iPad For Dummies, 8th Edition (2016)

Part II. The Internet iPad

webextra Check out your options for getting online (whether with Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G) at www.dummies.com/extras/ipad.

In this part …

Explore Safari, the best web browser to ever to grace a handheld device. Take advantage of links and bookmarks and find out how to open multiple web pages at the same time. And view on your iPad every open web page on any of your other Apple devices.

See how easy it is to set up email accounts and send and receive real honest-to-goodness email messages and attachments.

Marvel at the Maps app’s unerring capability to show you where you are. Discover the joys of step-by-step driving directions and real-time traffic info.

Chapter 4. Going on a Mobile Safari

In This Chapter

Surfing the Internet with Safari

Navigating the web

Having fun with bookmarks and reading and history lists

Sharing websites

Searching the World Wide Web

Securing Safari

You feel like you’re actually holding the web right in the palm of your hand.”

When an Apple marketer says such a thing to describe surfing the web on the iPad, a lot of truth is behind it. The spectacular Retina display that was introduced with the third-generation iPad, in combination with the snappy Apple-designed A5X chip (third generation) or A6X chip (fourth generation) with quad-core graphics inside the machine, makes browsing on Apple’s tablets an absolute delight. The iPad minis with the Retina display and the original iPad Air got ever-more-powerful A7 chips. The iPad Air 2 gets an A8X processor. And the newest member of the iPad stable, the large-screen iPad Pro, gets an A9X chip (and M9 motion processor).

In this chapter, you discover the pleasures — and the few roadblocks — in navigating cyberspace on your iPad.

Surfin’ Dude

A version of the Apple Safari web browser is a major reason that the Net on the iPad is very much like the Net you’ve come to expect on a more traditional computer. Come to think of it, the Internet often looks a lot better on iPads with the striking Retina display. And the screens on iPad models without the Retina display aren’t too shabby either. Safari for the Mac and for Windows are two of the very best web browsers in the business. In our view, Safari on the iPhone has no rival as a cellphone browser. As you might imagine, Safari on the iPad is even more appealing.

technicalstuff Through older iterations of iOS, Apple revved up Safari’s performance with what the company refers to as a Nitro JavaScript engine. Even a consumer-friendly company like Apple can’t help but rely on geeky terms every now and then.

Exploring the browser

We start our cyberexpedition with a quick tour of the Safari browser. Take a gander at Figure 4-1. Not all browser controls found on a Mac or a PC are present, but Safari on the iPad still has a familiar look and feel. We describe these controls and others throughout this chapter.

Figure 4-1: The iPad’s Safari browser.

Before plunging in, we recommend a little detour. Find out more about the wireless networks that enable you to surf the web on the iPad in our web extras at www.dummies.com/extras/ipad.

Blasting off into cyberspace

Surfing the web begins with a web address, of course.

tip Here are a few tips for using the keyboard in Safari (and see Chapter 2 for more help with using the virtual keyboard):

· Because so many web addresses end with the suffix .com (pronounced dot com), the virtual keyboard has a few shortcuts worth noting. Press and hold your finger against the .? key, and you’ll see that .com option. You’ll see other common web suffixes as well — .edu, .net, .org, .us, .ro, and .eu. Some options appear only if you’ve selected an international keyboard (as discussed in Chapter 2).

· The moment you tap a letter, you see a list of web addresses that match those letters. For example, if you tap the letter E (as we did in the example shown in Figure 4-2), you see web listings for eBay, ESPN, and others. Tapping U or H instead may display listings for USA TODAY or the Houston Chronicle (shameless plugs for the newspapers where we’re columnists).

Figure 4-2: Web pages that match your search letter.

tip Models with Siri can lend a hand, um, voice, as you surf. If you call upon Siri and ask the voice genie inside the iPad to open the Safari app, Siri obliges. If you mention a specific website to Siri — “ESPN.com,” say — Siri opens your designated search engine (Google, Bing, or Yahoo!), as discussed later in this chapter. And if Siri heard you right, the site you mentioned appears at the top of the search results.

When you tap certain letters, the iPad has three ways to determine websites to suggest:

· Bookmarks: The iPad suggests websites you’ve bookmarked from the Safari or Internet Explorer browser on your computer (and synchronized, as we describe in Chapter 3). More on bookmarks later in this chapter.

