Master Safari Tabs on iPhone: 17 Essential Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for dealing with Safari browser tabs on your iPhone.

So when using Safari on your iPhone to browse the web you're probably using Tabs, whether you realize it or not. So here I am in Safari. I'm just viewing a webpage. This webpage is being viewed in a tab. You don't really have windows in iOS. So every page that you're viewing at the same time is basically in a new tab like it would be in a single window on a Mac or PC. You can see all of your tabs by using this button at the bottom right that looks like two squares. If you don't see the controls here it is probably because you're in the middle of the page. Scroll down a bit and these controls should appear and then you can tap here and see all of your tabs. I've got two tabs open here. But chances are you've got more. You can scroll through them and then to jump to any tab just tap it and you'll go to that tab. Tap here again and then you can choose another tab.

So how do you open new tabs? Well, a lot of times when you tap on a link it automatically opens a new tab if that is how the website is designed. However, you can force it by tapping and holding a link, like this. You get a little preview there and you'll get a Context Menu at the bottom that includes Open In a New Tab. So now I've created a new tab and you can see here I now have three tabs open. You can also tap and drag a link, like this, and then with another finger tap on the tab overview button on the right. Now you can drop this into a position here to create a new tab with that link. 

You can also create a new tab with just your Start Page or your browser's Home Page showing by tapping the tabs button at the bottom right and then tapping the Plus Button on the left. Now it will create a New Tab with your start page there. So you can see now I have four tabs. 

Now if you're like most people you probably have way too many tabs open and some of those are for pages you haven't viewed in days. You can close any tab using this Interface here by simply tapping the x button right there. So I'll close this tab like that. 

Now if you want to clear this all out and close a lot of tabs you can do it by tapping and holding that X button at the top right. You'll get some options. One of them is to just close that tab but you can also close all other tabs leaving that tab as the only one that is still open. But you can also do this without even going to the tabs overview. You can just Tap & Hold here at the Tabs Icon at the bottom right and you'd see I've got the ability to close this tab or close All of the tabs, clearing them out. 

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Now if you close a tab by mistake or just want to get back to one that you had opened earlier in the day or something, you can go to the Tab Overview and with the Plus button here you can tap and hold and you're going to get a list of recently closed tabs. So you can open up one of those tabs again very easily. 

Now you can get to another tab by tapping the Tabs button and going to Tab Overview. But you can also use the bar here at the bottom. If you tab and swipe over, like that, you can go between all of your tabs very easily. If you don't see it like that you can go to Settings and then go down to the bottom of the list and you'll see Apps. Tap there. Then go to the S's and then Safari. In Safari you've got some settings here. Scroll down. You've got settings for Tabs. So you can have the Tab Bar at the bottom or you can just have a single tab showing at the top. So if you want to be able to swipe between them make sure you've got Tab Bar on here. 

You can also decide whether or not there's the Tab Bar there in landscape mode. When Clicking on links that go to a new tab you can jump to the new tab or have that tab open as another tab but you don't go there right away. 

Now there's also a very important setting here if you find you accumulate a lot of tabs. Right here you've got Close Tabs. You can have it on Manual where you have to close all the tabs yourself. But you can also have Tabs automatically close after one day, one week, or one month. Use one of these if you find you accumulate dozens or even hundreds of tabs.

When you got to the Tab Overview screen you cannot only select a new tab but you can rearrange these. So if you want to drag this first tab down you can and put it as the last tab in the list. You also can swipe down here and note that you can Search Tabs. So, you can just limit what you see to certain key words. That's particularly useful if you've got lots of tabs open but you don't necessarily want to close any of them now but you know that the information you want is on some tab in that list. You can just search the pages that you've got open. 

Now you also have the ability to have Tab Groups. Notice here I've got a single tab group, the default one. It just shows the number of tabs I've got open. Three tabs. But I can tap here and I can create a New Tab Group and then I can name it. Now I've got a second Tab Group. I can swipe between these here. So in this tab group here I can open up a bunch of tabs, maybe say for vacation planning or research for work. Then I can go back to this tab group here where I've got my other pages open. You can have a whole bunch of different Tab Groups open and they sync with iCloud. So you'll see the same tab groups on your other Apple devices as well. 

If you do have Tab Groups you can move pages between them. If you tap and hold on one of these you'll see you can move a tab and select another tab group. You can also choose to Pin a tab. You can choose that in the Context Menu here and you can  see it appears now at the top. It will stay there in this Tab Group here always at the top and easy to get to. This also makes it harder to accidentally close this tab. 

A Tab Group that is always going to be here to the left is the Private Group. So these are private windows here. In other words they don't share the cookies and website data with your other browser tabs. So if you're logged into a website with an account you can use Private browsing to see what the website looks like. If you're not logged in or perhaps logged in using a second account it will treat the Private browsing account like you're a different person on a different device. 

Another useful thing you can do when you've got Tab Groups is when you tab and hold a link you can not only open it in a new tab but you can choose specifically which Tab Group to open it in. Drag & Drop also works with In-tab overview. You can tap and drag one of these and with another finger tap one of the other groups at the bottom, like that, and now you can drop this tab into this group. 

You can do it with multiple tabs as well. You can tap and hold and then select, Select Tabs. Now you can tap to select multiple tabs. Now with multiple tabs selected you can use the Move Button here to move them. You can close them. You can tap this button here and do even more things, like Copy multiple links at the same time to paste them into a document, say. You can also Tap and Hold to bring most of this up in a Context Menu. Or you can tap and drag and drag multiple tabs into another Tab Group. 

So I hope this helps you to level up your Safari Tab skills on the iPhone. Thanks for watching.