If you’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser on Mac, you’ve been missing out on some serious performance gains made by Apple with its Safari browser: Not only is Cupertino’s favorite browser faster than Chrome, it also saves battery power.
But Chrome is looking to catch up with a coming update that some Mac users are raving about.
Google’s chat and video messaging service, Hangouts, got a whole new standalone web app on Monday afternoon.
“We are launching another way to use Hangouts today,” writes Google’s Jordanna Chord on Google Plus. “From our new site you’ll be able to take advantage of the best of Hangouts in the browser, along with an inspiring image to get you through the day.”
Now you’ll be able to keep in touch with all your Hangouts-using buddies in any web broswer, including Safari, without having to run Gmail or Google Plus (or the Chrome app).
We’ve seen before that changing from Chrome to Safari can make a big difference on your Mac’s battery life.
But if you haven’t switched from Chrome or Firefox to Safari yet, this fact might change your mind: If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of one hour of total battery life by using anything but Safari.
Websites these days have another tool to engage you: the desktop notification. Many sites, this one included, allow you to opt in to a system of popup notices that encourage you to click through and see new content.
Of course, not all content is created equal, and you might someday wish to stop being notified of new cat photos from that feline-friendly website.
Here’s how to manage web notifications using two of the Mac’s most popular web browsers, Safari and Chrome.
Though Adobe Flash has been dying a slow death over the past few years, it’s far from dead yet. However, it seems like some people are getting pretty impatient with it and Facebook’s new chief security officer Alex Stamos is one of those people. He publicly tweeted yesterday calling out Adobe to just set a date already to kill Flash and make an announcement to put an end to its misery.
Apple seeded iOS 9 beta 2 to developers today and while there aren’t any groundbreaking new features or drastic improvements, the company did manage to add a bunch of little changes and tweaks across the OS.
Most of the improvements are small design changes, but there are a couple really useful additions too, like adding Handoff to the app switcher, search improvements are more.
Take a look at everything that’s new in iOS 9 beta 2:
When iOS 9 rolls out to the public this fall, it’ll be iPad users that appreciate it most, thanks to the many improvements Apple has made to multitasking. One of the biggest is Split View, a feature that’s exclusive to the iPad Air 2, which lets you run two apps side-by-side — just like you would on your Mac.
Split View lets you read articles in Safari while composing an email in Mail, enjoy a novel in iBooks while taking notes in the Notes app, and talk to friends via iMessage while organizing your schedule in Calendar.
But is Split View as game-changing as it looks at first glance? You bet it is.
Apple is planning to open up mobile Safari to “Content Blockers,” according to a new features discovered in the iOS 9 beta. The change could pave the way for ad blocking extensions, which prevent images, popups, and other content from loading as you browse the web.
I took the plunge and downloaded a password manager today, and when I was researching how to use it on my iPhone, one help page said I needed to put some bookmarklets onto my Mac and then move them over to the iPhone.
Problem was, I wasn’t sure how to make that happen; I figured it was just automatic.
It might be magically enabled for you, but if you’re like me and don’t know how to get your Safari bookmarks from one device to the other, here’s how to get it to work.
Tech-wizard scientists have discovered a crack in the Safari web browser’s armor that will let evildoers trick it into showing false information in its address bar.
The exploit could lead to users giving up sensitive information when they think they’re just trying to buy some pants or something.
Apple Watch is great at many things like checking weather, tracking fitness and sending notifications. But when it comes to surfing the web, Apple Watch is unsurprisingly the worst device for the task.
An Apple Watch version of Safari wasn’t included with Jony Ive’s smartwatch, but that didn’t stop notorious jailbreaker Comex from hacking a web browser onto the wearable. Comex posted a video of his hacked Apple Watch running a web browser on the Google homepage over the weekend, showing it is possible to browse the web from your wrist — but you’ll never want to.
Check it out:
There’s no question that Google Chrome is one of the best web browsers you can get, but it’s long been a resource hog under OS X. By simply avoiding it on the new MacBook, your battery could last more than three hours longer in between charges.
On the Mac, it’s super-easy to search for a word or phrase within the currently loaded page. You simply hit Command-F on your keyboard and Safari, Chrome or any other web browser will open up a little field to type your search terms into.