· History: The iPad suggests sites from the history list — those cyberdestinations where you recently hung your hat. Because history repeats itself, we also tackle that topic later in this chapter.

· Smart search field: When you type an address in the search field, you see icons for sites you frequent most often, and you can tap any of those icons to jump immediately to those sites.

You might as well open your first web page now — and it’s a full HTML page, to borrow from techie lingo:

1. Tap the Safari icon docked at the bottom of the Home screen.

If you haven’t moved it, it’s a member of the Fantastic Four on the dock (along with Messages, Mail, and Music). Chapter 1 introduces the Home screen.

2. Tap the smart search field (refer to Figure 4-1).

3. Begin typing the web address, or URL, on the virtual keyboard that slides up from the bottom of the screen.

4. Do one of the following:

· To accept one of the bookmarked (or other) sites that show up in the list, merely tap the name.

Safari automatically fills in the URL in the address field and takes you where you want to go.

· Keep tapping the proper keyboard characters until you enter the complete web address for the site you have in mind and then tap the Go key on the right side of the keyboard.

remember You don’t need to type www at the beginning of a URL. So if you want to visit www.theonion.com (for example), typing theonion.com is sufficient to transport you to the humor site. For that matter, Safari can take you to this site even if you type theonion without the .com.

technicalstuff Because Safari on the iPad runs a variation of the iPhone mobile operating system, every so often you may run into a site that serves up the light, or mobile, version of a website, sometimes known as a WAP site. Graphics may be stripped down on these sites. Alas, the producers of these sites may be unwittingly discriminating against you for dropping in on them by using an iPad. In fact, you may be provided a choice of which site you want — the light or the full version. Bravo! If not, you have our permission to berate these site producers with letters, emails, and phone calls until they get with the program. Fortunately, such a scenario is increasingly rare.

Zoom, zoom, zoom

If you know how to open a web page (if you don’t, read the preceding section in this chapter), we can show you how radically simple it is to zoom in on pages so that you can read what you want to read and see what you want to see, without enlisting a magnifying glass.

Try these neat tricks for starters:

· Double-tap the screen so that the area of the display that you make contact with fills the entire screen. It takes just a second before the screen comes into focus. By way of example, check out Figure 4-3, which shows two views of the same Sports Illustrated web page. In the first view, you see what the page looks like when you first open it. In the second one, you see how the menu of stories box takes over much more of the screen after you double-tap it. The area of the screen you double-tapped is the area that swells. To return to the first view, double-tap the screen again.

· Pinch the page. Sliding your thumb and index finger together and then spreading them apart (or, as we like to say, unpinching) also zooms in and out of a page. Again, wait just a moment for the screen to come into focus.

· Press down on a page and drag it in all directions, or flick through a page from top to bottom. You’re panning and scrolling, baby.

· Rotate the iPad to its side. This action reorients from portrait view to a widescreen landscape view. The keyboard is also wider in this mode, making it a little easier to enter a new URL. However, this little bit of rotation magic won’t happen if you set and enabled the screen orientation lock feature, which we describe in Chapter 1.

Figure 4-3: Doing a double-tap dance zooms in and out.

Reading clutter-free web pages

It’s all too easy to get distracted reading web pages nowadays, what with ads, videos, and other clutter surrounding the stuff you want to take in. So pay attention to the horizontal lines that often appear in the smart search field, as shown in Figure 4-4 (left). Tap those lines to view the same article without the needless diversions, as shown in Figure 4-4 (right). Tap the lines again to return the standard web view.

Figure 4-4: Reducing clutter when reading a web story.

Finding Your Way around Cyberspace

In this section, we discuss ways to navigate the Internet on your iPad by using links and tabs.

Looking at lovable links

Because Safari functions on the iPad the same way that browsers work on your Mac or PC, links on the device behave in much the same way.

Text links that transport you from one site to another typically are underlined, are shown in blue, red, or bold type, or appear as items in a list. Tap the link to go directly to the site or page.

Tapping other links leads to different outcomes:

· Open a map: Tapping an address may launch the Maps app that is, um, addressed in Chapter 6.

