I have quite a few email addresses, and almost all of them are Gmail based. I also use a ton of different devices to check my email, including my iPhone and iPad as well as a Macbook Air and a Mac mini. That’s not even mentioning the iMac I use from time to time at my office job. With all these devices, especially the Macs, it makes sense to me to use Gmail in the web browser, so I don’t have to keep setting up email client after email client, or make sure all my filters or rules are set up the way I want them on each of the Macs I use.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how my Mac opens up Mail app when I click a mail-to link on the web, in Twitter, or on Facebook. I want my Mac to open a web browser with the web version of Gmail in it every time I click one of those types of links. Here’s how to make that happen on the big three web browsers for Mac: Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.
If you’re one of the many folks that own and still use an older iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you might notice a slowdown when using the more recent web apps out there. Many of these rely on Javascript, which can slow down older devices when browsing those sites.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to disable Javascript on mobile Safari. Here’s how.
Using the real web on an iPhone is a wonderful thing. Apple has made their iOS browser, Safari, into a solid powerhouse of web-browsing goodness, ready to use out of the box, accessible in many ways to many kinds of people. It’s a great app.
And yet, the size of the iPhone screen, iPhone 5 included, can be a bit cramped. Add in the top address bar and the bottom button bar, and you have even less screen real estate to use for actual browsing. That’s why Apple included a new feature in iOS: full screen browsing.
Apple’s iOS lock screen has remained largely unchanged for the last five years. That’s probably because it serves its purpose pretty well, but sometimes it’s nice to try something different. Thanks to Pinch to Unlock, a new tweak for jailbroken iPhones, you can do just that. Rather than sliding to unlock your device, you just pinch.
Safari 6, the web browser that comes with OS X Mountain Lion, added a ton of new features when it launched a while back, and Reading List is one of the cool ones. Reading List will let you save articles without having to bookmark them, thus avoiding all the hassles of organizing and/or synchronizing bookmarks. It’s a similar system to something like Instapaper or Pocket (formerly) Read It Later, but baked right in to your Safari browser.
Apple released a small Java update for OS X users this Wednesday. The update effectively removed the Java applet plug-in that typically comes pre-installed in all web browsers on the Mac. Why? Well, Apple has been trying to distance itself from Java for quite some time, mainly due to the fact that most malware spreads via Java vulnerabilities.
Take the recent Flashback trojan, for example. Millions of Macs were comprised because hackers were able to exploit a security vulnerability in Java on the browser. You could visit a bad site with a corrupt Java applet and get infected. After this week’s update, Java is no longer included in browsers like Safari.
I got really used to using Chrome on my desktop and laptop Macs before Mountain Lion came out with Safari 6 at its heels. I try to use Chrome on my iOS devices, for the history and bookmark synching, I really do, but more often than not, I end up using mobile Safari, because a) it’s the default for all clicked links in other apps and b) I really, really like Reader.
Now, if you’re using Safari on both your Mac and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you’ll be pleased to know that you can access the tabs you’ve opened on your iPhone on your Mac, and vice versa, as long as you’re using iCloud. Let’s take a look at how we do this.
There are some new privacy settings in Safari 6 that potentially prevent a couple of security issues from plaguing you as you roam about the internet.
Some websites may track your browsing activity when they send you web pages to view, which allows those sites to tailor what is presented to you on a specific web page. In addition, when you type search words into the new integrated search bar in Safari 6, Safari will send those words to the search engine itself so that it can send you a list of common searches that are similar to yours. Both of these issues are potential privacy issues, and here’s how you can disable both of them.
Yesterday, we showed you how Safari 6 keeps track of the passwords you use when you visit websites that require them. They’re kept in a list in the background, so that when you connect to a secure website, you don’t have to enter in your user name or password every time. This is enabled (or disabled) in the Safari Preferences window, under the Auto-Fill tab, for some reason.
Disabling this feature makes your Mac more secure, if you are sharing the Mac or other folks have access to it. If you do use the saved password feature, however, there’s a cool little way to see what those passwords are right in Safari.
Safari does a great job at making your time on the web easy and simple. It will fill in frequently occurring form information, like your name, address, and email address, so that you don’t have to for every site you visit with a form requesting this information. Fill it out once, then let Safari auto-fill the info the rest of the time. It will also save website user names and passwords. Which, when you think about it, is a great idea for your own personal computer at home, but not so great for a work or shared computer.