Dolphin is one of the best third-party browsers you’ll find on iOS, and it just got even better on the iPhone, thanks to a new design and user interface, new features, and lots of improvements in version 6.0.
Here’s another one of those “so simple it hurts” tips that we find from time to time, leaving us scratching our heads, wondering why we didn’t figure it out sooner.
When you’re browsing the web, whether you’re on a computer or your iPhone, you don’t always want to open links in the window you’re browsing in. Neither do you always want to open them in a new tab in the foreground. Sometimes, especially when you’re doing internet research, you want to open tabs in the background. On the Mac, it’s simply a matter of Command clicking a link in your current browser, or setting a preference or two for your favorite web apps.
You can do this on iOS, too, with a simple tap in Settings. Here’s how.
We love Readdle’s productivity apps here at Cult of Mac, especially when they’re going cheap. The company is currently holding a Back to School campaign that sees a number of iOS apps that “are indispensable for studying” reduced. Those included are ReaddleDocs for iPhone, ReaddleDocs for iPad, and Remarks.
The most noticeable change in the way Safari works in its latest version is in the way it allows you to search. Just like Google’s Chrome web browser, Safari now includes an integrated search in the previously URL-only address bar at the top of the browser.
There are some tricks to narrow down search results, as well as a couple neat ways to save specific searches for later use. Let’s check them out together, shall we?
Today Google updated its Chrome browser in the iOS App Store with the ability to share webpages to Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. By updating now, Google has beaten Apple’s own Safari browser to the punch. Safari in iOS can share directly to Twitter, and Facebook integration is coming in the fall with iOS 6. Google+ integration is not offered, and given Apple and Google’s rocky relationship, don’t expect to see it ever.
The release of iOS 6 just weeks away. The new release includes a range of new features. Some seem tailor-made for business use like the new VIP contacts feature in Mail. Others are clearly designed for a mass-market consumer audience. Even those consumer-oriented additions have a lot of potential for use in the office, however.
When the burglar who robbed Steve Jobs’ house walked out with jewelry, computers, and Steve’s old wallet, I doubt he could have imagined one of his heisted Macs would call in the coppers. But he learned that you don’t mess with a Mountain Lion. We’ll tell you the tale on our all-new CultCast—and don’t worry—all mock turtlenecks have been returned to their proper place.
We talk rumor control, iPhone 5 design, the Olympics, and more. Then, by popular request, it’s a battle of the browsers! We’ll tell you which web-ware we love the most, and why Apple’s own app still has a big issue to fix.
Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new episodes right on your iPhone or iPad with Apple’s newly updated and freshly debugged Podcasts App.
Show notes ahead!
Reader Chris M asked us yesterday about finding a way to see the source media files in Safari now that the Activity Window has been retired in OS X Mountain Lion. He writes:
A while back you showed a great feature. If you were using Safari watching a video, you could go to WINDOW—-ACTIVITY—and it would show everything on the website and you could Option click on the video file and automatically download it. That feature went away in Mountain Lion. Will you PLEASE write an article and show if there is any way to access this feature any more.
You’re in luck, Chris, as we found just the thing. It’s not quite a full “bringing sexy back” fix, but it should serve the purpose you used the Activity Window for – finding media files in web pages.
Now here’s a slick new way of interacting with tabs in Safari. When you open a bunch of tabs in Safari, it gets a little hard to figure out which tab is which, right? You can, of course, use Command-Shift-Arrow (right or left) to move between tabs, but that’s only reliable if the site you’re tabbing over to doesn’t auto-focus your cursor to a search field, like YouTube or Google does.
Luckily, it urns out that Apple has again made things a bit more iOS like in its flagship Mac operating system, OS X Mountain Lion. To check this tip out on your own, launch Safari on your Mac (be sure you’re running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) and open a few tabs.
Google has issued an update to Google+ for iOS that makes it the first app to offer an “Open in Chrome” button for URLs. Version 3.1 also brings teen Hangouts, and bug fixes that promise to improve performance.
The Federal Trade Commission released information this morning that because of their misrepresentation to users of Apple’s Safari Internet browser, Google has agreed to pay a record $22.5 million civil penalty to settle charges from the FTC.
The $22.5 million fine is the largest in FTC history. Earlier this year an investigation found that Google had placed advertising cookies on the computers of Safari users who visited sites on Google’s DoubleClick ad network. Users were told by Google that they would automatically be opted out of the tracking, but Google kept tracking them anyway.
Mountain Lion’s version of the Safari browser brough many great things: a unified URL/search bar, iCloud tab syncing and some neat new gestures (try pinching when you have a few tabs open). What it also did was remove the RSS button, replacing it with the Reader button found in iOS. This – apparently – pissed off a lot of people.
So, for those of you who used this button daily, we’ve put together a list of alternatives. None of them will give you the same functionality, but all of them are great RSS readers which work in slightly different ways.
I gave up on Google Chrome for iOS about a day after it was released. Even though my iPhone is jailbroken and I can bypass iOS’s restrictions to set Chrome as my default browser, I missed Safari. Also, Chrome felt considerably slower than the iPhone’s default browser, and that was because Apple handicaps third-party apps by not allowing them to access the lightning-fast Nitro Javascript engine in iOS.