· Prepare an email: Tap an email address, and the iPad opens the Mail program (see Chapter 5) and prepopulates the To field with that address. The virtual keyboard is also summoned so that you can add other email addresses and compose a subject line and message. Note that this shortcut doesn’t always work.

tip To see the URL for a link, press your finger on the link and hold it there until a list of options appears, as shown in Figure 4-5.

Figure 4-5: Press and hold down on a link, and a list of options appears.

Use this method also to determine whether a picture has a link. Just hold your finger down on the picture; if it’s linked, you see the web address to which the link points.

As for the link options shown in Figure 4-5, here’s what two of them do:

· Open: Opens the page in this tab.

· Copy: Copies the link’s URL to your iPad’s Clipboard so that you can paste it elsewhere.

You read more about the other two options — Open in New Tab and Add to Reading List — a little later in this chapter.

Not every web link cooperates with the iPad because it doesn’t support some common web standards — most notably, Adobe Flash video. If you see an incompatible link, nothing may happen — or a message may appear, asking you to install a plug-in.

This lack of support for Adobe Flash video is a void that is (frankly) unlikely to ever get addressed. Even Adobe is no longer embracing Flash for mobile devices. Apple does support the ever-popular HTML 5 standard for audio and video, which Adobe, too, is now backing.

Tabbed browsing

When we surf the web on a Mac or PC, we rarely go to a single web page and call it a day. In fact, we often have multiple web pages open at the same time. Sometimes we choose to hop around the web without closing the pages we visit. Sometimes a link automatically opens a new page without shuttering the old one. (If these additional pages are advertisements, this behavior isn’t always welcome.)

Safari on the iPad lets you open multiple pages simultaneously, via a brilliant rendition of tabbed browsing similar to the desktop version of browsers such as Safari.

After you have one page open, you have two ways to open additional web pages in Safari so that they appear on the tab bar at the top of the screen (rather than replace the page you’re currently viewing):

· Tap the + icon (see Figure 4-6) near the top-right corner of the browser. A tab named Favorites appears, as shown in Figure 4-6. Now type a URL, tap a bookmark or an icon for a favorite or frequently visited site, or initiate a search, and the result will appear in this tab.

· Hold your finger on a link until a list of options appears (refer to Figure 4-5), and then tap Open in New Tab.

Figure 4-6: A new tab, ready to display any page you choose.

To switch tabs, just tap the tab. To close a tab, tap the gray X that appears on the left edge of the active tab.

You can manage tabs in one other way. Tap the view open tabs icon in the top-right corner of the browser (refer to Figure 4-1) to summon thumbnail views of your open web pages, as shown in Figure 4-7. You can tap the X on any thumbnail to close it. From here you can also go into private browsing mode (discussed later in this chapter) or check out iCloud tabs, the topic we’re about to dive into.

Figure 4-7: A thumbnail view of all your open tabs.

iCloud tabs

Although the iPad is your likely traveling companion just about everywhere you go, we know that you also browse the web from your smartphone or personal computer. If that smartphone happens to be an iPhone and the computer is a Macintosh (or a Windows PC running Safari), you can take advantage of iCloud tabs, a feature that lets you resume reading web pages that you started looking at on those other devices. The feature works with the iPod touch, too. If you read the preceding section, you already know how to access iCloud tabs: Tap the View Open Tabs icon to bring up tab view, which is shown in Figure 4-7. In this example, there are open tabs on Edward’s MacBook Air and on his iPhone. Tap a link to open the page on your tablet.

Revisiting Web Pages Time and Again

Surfing the web would be a drag if you had to enter a URL every time you wanted to navigate from one page to another. So you can find those favorite websites in the future, the iPad provides bookmarks, web clips, reading lists, and history lists.

Book(mark) ’em, Dano

You already know how useful bookmarks are and how you can synchronize bookmarks from the browsers on your computer. It’s equally simple to bookmark a web page directly on the iPad. Follow these steps:

1. Make sure that the page you want to bookmark is open, and then tap the share icon (shown in the margin) at the top of the screen.

