tab.
You can manage tabs in one other way. Tap the view open tabs icon in the top-right corner of the browser (refer to Figure 4-1) to summon thumbnail views of your open web pages, as shown in Figure 4-7. You can tap the X on any thumbnail to close it. From here you can also go into private browsing mode (discussed later in this chapter) or check out iCloud tabs, the topic we’re about to dive into.
Although the iPad is your likely traveling companion just about everywhere you go, we know that you also browse the web from your smartphone or personal computer. If that smartphone happens to be an iPhone and the computer is a Macintosh (or a Windows PC running Safari), you can take advantage of iCloud tabs, a feature that lets you resume reading web pages that you started looking at on those other devices. The feature works with the iPod touch, too. If you read the preceding section, you already know how to access iCloud tabs: Tap the View Open Tabs icon to bring up tab view, which is shown in Figure 4-7. In this example, there are open tabs on Edward’s MacBook Air and on his iPhone. Tap a link to open the page on your tablet.
Surfing the web would be a drag if you had to enter a URL every time you wanted to navigate from one page to another. So you can find those favorite websites in the future, the iPad provides bookmarks, web clips, reading lists, and history lists.
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 iPad. Follow these steps:
Make sure that the page you want to bookmark is open, and then tap the share icon (shown in the margin) at the top of the screen.
You have many options beyond bookmarking when you tap the share icon (refer to Figure 4-1, though not all the options are visible in the figure). You can tap Message, Mail, Notes, Twitter, or Facebook. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo (Chinese variations of Twitter) are also available, provided you added a Chinese keyboard in Settings (see Chapter 2). You can tap Save PDF to iBooks. Or you can tap Add to Favorites, Add Bookmark, Add to Reading List, Add to Home Screen, Copy, Print, Find on Page, or Request Desktop Site, as we show you here. You can also use the wireless feature called AirDrop to share the page with people nearby via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, provided they have a fourth-generation iPad or later, the iPad mini, or a Mac with OS X Yosemite, or OS X El Capitan. See Chapter 13 to find out how to use AirDrop.
Tap Add Bookmark.
A new Add Bookmark window opens with a default name for the bookmark, its web address, and its folder location.
To open a bookmarked page after you set it up, tap the bookmarks icon, which is to the left of the smart search field. (Refer to Figure 4-1.)
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 a bookmarked site is no longer meaningful, you can change it or get rid of it:
To remove a bookmark (or folder), tap the bookmarks icon and then tap Edit. Tap the red circle next to the bookmark you want to toss off the list, and then tap Delete.
To remove a single bookmark or folder, swipe its name from right to left and then tap the red Delete button.
When you visit a web page you’d like to read, but just not now, the reading list feature is sure to come in handy, including when you’re offline. Here’s how it works:
In Safari Settings, you can choose to use your cellular network (if available) to save reading list items from iCloud so you can read them offline.
Finally, don’t forget that you can share your reading list (and bookmarks) among your computers and iOS devices with iCloud, as described in Chapter 3.
You frequent lots of websites, some way more than others. For example, perhaps you consult the train schedule several times during the day. In their infinite wisdom, the folks at Apple let you bestow special privileges on frequently visited sites, not just by bookmarking pages but also by affording them their unique Home screen icons. Apple used to call these web clips, and we still like the term. Creating one is dead simple. Follow these steps:
Tap Add to Home Screen.
Apple creates an icon out of the area of the page that was displayed when you saved the clip, unless the page has its own custom icon.
Tap Add.
The icon appears on your Home screen.
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. Here’s how to access your history:
Tap the bookmarks icon and then tap History.
The History option is at the top of the bookmarks list.
Tap the day you think you hung out at the site.
Sites are listed under such headings as “This Morning,” “Thursday Evening,” or “Thursday Morning,” or segregated by a specific date.
When you find the listing, tap it.
You’re about to make your triumphant return.
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 images. To copy an image from a website, follow these steps:
Tap the Save Image button that appears, as shown in Figure 4-9.
Saved images end up in your Photos library in the All Photos album, from which they can be synced back to a computer.
Tap Copy instead, and you can paste the image into an email or as a link in a program such as Notes.
In some cases, typically advertisements, you also see an Open button or an Open in New Tab button, which takes you to the ad image.
When you find a great website that you just must share, use Safari to tweet it, post it to Facebook, or — go old-school — print it.
To make Twitter and Facebook work, of course, the iPad must know your username and password, which you can fill add in Settings (see Chapter 15).
Tap the share icon (shown in the margin), and you find these sharing options:
Most of us spend a lot of time using search engines. And the ones 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 using Baidu. All these search options are available on the iPad, along with DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track your web footsteps.
With iOS 7, 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. Although you can certainly use the virtual keyboard to type google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com, or other search engines into this field, Apple doesn’t require that tedious effort. Instead, just type your search query directly in the box.
To conduct a web search on the iPad, 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 top hits — an educated guess, really — shown at the top.
You see other search suggestions as you start tapping additional letters. In Figure 4-10, for example, typing the letters le yields such suggestions as Lexmark, LeBron James, and league of legends. 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 until you generate the search result you want.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Siri can open Safari — all you have to do is ask. We also mentioned that Siri can (in some cases, anyway) take you to your favorite search engine, just by you uttering the name of a website. Of course, much of what Siri can do is web-centric. So now is as good a time as any to recommend Chapter 14, where you get an excellent sense of all that Siri can do.
Through the Search Engine Suggestions and Safari Suggestions features, you can get potentially useful information even if you don’t explicitly search for it. If you search the name of a movie, for example, Safari will also provide showtimes at nearby theaters without being asked. If you’re not comfortable with this feature, you can turn it off in Settings. And why wouldn’t you be comfortable? When you use Safari Suggestions, your search queries and related data are shared with Apple. Speaking of which …
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, as we mention earlier in this chapter.
To go incognito, tap the view open tabs icon (refer to Figure 4-1), and then tap the Private button at the upper-right corner of the screen. After private browsing is on, any traces of your visit to nonono.com (or wherever) are nowhere to be found. 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 come out of hiding, tap the view open tabs icon again and then tap Private again.
You can separately turn on a Do Not Track setting in Settings. Speaking of which, kindly move on to the next section.
Along with the riches galore found on the Internet are places in cyberspace where you’re hassled. You might want to take action to protect your privacy and maintain your security.
To get started, tap the Settings icon on the Home screen and then tap Safari.
The following settings enable you to tell your iPad what you want to be private and how you want to set your security options:
AutoFill: Safari can automatically fill out web forms by using your personal contact information, usernames, and passwords, or information from your other contacts. Tap AutoFill and then tap the on/off switch to enable or disable AutoFill.
Turning on AutoFill can compromise your security if someone gets hold of your iPad.
Block Cookies: We’re not talking about crumbs you may have accidentally dropped on the iPad. Cookies are tiny bits of information that a website places on the iPad when you visit so that the site recognizes you when you return. You need not assume the worst; most cookies are benign.
If this concept wigs you out, you can take action and block cookies from third parties and advertisers: If you tap the Always Block option, you will theoretically never again receive cookies on the iPad. Or you can choose to accept cookies only from the website you’re currently visiting or only from the websites you happen to visit. You can also tap Always to accept cookies from all sites. Tap Safari to return to the main Safari Settings page.
If you set the iPad so that it doesn’t accept cookies, certain web pages won’t load properly, and other sites such as Amazon won’t recognize you or make any of your preferred settings or recommendations available.
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