Safari - page 11

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.

Apple released the second beta build OS X 10.9.2 to developers today, nearly a month after the first beta was released. Developers can grab Build 13C39 from the Mac Dev Center, or by running a software update if you’re already running the first beta.

The seed notes don’t list any new features, but ask devs to focus on Mail, Messages, graphics drives, VoiceOver, VPN and SMB2. The last beta added FaceTime over audio to the Messages and FaceTime apps.  Apple also seeded the first beta of Safari 6.1.2 to developers that looks like it’s mostly filled with bug fixes.

Source: Apple

When you browse the web with mobile Safari, you’ll come across sites that ask you to create a login, and that usually requires a password.

You can save your passwords in mobile Safari automatically, but there are some sites that request passwords not be saved. There’s a workaround, though, if you feel like you should be able to save whatever passwords you darn well please, and it’s buried in the Settings app.

The web is full of all kinds of links, both clearly labeled ones as well as links with varying degrees of treacherousness (Rick Roll, we’re looking at you). While finding yourself sent to a video of Rick Astley may be fairly innocuous, there are times when you’re on the web and you come across a link that could possibly do something more serious.

That’s where the mobile web browsers in iOS 7 come in. I’ve tried this trick in both Safari and Chrome, but there may be other, less popular browsers that do the same thing: your mileage may vary.

Ugh, Flash content, right? It slows everything down, and buries content within inaccessible Flash movies, and forces you to install and keep updating the plugin, even if you don’t need it.

Honestly, I hope Flash goes the way of the dodo, and HTML5 takes over. If I had my druthers, I’d disable Flash on my Mac

Until then, however, there are some sites where you actually need to enable Flash to see the content. So, instead of completely dumping Flash in a fit of pique, you can enable it in Safari only for specific sites.

There isn’t a built-in way to add extensions to mobile Safari or Chrome on your iOS device, so it’s not possible to add the amazing (and free) Evernote web clip extension like you can on the Mac.

There are third-party apps that will add anything in your clipboard to Evernote, but the best one (Everclip) cost money, and you need to copy the web URL to your clipboard, and then launch the app.

If you want a quick way to add webpage clips to your Evernote file system from within your mobile browser, all you need to do is use Javascript. This works really well on the iPad, but the iPhone 5 I tested it with had some sizing and formatting issues, so your mileage may vary.

The peeps behind Kaspersky Labs’ Securelist blog have uncovered an Easter Egg in Safari, which they claim lists user IDs and passwords in plaintext.

The problem relates to Safari’s retention of browser history as used in the “Reopen All Windows from Last Session” feature — which enables users to easily revisit sites they opened during previous Safari sessions.

When you launch Safari these days, you’ll get the Top Sites page, showing all the sites you visit most frequently in Safari. If you’ve disabled this default view, you can get to it with a quick Option-Command-1 in Safari.

Did you know, however, that you can rearrange these Top Sites more to your liking? You can even delete sites you don’t want appearing there, as well.

While other web browsers exist and thrive on iOS, Safari is the one Apple includes with it’s iOS system software, and it’s probably the one most of us use often, no small thanks to the fact that it’s integrated at the system level. Every click through, unless third-party apps (like Mailbox) allow something different, takes us to Safari as our main browser.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ways to protect more of your privacy, you’ll want to enable the Do Not Track feature in mobile Safari, as well as possibly block cookies, which are bits of code that store your preferences on website servers for return visits.

Magic Mouse gestures let you use swipes and taps on the mouse itself to do things like go back a page when browsing in Safari.

Unfortunately, some folks who have upgraded to Mavericks may have noticed that their Magic Mouse gestures no longer work.

Luckily, there’s a quick way to re-enable this feature, if you miss it.

iOS users that long for something other than Safari will be delighted to know that Google has released a free update for Chrome for iOS.

The new updated includes an Autofill feature that lets users complete forms with just a few clicks, similar to the autofill feature Apple introduced in iOS 7 with iCloud Keychain. Along with some stability enhancements and bug fixes, Google has also improved image searches by adding the ability to long press on an image to search for related images.

Here are the release notes:

The fines just keep mounting for Google. In the wake of last year’s Safarigate, in which Google was revealed to be tracking millions of iOS & Mac Safari users against their knowledge, Google first agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to the FTC, the largest such fine in history. But it’s not stopping there, with Google now agreeing to pay $17 million to settle the issue with 37 states.

Wow, the Evernote folks are on a real roll these days. Not only does the iOS app now not suck enough to use it every day, but the new Safari web clipper is good enough to make me use my Mac for browsing the web again. It’s like a combination of Skitch, Instapaper and, well, Evernote.

For years, Adobe Flash has been the point-of-entry for countless exploits, vulnerabilities and malware. Steve Jobs hated it, famously penning a scathing public letter talking about how irrelevant Flash had become; it’s even been shown that just refusing to install Flash on your MacBook, you can significantly improve battery life.

In OS X Mavericks, though, Adobe Flash is getting more secure, thanks to Apple’s new App Sandbox feature.

The new mobile Safari app built in to iOS 7 has a whole new multi-windowed interface, which allows for a near limitless number of windows that you can open at once. Simply hit the icon in the far right-hand bottom corner to bring up the “tabs” interface, and then tap the big central Plus button to add a new page to the list.

But what about closing those windows? They’ve got an X icon in the upper left of each tab/window, but the X is super tiny, and not always easy to tap. Sometimes I end up activating a window instead of closing it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Let’s talk about getting around the web quickly. Most likely, you’re using Safari or Chrome on the Mac to surf the information superhighway, and these modern browsers use tabs to open more than one window onto the world wide web at the same time, right?

You probably also have a series of oft-accessed bookmarks that you keep in the toolbar just above the web page and just below the address or URL bar.

Popping back and forth between tabs, or opening up new bookmarks is fairly easy with the mouse, for sure, but here’s a faster way that lets you keep your hands on the keyboard.

iOS 7 brings a ton of visual and interface changes to our favorite smart phone, not all of them easily intuited from general use.

One of these is the new fullscreen mobile Safari. The web browser’s address bar and toolbar (at the bottom) disappears when you’re browsing, and you might have figured out how to bring it back by accident, but not in a systematic way.

Nothing sucks the joy out of using a smartphone than not really being sure how to do something, so here are three ways to re-appear that sucker on your iPhone.

Cult of Mac Deals has done it again. You loved the last two “name your own price” bundles, so they’ve brought it back! This time, they’ve put together their best bundle yet!

Once again they’ve delivered 10 top Mac apps for a price that only you can name with The Name Your Own Price Mac Bundle 3.0! Headlining this bundle is Camtasia 2, an incredible screencasting app for Mac. Normally $99 by itself, you can get it along with CrossOver and 8 other apps for a fraction of the price! All you have to do is beat the average price of the bundle. Note: This deal ends at midnight tonight!

Some of the more flashy features of iOS 7 like iTunes Radio, Multitasking, and Control Center have received a lot of the attention with iOS 7, but Apple has packed a couple of really neat features into AirDrop, Safari, and the redesigned App Store, that promise to completely change the way you use your iPhone.

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