You have many options beyond bookmarking when you tap the share icon (refer to Figure 4-1, though not all the options are visible in the figure). You can tap Message, Mail, Notes, Twitter, or Facebook. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo (Chinese variations of Twitter) are also available, provided you added a Chinese keyboard in Settings (see Chapter 2). You can tap Save PDF to iBooks. Or you can tap Add to Favorites, Add Bookmark, Add to Reading List, Add to Home Screen, Copy, Print, Find on Page, or Request Desktop Site, as we show you here. You can also use the wireless feature called AirDrop to share the page with people nearby via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, provided they have a fourth-generation iPad or later, the iPad mini, or a Mac with OS X Yosemite, or OS X El Capitan. See Chapter 13 to find out how to use AirDrop.

2. Tap Add Bookmark.

A new Add Bookmark window opens with a default name for the bookmark, its web address, and its folder location.

3. Give it a name and folder location:

· Accept the default bookmark name and default bookmark folder: Tap Save.

· Change the default bookmark name: Tap the x-in-a-circle next to the name, enter the new title (using the virtual keyboard), and then tap Save.

· Change the location where the bookmark is saved: Tap the > symbol to the right of the suggested location (likely Favorites), tap the folder where you want the bookmark to be kept so that a check mark appears, and then tap Save.

To open a bookmarked page after you set it up, tap the bookmarks icon, which is to the left of the smart search field. (Refer to Figure 4-1.)

remember If you don’t see bookmarks right away, make sure that the leftmost of the three tabs at the top of the screen is highlighted in blue. The other tabs are for the reading list and for shared links — those shared by your contacts from selected social networks.

If the bookmark you have in mind is buried inside a folder, tap the folder name first and then tap the bookmark you want.

Altering bookmarks

If a bookmarked site is no longer meaningful, you can change it or get rid of it:

· To remove a bookmark (or folder), tap the bookmarks icon and then tap Edit. Tap the red circle next to the bookmark you want to toss off the list, and then tap Delete.

tip To remove a single bookmark or folder, swipe its name from right to left and then tap the red Delete button.

· To change a bookmark name or location, tap Edit at the bottom-right corner of the Bookmarks window. Tap a given bookmark, and an Edit Bookmark window appears, with the name, URL, and location of the bookmark already filled in. Tap the fields you want to change. In the Name field, tap the X in the gray circle and then use the keyboard to enter a new title. In the Location field, tap the location name and scroll up or down the list until you find a new home for your bookmark.

· To create a new folder for your bookmarks, tap Edit and then tap New Folder. Enter the name of the new folder, and choose where to put it.

· To move a bookmark up or down in a list, tap Edit and then drag the three bars to the right of the bookmark’s name to its new resting place.

remember If you take advantage of iCloud, the web pages you’ve bookmarked on your Mac and on your other iOS devices will be available on the iPad, and vice versa.

Saving to your reading list

When you visit a web page you’d like to read, but just not now, the reading list feature is sure to come in handy, including when you’re offline. Here’s how it works:

· Saving a page for later: Tap the share icon and then tap Add to Reading List. Or, if you see a link to a page you’d like to read later, press on the link until a list of options appears (refer to Figure 4-5) and then tap Add to Reading List.

· Reading a page on your reading list: Tap the bookmarks icon and tap the page in the reading list, as shown in Figure 4-8.

· Keeping track of what you’ve read: Tap Show Unread to display only those items that you haven’t read yet. Tap Show All to show all the items in the reading list.

· Removing items from the reading list: Swipe the item from right to left, and then tap its red Delete button.

Figure 4-8: Tap a page in the reading list to read it.

tip The reading list feature used to require an active Internet connection, which is why we always admired the superb save-to-read-later Instapaper app — and still do. It’s now free in the App Store, though there are also premium subscription options that add functionality separate from the Safari reading list.

In Safari Settings, you can choose to use your cellular network (if available) to save reading list items from iCloud so you can read them offline.

Finally, don’t forget that you can share your reading list (and bookmarks) among your computers and iOS devices with iCloud, as described in Chapter 3.

Clipping a web page

You frequent lots of websites, some way more than others. For example, perhaps you consult the train schedule several times during the day. In their infinite wisdom, the folks at Apple let you bestow special privileges on frequently visited sites, not just by bookmarking pages but also by affording them their unique Home screen icons. Apple used to call these web clips, and we still like the term. Creating one is dead simple. Follow these steps:

1. Open the web page in question, and tap the share icon (shown in the margin).

2. Tap Add to Home Screen.

Apple creates an icon out of the area of the page that was displayed when you saved the clip, unless the page has its own custom icon.

