Using Safari 15 Tabs On an iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Tabs, Tab Groups, and other new features of Safari 15 in iOS 15 on the iPhone.

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So once you upgrade to iOS 15 on your iPhone you'll notice that Safari looks a little different. First of all you'll find the Address Field and Search Field for Safari is at the bottom now. No longer at the top although I'll show you how to change that if you want. Before with Safari Tabs if you wanted to switch tabs you would tap this button here which brings up the Tab Overview and you can switch to a new tab. But now you could do it without having to do all that. As a matter of fact it's easy to do even while holding your phone with one hand. All you need to do is swipe from right to left at the bottom there and it switches between tabs. You can go back and forth to all the tabs that you have open. This alone is a huge improvement. But there's a lot more to it as well. 

If you want to add a new tab just go to the end of the list here and notice that when you swipe over you get a Plus button that appears. If you keep swiping it just opens up the Start Page as a new tab. In a few minutes here we will look at how to customize the Start Page to make it more useful. 

But there's a lot more functionality inside this Tab interface here at the bottom. For instance you could tap these two letters here at the left and that brings up this menu here. You'll notice the first item here allows you to move all of these tabs and everything to the top. Now you see it like you did before. Tap here again and you can move to the bottom. But also you have access to a lot of other things like Privacy Report, websites settings, all through this. You could even Hide the Toolbar entirely and it will come back when you go all the way down to the bottom and tap there. Now if you tap here, of course, you can Edit the Address. But if you tap and hold then it will bring up other options. For instance you can move to a different Tab Group.

So let's look at creating Tab Groups. Right now I've got these three tabs, actually four since I opened up this blank page. This is part of a group of tabs that are basically ungrouped tabs. If I tap the Tab Overview here I'll see I've got four tabs open here and if I tap here it will show me those four tabs. Then any private tabs I have opened and then it will show me Tab Groups. I've got two here. You may remember from a previous video these are the two Tab Groups I created on my Mac in Safari 15. So iCloud is syncing those across. I can create a new empty Tab Group here or take these four tabs that I've opened that are ungrouped and create a new Tab Group right here. I can also tap and hold any group and it will bring up options like Rename and Delete. I could also get to those by going to Edit and then I can tap on the three dots button to the right side of either one of these. I could also rearrange the order that they are in. You could also tap and hold one of these. You'll notice the different tabs will show up here and you could jump to anyone of those. If you're in Edit mode you can tap here and there's the ability to copy Links to all of those tabs as well. 

Tab Overview is also someplace you could create a new tab for that particular group. So now you'll notice there are five tabs there including this new blank page. 

So when you are at a blank page it's actually your Start Page. So your Start Page is going to include things like your Favorites and maybe tabs you have opened on other devices. If you go to Edit you can customize the Start Page. This has been around for a year on the Mac but now it comes to the iPhone as well. So you can set it here for what you want to include, Favorites Recently Visited and you can have other things as well. You can even customize it with a background image if you like. You could also change the order in which things appear. So if you want very specific sites to appear there you can actually just select Favorites and just the things in your Favorites bookmarks will show there including folders of bookmarks. If you don't want to see Frequently Visited you can simply turn that off as well as Siri Suggestions. You can turn that off as well. So you'll always just see the exact same thing, your Favorites, here rather than other suggestions.

In addition to swiping back and forth to go to different tabs inside of a group another way to get to the Tab Overview is to tap and swipe Up. Then it will take you into Tab Overview and allow you to easily switch which Tab Group you're using.  

So Apple is really going all in here in allowing you to navigate around in Tabs, Tab Groups, your Start Page, go to new pages all with holding your phone with one hand and using your thumb to do everything. If you want to Refresh the page all you need to do now is swipe Down and you could see how it does a Refresh. The same way you may refresh the Status or the List of Contents in another app. You can even do a lot of things within a single tap. For instance if I'm looking at this page here I can tap down and hold. Then I could go up to Move to Tab Group, wait, the Tab Groups appear and I can pick a new Tab Group and it will move that tab into that group. Or I can tap and hold the Tab Overview button and I can jump to another Tab Group, I can close all of the tabs in this group, just this tab, or I can even start a new tab here. If I'm all the way over to the left of a bunch of tabs I don't need to go to the end to create a new one.

Now when in Landscape mode things look a lot different. You don't have the Tab Bar at the bottom. As a matter of fact it looks a lot more like using Safari on the Mac. You see the different tabs here at the top. It's more like the Desktop experience. But you can still go to Tab Overview and do things like create Tab Groups and organize them. In addition in the Settings app you can go to Safari and there are several settings here that have to do with Tabs. One is to go back to the old view. Then you could also turn Off the Tabs for Landscape View. Then notice the one that's Allow Website Tinting. The Tab Bar will be tinted with the background color of the webpage. Most webpages just use white so you may not notice. But if you're annoyed that sometimes the Tab Bar turns a bright color when you're at a certain page you could simply turn that Off here. If you find you're accumulating a lot of tabs that you always forget to close them you could always go to Close Tabs and set tabs to close automatically after a day, week, or month. 

So while there is a lot of new functionality in Safari 15 in iOS 15 actually you can access almost all of that by just tapping or tapping and holding on the various things in the Tab Bar at the bottom of Safari. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.