Does the lack of Nitro in your favorite third-party iOS browsers keep you awake at night? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool to make an app like Google Chrome just as fast as Mobile Safari. For jailbreakers, there’s a new tweak out that makes it all possible.
With the Safari 6.0 update, Apple decided we don’t need no stinkin’ RSS button in our web browser, so they took it out. Whether you agree with Cupertino or not is beside the point, the RSS button is gone and it’s probably not coming back.
Thankfully, one developer spotted the change months ago and already has a quick solution to bring back the RSS button to Safari.
With the launch of Mountain Lion, Apple also pushed out an update to Safari which removed the RSS button so many people loved. We received a lot of email over the past 24 hours asking what the best RSS Reader Apps for Mac are, but we figure you guys read just as much news as us, so why not ask you.
What’s the best RSS Reader App for Mac, and why? What do you look for most in an RSS Reader?
CLICK HERE TO TELL US YOUR FAVORITE RSS READER APP IN OUR FORUMS
It didn’t take long for OS X Mountain Lion to hit the top of the Mac App Store’s paid chart following its release yesterday, which means Apple shifted a heck of a lot of copies on day one. In fact, it sold so many copies that traffic from the Cupertino company’s servers was up to six times higher than normal.
With the release of OS X Mountain Lion today, Apple also released Safari 6.0 for Mac. As noted by some, the Windows version of Safari didn’t see the update, and in fact, disappeared from Apple’s site altogether.
While a direct download is still available, speculation has arisen that perhaps Safari for Windows had been completely discontinued.
If you’ve decided to wait for OS X Mountain Lion until all of your apps are compatible, don’t think Apple has forgotten all about you already. The Cupertino company has just released Safari 6 for OS X Lion, which introduces a number of new features, including the smart search field, an offline Reading List, and more.
One of the limitations of the iPhone and iPod touch version of Safari has always been a lack of tabbed browsing. Granted, there’s only so much space on the smaller mobile screen, but all the same – tabbed browsing is great.
So is being able to open tabs in the background, so that you can continue reading, say, an article on Cult of Mac, but still save an interesting link in another tab, just like you can on the Mac with a Command-click. With a simple Settings tweak, you can.
Back in June at the I/O developer conference, Google announced they are bringing their Chrome web browser to the iOS platform. Many Apple fans prefer Chrome over Safari on desktop machines, so the unveil was met with a lot of excitement from iOS users. However, it looks like Chrome has a long road ahead if it hopes to become a prominent power on the iOS web scene.
A new study by Chitika shows that after Google Chrome for iOS has been at the top of the App Store charts for weeks, it has earned a 1.5% marketshare of all web browsers on iOS. Safari dominates with an 85.6% marketshare, while other third-party browsers take up the other 13%. Chrome’s overall 1.5% browser share translates to a 10.3% share of the total iOS third-party browser market.
If you’re not careful when using Safari, you could end up with a screen full of open website windows. Safari’s default behavior when opening a new link is to do so in a new window. This drove me nuts until I figured out I could just Control-click any links and they’d appear nicely in a new tab instead of a new window.
On the occasions I forget that feature and end up with a ton of open windows, there’s always the “Merge All Windows” menu command in the Window menu. It’s a slick piece of kit, but I’d like to trigger it with a keyboard combination. Here’s how.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a huge fan of the mobile version of Chrome on my iPhone and iPad. I use Chrome for Mac almost exclusively, and having all my bookmarks and browsing history available to me on the go is really the killer feature.
Alex has already shown you how to set Chrome as the default browser if you have a jailbroken iOS device, but what about those of you (like me) who don’t want the hassle of a jailbreak? How can we quickly hop over to Chrome on our iPhone? Turns out, it’s pretty easy.
Back in February it was discovered that Google was bypassing Apple’s privacy settings in Mobile Safari on iOS. The search giant was making ad revenue from Safari users’ web activity by ‘tricking’ the default iOS browser to allow multiple tracking cookies.
6 months later, and Google is about to pay the “largest penalty ever levied on a single company” by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Google will pay $22.5 million to settle the charges issued by the FTC, and the code in question has already been disabled by Google in Safari on iOS.
Google released its Chrome browser on the iOS platform last week, and it wasn’t long before the app shot to the top of the App Store’s charts. People clearly wanted a change of pace, and Apple’s Mobile Safari just wasn’t cutting it.
If you’re a Google Chrome for iOS fanatics out there, you’ll be pleased to hear that a couple new Cydia tweaks have surfaced to make Google Chrome the best Safari replacement around.
Apple’s new Podcasts app, with its skeuomorphic tape reels and beautiful interface, is an absolutely brilliant way to discover, manage, and listen to podcasts. And on our newest CultCast, we’ll tell you how Apple’s new gem will finally bring podcast entertainment out of the shadows and into the hands of the masses.
And then, did you know Google just released their beloved Chrome browser for iOS? We’ll tell you what we think and if it’s going to give Safari a run for its money.
All that and our answers to your Twitter questions on an all-new CultCast! Subscribe now on your shiny new Podcasts app, then catch the show notes after the jump!