3. Type a new name for your web clip or leave the one that Apple suggests.

4. Tap Add.

The icon appears on your Home screen.

tip As with any icon, you can remove a web clip by pressing and holding down on its icon until it starts to wiggle. Tap the X in the corner of the icon, and then tap Delete. You can also move the web clip to a more preferred location on one of your Home screens or on the dock.

Letting history repeat itself

Sometimes you want to revisit a site that you failed to bookmark, but you can’t remember the darn destination or what led you there in the first place. Good thing you can study the history books.

Safari records the pages you visit and keeps the logs on hand for several days. Here’s how to access your history:

1. Tap the bookmarks icon and then tap History.

The History option is at the top of the bookmarks list.

2. Tap the day you think you hung out at the site.

Sites are listed under such headings as “This Morning,” “Thursday Evening,” or “Thursday Morning,” or segregated by a specific date.

3. When you find the listing, tap it.

You’re about to make your triumphant return.

tip To clear your history so that nobody else can trace your steps — and just what is it you’re hiding? — tap Clear at the bottom-right corner of the history list. You can clear the last hour, clear only the day that you tapped Clear, clear today and yesterday, or clear all your history. Alternatively, starting on the Home screen, tap Settings ⇒ Safari ⇒ Clear History and Website Data. In both instances, per usual, you have a chance to back out without wiping the slate clean.

warning When you clear your history from settings, your history, cookies and browsing data will be removed from all the devices you have signed into iCloud. If that is not your intention, tap Cancel.

Saving web pictures

You can capture most pictures you come across on a website — but be mindful of any potential copyright violations, depending on what you plan to do with the images. To copy an image from a website, follow these steps:

1. Press your finger against the image.

2. Tap the Save Image button that appears, as shown in Figure 4-9.

Saved images end up in your Photos library in the All Photos album, from which they can be synced back to a computer.

tip Tap Copy instead, and you can paste the image into an email or as a link in a program such as Notes.

In some cases, typically advertisements, you also see an Open button or an Open in New Tab button, which takes you to the ad image.

Figure 4-9: Hold your finger against a picture in Safari to save it to the iPad.

Sharing Your Web Experiences

When you find a great website that you just must share, use Safari to tweet it, post it to Facebook, or — go old-school — print it.

To make Twitter and Facebook work, of course, the iPad must know your username and password, which you can fill add in Settings (see Chapter 15).

Tap the share icon (shown in the margin), and you find these sharing options:

· AirDrop: Share the page with other people who have compatible devices and AirDrop. You’ll need to turn on AirDrop in Control Center (just drag upward from the bottom of the screen). Then you can choose whether to make your iPad discoverable to everyone or only to people in your contacts. AirDrop works only with fourth-generation iPads or later, the iPad mini, or Mac computers with OS X Yosemite or OS X El Capitan.

· Message: Send a link to the web page in a text or an iMessage.

· Mail: The Mail program opens with a link for the page in the message and the name of the site or page in the Subject line.

· Notes: Sure you can bookmark pages. But sometimes it's even more convenient to reserve space in the Notes app for a web page you want to refer to later. Aren’t you glad to know that you can?

· Twitter: The iPad adds to an outgoing tweet a link to the web page. You must fill in the rest of the actual post.

· Facebook: Post the page — and whatever comments you choose to add — to the popular social network.

· Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo: If available, you post via these Chinese blogging services. You need to activate a Chinese keyboard or language to see these options.

· Save PDF to iBooks: To do just that, tap here.

· Reminders: You can add a page to the Reminders app. If you tap Options, you can be reminded on a given day or at a location.

· Print: The iPad searches for an AirPrint printer. If you have one, you can choose the number of copies you want. Tap Print to complete the job.

· Find on Page: Tap this option and use the virtual keyboard that slides up to type in the field above the keyboard the word that you want to find. Highlighted words appear in yellow. Use the up and down arrows to find each mention of the word. Tap Done when you’re done.

· Request Desktop Site: If such a page is available (and different from the mobile site), tapping here delivers that page.

· More: Tap More to summon a list of activities. You can change the order of the activities by dragging the three horizontal lines to the right of each activity. (By pressing down on an icon, you can drag it to a new position without tapping More.)

