New Safari Features In iPadOS

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's look at the new features of Safari in iPadOS. 

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So iPadOS, also known as iOS 13 for iPad, changes the Safari browser to be a Desktop browser rather than a mobile browser. That means that webpages on your iPad should now look and work just like they do on a Desktop computer, not a phone. With that comes several great new features. 

So let's start by looking at the new website View menu. This is the little button at the left side of the Address field. Looks like two letter A's. Tap that and you get a bunch of controls. First you get the ability to zoom in on just the text which is something you can do on a Desktop browser. So I hit the larger A it will change the size of the text but not zoom in on the entire webpage. You can zoom out as well. In addition you've got Reader View which is what we had there in place of that button before. You can also Hide the toolbar and get it back by simply tapping near the top of the screen. You can request the Mobile website if you'd rather see the mobile version of this website.

You'll also have website Settings which is similar to what you have in Safari on the Desktop. You go into that and have settings for this individual site. So you can set it to Request Desktop Website or the Mobile Website. You can request it to use the Reader View Automatically, if available, on a page on that site. You can also change access to things. So if you've allowed access for your camera for a website or a microphone or location here's where you can turn it off or switch it. Tap it there and you can have it Deny, Allow, or just go back to asking you every time. 

Now also on the toolbar on the top you may notice a new icon there. It's a Download menu. You tap that and it shows you your downloads just like it would on a desktop. So you would see a progress bar there if there was a download in progress. Otherwise you will see your previous downloads. You can Clear and you can hit that little Magnifying glass there and it will jump to the Files app to your Download folder. That's right! In the Files app now you've got a Downloads folder just like on the Mac.

What about Uploads? You do have a new feature in Uploads as well. If you go to upload a file you can, just as before, choose from File, you can choose from your Photo Library if it's looking for an image. If you choose an image you can then choose the size for the image. Notice there at the bottom it says Choose Image Size. Tap that and I can go Large, Medium, Small, or Actual Size just like you can in Safari for Mac.

Now notice here I've got a bunch of different tabs open. What if I have a ton of tabs open and I want to search for one. Or maybe I forget I have a website open in a tab and I decide to go to that webpage separately. When you do a Search you won't only get the regular search results but you get a Switch to Tab feature there. So you can see I can tap that and it just jumps to that tab. That's a new feature of macOS Catalina as well.

Now when you go to Share a website you've got some new options. If you look at the top of the Share sheet there you have an Options button. You tap that and now you can Share as PDF or web archive. You can set it to one of those two specifically. Using Automatic for the web is just going to give you a link to Share. 

Also with Tabs if you tap and hold a tab you're going to get some Options there. You can arrange tabs by Title or arrange them by website. With Tabs you can also save all of your tabs as bookmarks. For instance if I like these four tabs open and I want to have a set of bookmarks for them I can tap and hold the Bookmarks button at the top left and you can see in addition to Add Bookmark I have Add Bookmarks for 4 Tabs.

If you want to see two Safari windows at the same time you could already have done this using Split view. But now you get the full toolbars for that. So if I put another Safari window up here and I jump to that you can see I get the Toolbars there at the top of both of those. 

So you can even do one thing in Safari for iPadOS that you can't easily do on Safari for Mac. That is take a screenshot that includes the entire webpage. So I'm going to take a normal screenshot but with Safari here as the app on the screen. I'm going to Hold button and the Sleep/Wake button at the same time. I get a little preview at the bottom left. I'm going to tap that and I go into the mode now where I can mark it up. But at the top of the screen now I get Screen and Full Page. I can switch to Full Page and I can now scroll using the little scroll bar on the right side. Scroll up and down and see the entire page here. I can mark it up, just as I would before, and I can Share it hitting the Share button. So now I can Save it as a file, Share it, anyway you normally would. It's just that you get the entire scrolling webpage as a screen capture not just the visible part. 

In addition to those specific features in general webpages are supposed to behave better, render faster, scroll faster, and just feel a lot more like you're looking at the webpage on a MacBook or a iMac.