iPhone: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 11. The Web

The iPhone’s Web browser is Safari, a lite version of the same one that comes with every Macintosh and is also available for Windows. It’s fast, simple to use, and very pretty indeed. You see the real deal—the actual fonts, graphics, and layouts—not the stripped-down, bare-bones mini-Web on cellphones of years gone by.

Safari Tour

You get on the Web by tapping Safari on the Home screen. As noted in the previous chapter, the Web on the iPhone can be either fast (when you’re in a WiFi hotspot), medium (in a 3G coverage area) or excruciating (on the EDGE cellular network). Even so, some Web is usually better than no Web at all.

Tip

You don’t have to wait for a Web page to load entirely. You can zoom in, scroll, and begin reading the text even when only part of the page has appeared.

Safari has most of the features of a desktop Web browser: bookmarks, autocomplete (for Web addresses), scrolling shortcuts, cookies, a pop-up ad blocker, password memorization, and so on. (It’s missing niceties like streaming music, Java, Flash, and other plug-ins.)

Here’s a quick tour of the main screen elements, starting from the upper right:

• (Google). Tap this word (which you can change to say “Bing” or “Yahoo”) to open the search bar and the keyboard; see Searching the Web.

• Address bar. This empty white box is where you enter the URL (Web address) for a page you want to visit. (URL is short for the even-less-self-explanatory Uniform Resource Locator.)

• , (Stop, Reload). Tap to interrupt ...