Launching a Mobile Search Mission

Most of us spend a lot of time using search engines. And the ones we summon most often are Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing, at least in the United States. If you’re in China, chances are you search using Baidu. All these search options are available on the iPad, along with DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track your web footsteps.

With iOS 7, Apple brought the previously separate address bar and search fields together into a single convenient, unified strip called the smart search field, following the path taken on most popular web browsers for PCs and Macs. Although you can certainly use the virtual keyboard to type google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com, or other search engines into this field, Apple doesn’t require that tedious effort. Instead, just type your search query directly in the box.

To conduct a web search on the iPad, tap the smart search field. You immediately see icons for your favorite web destinations, with Apple betting on your frequent return visits. But when you start typing in the smart search field, a Google (or other) search mission commences, with top hits — an educated guess, really — shown at the top.

You see other search suggestions as you start tapping additional letters. In Figure 4-10, for example, typing the letters le yields such suggestions as Lexmark, LeBron James, and league of legends. Tap any search results that look promising, or tap Go on the keyboard to immediately land on the top hit. Or keep tapping out letters until you generate the search result you want.

Figure 4-10: Running a search on the iPad.

tip You can also find a search word or phrase on the web page you have on-screen. Just look in the list for On This Page. You’re informed of the number of matches; if it’s more than one, you can move back and forth through them with the up-pointing and down-pointing arrows, respectively, at the bottom of the screen.

tip To switch the search field from the current search engine to another search engine choice on your iPad, check out the “Smart Safari Settings” section, later in this chapter.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Siri can open Safari — all you have to do is ask. We also mentioned that Siri can (in some cases, anyway) take you to your favorite search engine, just by you uttering the name of a website. Of course, much of what Siri can do is web-centric. So now is as good a time as any to recommend Chapter 14, where you get an excellent sense of all that Siri can do.

tip You conduct a web search also by initiating a Spotlight search. To summon the Spotlight search field, swipe down from any Home screen. Type (or dictate) your search term and then scroll to the bottom of the list below any search results that point to the use of the term on the iPad itself (meaning inside messages, notes, apps, and so on). Tap Search Web to search the web with the term you entered, or tap Search Wikipedia to run that search inside Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. You can also tap Search Maps to, well, search maps.

Through the Search Engine Suggestions and Safari Suggestions features, you can get potentially useful information even if you don’t explicitly search for it. If you search the name of a movie, for example, Safari will also provide showtimes at nearby theaters without being asked. If you’re not comfortable with this feature, you can turn it off in Settings. And why wouldn’t you be comfortable? When you use Safari Suggestions, your search queries and related data are shared with Apple. Speaking of which …

Private Browsing

Don’t want to leave any tracks while you surf? Don’t worry — we won’t ask and we won’t tell. Turn on private browsing for a “what happens in Safari stays in Safari” tool. Those truly bent on staying private will also want to tap Clear History, as we mention earlier in this chapter.

To go incognito, tap the view open tabs icon (refer to Figure 4-1), and then tap the Private button at the upper-right corner of the screen. After private browsing is on, any traces of your visit to nonono.com (or wherever) are nowhere to be found. Your history is wiped clean, open tabs don’t appear in iCloud tabs, and your autofill information is not stored anywhere. To remind you that you’re browsing privately, the Safari interface takes on a darker shade — a not-so-subtle message here, we suppose, that you might be engaging in a shady or naughty activity. We don’t pass judgment. Besides, we assume that you’re just a private soul, and we certainly respect that.

To come out of hiding, tap the view open tabs icon again and then tap Private again.

tip The history of pages you’ve visited can be useful and a huge timesaver, so don’t forget to disable this option again when you’re finished doing whatever it is you don’t want people to know you’re doing.

You can separately turn on a Do Not Track setting in Settings. Speaking of which, kindly move on to the next section.

tip Be mindful of your settings on other machines. If you run Safari on both an iPad and a Mac, but choose to go private only on Apple’s tablet, your Mac browsing history will still show up in your history listings on the iPad.

Smart Safari Settings

Along with the riches galore found on the Internet are places in cyberspace where you’re hassled. You might want to take action to protect your privacy and maintain your security.

To get started, tap the Settings icon on the Home screen and then tap Safari.

