Discover these hidden tricks of the Apple Safari browser. Safari for phone, iPad, and Mac offers a variety of features and settings to help you search the web like no other browser. There are even more new tools and tricks to know about with the release of iOS/iPadOS 14 and macOS Big Sur.
Apple’s default web browser on iPhone, iPad, and Mac is , but have you ever taken the time to investigate its many hidden features and settings? Standard features like private mode, bookmark management, and offline reading are included, but there are hidden Safari browser tricks you can do around privacy and security.
With iOS/iPadOS 14 and macOS 11 Big Sur, Safari has a few new tricks up its sleeve, including translation, privacy reporting, and password monitoring. Here’s how to use these features and customize your settings for a better Safari experience.
Now you can easily translate websites displayed in a foreign language. The new feature supports English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. Search for a site that appears in one of those languages, and you’ll see a translation icon appear briefly near the address bar.
You can also touch the icon yy at any time and select “Translate to”.
Each page of the site will be displayed in the language of your choice. To revert the site to the original language, tap the aA icon again on mobile or the translate icon on Mac, then select View Original.
View privacy report
Cross-site trackers monitor your web-based activities as you navigate from one site to another, an activity that can certainly raise privacy concerns. Safari blocks such trackers from profiling you by default and now lets you see which sites and trackers are blocked.
You can check your privacy report by tapping the aA icon on mobile and selecting Privacy Report, or by clicking the shield icon in Safari on your Mac and selecting the information icon.
Click the Show More link to learn more about cross-site tracking and how Apple blocks it. The window reveals how many trackers were unable to create a profile and how many sites contacted those trackers. Further down, you can see the websites that contacted the trackers and see which trackers were blocked.
View compromised or reused passwords
Another one of Safari’s hidden browser tricks, on your iPhone or iPad you can now view passwords saved in iCloud Keychain that have been leaked in a data breach, are being reused for multiple login credentials, or are deemed weak.
To verify this, go to Settings > Passwords > Security Recommendations . Then you can tap on a specific entry to remove or change the password.
Watch picture-in-picture videos
Many video streaming apps already let you watch their videos in a smaller window while you go about other tasks, but Safari now fully supports this option. If you’re watching a video on YouTube or Vimeo, you can start playing a video in full screen, then select the Picture-in-Picture icon in the upper left corner.
The video is reduced to a smaller window that you can move to any corner of the screen. To return to full-screen video, touch the small window and select the Picture-in-Picture icon.
new home page
Safari introduced a new home page with the release of iOS/iPadOS 13. Open a new tab to see your bookmarks, frequently visited sites, and Siri-suggested sites. Tap the Show More or Show Less link at the top right to see more or fewer icons.
Automatic closing of open tabs
The pages you open in Safari have a way of growing and growing until the browser is filled with dozens of open tabs. With iOS / iPadOS 13 or higher, you can set a certain time to automatically close all open tabs.
Go to Settings > Safari > Close Tabs to set tabs to close manually or automatically after a day, week, or month.
If you don’t want Safari to keep track of the sites you visit, your search history, or the AutoFill information you enter, private browsing mode will keep this information hidden (although you won’t be completely anonymous). Tap the tabs icon in the bottom right corner of Safari, tap Private, then tap the + icon to open a new page. You can exit Private mode by opening the tab screen, selecting Private, and then tapping Done.
Save open tabs as bookmarks
Instead of saving each individual open tab as a bookmark, you can save them all at once if you’re running iOS/iPadOS 13. To do this, tap the bookmark icon at the top or bottom of the screen. In the menu, tap βAdd bookmarks for tabsβ and your tabbed pages will be saved.
read offline
You can save a web page for offline reading. On the page you want to save, tap the Share icon, then tap Add to Reading List. To access any page in your reading list online or offline, touch the Bookmarks icon and touch the Glasses icon. You can then touch the page you want to read.
By default, the page disappears from the reading list after reading it. To see all the pages, including the ones you’ve already read, tap Show All at the bottom of the menu; touch Show unread to return to the list of unread items.
Quick access settings
If you’re running iOS / iPadOS 13 or higher, you’ll find certain settings hidden under the aA icon next to the address bar. A pop-up menu offers commands to change the zoom level, show the current page in Reader View, hide the toolbar, request the desktop or mobile version of the site, view the Privacy Report, and access more site settings Web.
reader view
Reader View, as its name suggests, makes it easy to read a web page. To do this on iOS / iPadOS 13 or higher, tap the aA icon in the address bar and select Show Reader View, or simply long press the aA icon until the page appears in Reader View. Touch the icon again to change the font or exit to normal view.
View two pages side by side
You can do more in Safari with iPad multitasking introduced in iPadOS 13.1. To view two web pages at once, open two pages, and then drag one to the right side of the screen until it opens in Slide Over view.
You can then reposition the second window so both pages are in Split View with a vertical bar that you can drag left or right to change the width of each window.
sharing options
By tapping the Share icon, you can send a link of the current web page to another app. You can choose to send a link via text message, email, reminder, Facebook, or Twitter. From here, you can also add the page to your home screen or print it.
There is another way to share web pages if you are running iOS/iPadOS 13 or higher. After tapping the Share icon, tap Options. You can now choose to share the page as a web page, PDF, or file.
download files
Starting with iOS/iPadOS 13, Safari has a download manager so you can more easily download files from a website. You can download a file by pressing the link and tapping Download Linked File on the pop-up menu.
View all downloaded files by tapping the down arrow button in the top right corner, then tap a specific file to view it.
You can also access downloaded files from the Files app by selecting the location for your iPhone or iPad and then navigating to the Downloads folder.
Change download folder
By default, Safari Download Manager saves files to the Downloads folder in iCloud, but you can change the location. open Settings > Safari > Downloads and send them to your iPhone, iPad, or other location. Here, you can also choose to delete downloaded items after a day, after a successful download, or manually.
Take a screenshot of the entire page
In the past, the screenshot feature on your mobile device would only capture the visible portion of a web page, cutting off the rest. With iOS / iPadOS 13 or higher, you can now capture the entire page. To do this, take a screenshot as usual, then tap the preview thumbnail of the shot. On the preview screen, tap the button that says Full Page and an image of the entire web page is saved, even if it wasn’t visible in the initial shot.
Safari Settings
Another hidden Safari browser trick is that if you want to change some of the main Safari settings, open Settings > Safari > Siri and Search on mobile or go to Safari > Preferences on a Mac. Here you can select where Safari information appears when you ask Siri a question, change your default search engine, and choose what information is auto-filled on websites.
Safari’s AutoFill feature lets you choose your contact information to fill in, but not names and passwords or credit card details.
You can also tell Safari to keep track of frequently visited sites, allow your Favorites to be accessed when you search or create a new tab, open new tabs in the background, show the Favorites bar, show the tabs and block pop-ups.
Scroll down to the Privacy & Security section (separate tabs in Preferences on Mac). You need to enable all settings here if they are not already selected.
This is where cookies collected by the browser can be deleted and any future data collection can be blocked. To learn more about these settings, tap the βAbout Safari and Privacyβ link.
If you’re not crazy about Safari and prefer to use Chrome, Firefox, or another browser as your default, you can now when you update to iOS/iPadOS 14. Go to Settings, then tap the browser app you want to use as your default.
Tap the default browser app settings and change it to your preferred browser. Now when you click on a…
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