Safari - page 11

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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Poor Dashboard widgets. They seem so sad, sitting there, their vast potential wasted by a lack of any good ones.

Luckily, our friends over at OS X Daily have pointed out a pretty slick way to roll your own using Safari. Who knew?

Here’s how to make your own darn widgets in OS X with nothing more than a copy of Safari and any web page you want to keep track of.

Apple seeded a the latest beta of OS X 10.8.5 to developers this afternoon with Build 12F36. Devs can pick up the update from the Developer Center or Mac App Store.

The latest beta build comes more than a month after Apple’s last beta for OS X Mountain Lion. The seed notes asks developers to focus on Wi-fi, Graphics, Wake From Sleep, PDF viewing, and Mobile Device Management. Developers will also find a new beta of Safari 6.1 in the Mac Dev Center that’s focused towards testing extensions for compatibility with Safari 6.1.

Source: Apple

While Apple has been getting dominated by Android in terms of the sheer number of smartphones sold, iOS users have still managed to capture the lion’s share of worldwide mobile web share company, but it looks like the size of their pie is shrinking.

According to the latest survey from NetApplications, iOS’s worldwide mobile web share has dropped 11% since August of 2012. While iOS is still at the top with 54.9%, Android has risen from 20.9% in August 2012, to 28.1% in August 2013.

The iWork for iCloud beta, which allows you to use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote inside your web browser, is now available to all at iCloud.com. You do not need to be an existing iWork customer to take advantage of the apps, but if you are, you can now access all of the iWork documents you’ve stored in iCloud from absolutely anywhere.

Ever go to add a website to your Home Screen in mobile Safari and notice it just looks like a jumbled, unidentifiable mess?

This doesn’t happen too often any more, as most sites have learned how to create a special icon for Home Screen bookmarks on iOS, but every so often, you’ll come across a site that won’t have a custom icon.

When that happens, here’s a quick and easy way to make that Home Screen icon look a bit better.

I know a guy who opens the same 25 or so tabs each day, checking email, news, websites he likes to read, etc. I often ask him why he doesn’t just use RSS or something, but he usually mumbles about liking the layouts of individual web pages.

Whatever. My friend likes to open a ton of tabs every day, and he does so with a bookmarked folder full of those tabs. Now, he created this bookmark folder manually, but there’s an easier way, using either Safari or Chrome

Here’s how.

Over at Stack Exchange, one intrepid user asks,

I would like to know if there is any way to block Facebook and other sites from being added to Safari’s Top Sites. Someone knows how to do that?

One answer is to completely keep new tabs or windows from showing Top Sites, but that’s not really the best answer. There is an answer, pulled directly from Apple’s own support page for Safari 6, however, that fits the bill.

Realmac Software, the creators of Clear and Analog Camera, just launched Ember, a digital scrapbook for your Mac. You can use it to collect all of the things that inspire you, including websites, photos, apps, and more — which you can then organize into separate collections dedicated to all of your ongoing projects.

AutoFill is a boon to those of us who have a ton of forms to fill in, and these days, who doesn’t?

One of the cool new features of Safari in OS X Mavericks beta is the ability to store credit card info, so you never have to pull that card out of your wallet at work while you buy giraffe statuettes from eBay again. Ahem.

Here’s how to get the credit card info into the AutoFill feature of Safari.

AutoFill has been a part of OS X and Apple’s browser, Safari, for a while now. When you fill out forms on the web, Safari will prompt you to use your contact info to fill in the form, or to use the form data you entered as your AutoFill information. This is helpful as you fill out a lot of web forms, of course.

Now, in OS X Mavericks beta, Safari has a new trick up its sleeve, with the ability to suggest secure passwords to you, and then saving them for you when you go back to that site. It’s called iCloud Keychain, and here’s how to set it up.