The following settings enable you to tell your iPad what you want to be private and how you want to set your security options:

· Search Engine: Tap the search engine you desire — just as long as that search engine happens to be Google, Yahoo!, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or, if you’ve enabled a Chinese keyboard, Baidu. Other settings found here let you determine whether the iPad can make Search Engine Suggestions and Safari Suggestions, features touched on earlier in this chapter.

· Passwords: Use a finger to authorize Touch ID, and you can view and edit the passwords you use all over the Internet.

· AutoFill: Safari can automatically fill out web forms by using your personal contact information, usernames, and passwords, or information from your other contacts. Tap AutoFill and then tap the on/off switch to enable or disable AutoFill.

· Tap Use Contact Info if you’re comfortable using the information found about your Contacts.

· Tap My Info to select yourself in your contacts so that Safari knows which address, phone numbers, email addresses, and other information to use when it fills in a form.

· Tap the Names and Passwords on/off switch to enable or disable, respectively, Safari’s capability to remember usernames and passwords for websites. You also get to decide whether credit card information can be used and saved.

· Tap Credit Cards to manage and enter the credit card numbers you’re comfortable sharing.

warning Turning on AutoFill can compromise your security if someone gets hold of your iPad.

· Open New Tabs in Background: If you enable this setting, new tabs that you open in Safari will load even if you’re reading a different page in another tab.

· Favorites: Apple lets you quickly access favorite bookmarks when you enter an address, search, or create a tab. Tap the category of sites for which you’d like to see icons in that category (News, Business, Technology, whatever). A check mark appears next to your selection. Or if you’re cool with it, leave the default category setting as Favorites.

· Show Favorites Bar: If you enable the Show Favorites Bar option, you’ll be able to see Safari’s bookmarks bar between the smart search field and tab bar.

· Show Tab Bar: You can display the open tab buttons in a bar near the top of the Safari display or not, another matter of personal preference.

· Block Pop-ups: Pop-ups are those web pages that appear whether or not you want them to. Often, they’re annoying advertisements. But on some sites, you welcome the appearance of pop-ups, so remember to turn off blocking under such circumstances.

· Quick Website Search: Determine whether or not to use website shortcuts when you’re searching within a website. For example, you can type wiki FDR to show Wikipedia entries for Franklin Roosevelt.

· Preload Top Hit: We talk about the smart search field throughout this chapter. Here you get to choose whether the iPad can preload the top hit, or both.

· Block Cookies: We’re not talking about crumbs you may have accidentally dropped on the iPad. Cookies are tiny bits of information that a website places on the iPad when you visit so that the site recognizes you when you return. You need not assume the worst; most cookies are benign.

If this concept wigs you out, you can take action and block cookies from third parties and advertisers: If you tap the Always Block option, you will theoretically never again receive cookies on the iPad. Or you can choose to accept cookies only from the website you’re currently visiting or only from the websites you happen to visit. You can also tap Always to accept cookies from all sites. Tap Safari to return to the main Safari Settings page.

remember If you set the iPad so that it doesn’t accept cookies, certain web pages won’t load properly, and other sites such as Amazon won’t recognize you or make any of your preferred settings or recommendations available.

· Do Not Track: As the name suggests, if you turn this setting on, the iPad will not trace your cyberfootsteps.

· Clear History and Website Data: You met this option earlier. Tap it to erase everything in Safari’s history, leaving nary a trace of the pages you’ve visited.

· Fraudulent Website Warning: Safari can warn you when you land on a site whose producers have sinister intentions. The protection is better than nothing, but don’t let down your guard because the Fraud Warning feature isn’t foolproof. The setting is on by default.

· JavaScript: Programmers use JavaScript to add various kinds of functionality to web pages, from displaying the date and time to changing images when you drag over them. However, some security risks have also been associated with JavaScript. If you do turn it off, though, some things might not work as you expect. But this setting is found under the Advanced topic for a reason, meaning that Apple doesn’t think too many of us should mess with this setting. We generally leave things as they are, but go with whatever makes you comfortable.

· Advanced: Although the Advanced settings are indeed advanced (see the preceding bullet), you might want to drop by if you’re curious about how much data you’re consuming at different sites. Developers might also want to check out Advanced settings to turn on a Web Inspector feature that most readers need not concern themselves with.