But what about when you’re using mobile Safari on your iPhone or iPad? How do you find a specific word or phrase there?
It’s pretty simple, but not super-intuitive. Here’s our recipe for finding search terms on your iPhone’s version of Safari.
A newly discovered security bug has secretly left Safari users on both iOS and OS X vulnerable to attacks on hundreds of thousands of websites for years.
The ‘FREAK’ security flaw was exposed today by a group of nine researchers who discovered web browsers could be forced to use an intentionally-weakened form of encryption. FREAK effects iPhones, Macs, and Android browsers, but Apple’s spokesman says the company will release a fix next week.
Thanks to contractual obligations that are purportedly ending this year, Google’s days as Safari’s search provider could be numbered. And Yahoo wants to take its spot.
During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, Marissa Mayer reiterated her interest in being Safari’s main search engine. “The Safari platform is basically one of the premier search deals in the world if not the premier search deal in the world,” she said in response to a question about Yahoo’s plans for search.
Google’s new Inbox app is a godsend for people like me who seem to teeter on the brink of inbox bankruptcy weekly, but there’s one problem with the killer Gmail manager: it’s not only available on iOS, Chrome, and Android.
The Inbox team might not be in a hurry to bring its service to Safari, but if you want don’t want to defect to Chrome just manage play with Inbox, our friend Rishi at Zinx has discovered how to access Inbox from Safari.
Here’s how to do it:
Whether you’re a Mac novice or a seasoned veteran, there are a ton of tips and ticks out there for mastering OS X Yosemite. In Part 2 of our Yosemite tip series, we gather more of the very best.
Although Apple-watchers have been buzzing about OS X 10.10 Yosemite since last week’s WWDC, Apple hasn’t forgotten about its current generation Mavericks Mac OS.
To prove it, the company has released three new betas for developers to test out — including OS X Mavericks 10.9.4, OS X Server 3.2, and Safari 6.1.5.
We’re still busying digesting all the new stuff Tim Cook and Craig Federighi announced yesterday with iOS 8, and even though we’re ridiculously excited about major backend features like HomeKit, iCloud Photo Library and Metal, 24 hours of tinkering around with the OS has revealed a lot of hidden gems that went unmentioned.
Along with the host of new iOS 8 features, Jony Ive and the Human Interface team have been busy adding dozens of tiny tweaks to the UI as well as tossing in a few smaller features you probably didn’t notice.
Take a look at these 11 tweaks Apple sneaked into iOS 8 without telling anyone:
Having seen its shares jump recently, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has another plan she hopes will continue her company’s turnaround: convincing Apple to adopt Yahoo as the default search engine for Safari on iOS.
Yahoo has reportedly been working on two secret projects designed to build “a viable mobile search engine and monetization platform to convince Apple to make Yahoo the default search engine on its Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad,” according to a new report from Re/code.
Codenamed “Fast Break” and “Curveball,” the projects will be the subject of an upcoming presentation Mayer will make to Apple at some point in the near future — with the aim of getting the company to ditch Google as its search partner.
When you’re using OS X, you can search the web for any term you can right click on. You simply do so and then choose “Search Google for [highlighted word].”
In iOS, there doesn’t appear to be any way to do the same thing.
There is, however, a work around.
When you want to look up a street address in Safari, you may still be using an old workflow: copy the address from the web page, paste it into the search bar, and then use Google Maps.
With OS X Mavericks, you might even have gone a step further and pasted the address into Apple’s Maps app, and then sending the directions to your iPhone.
There’s another way, though, which offers more immediate gratification: opening the address in Safari.
Under its previous owner, Instapaper was a good-but-limited iOS app with a barely functional website component. Under its new ownership at Betaworks, the app has slowly become part of a great ecosystem, with the latest addition being a Safari extension.
Twitter’s new web design began rolling out to all users yesterday, but if you hate the new white UI there’s already an extension for Safari that darkens the scene.
When you launch Safari on OS X Mavericks, you’ll typically get a set of thumbnails of web sites you’ve visited, called Top Sites. The default set is twelve thumbnails, but if you hop into the Safari preferences, you can set it to display six, 12, or 24 Top Sites.