This week's tips focus on navigating the murky waters of our default iOS browser, Safari Mobile. We'll be exploring quick access to your favorite websites from your Home screen, tips on scrolling within Safari, and how to use the History features built into Safari to revisit websites we've been to before.

Using Web Clips for Fast Website Access

You can use Web Clips to quickly access your favorite websites from your Home screen. It's easy. Simply launch Safari, browse to a favorite website and create a Web Clip:

 On the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, tap this button:

and then tap Add to Home Screen.

Safari will prompt you to select a name for your Web Clip and it offers a default name that you can use or change. Tap Add and Safari will create an icon representing the website on your Home screen.

An icon with a screen cap of the site or the favicon will be added to your Home screen.

Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Delete a Web Clip from Your Home Screen

If you decide that you no longer need the Web Clip, you can delete it just like any other app.

Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Pro Scrolling in Safari

If you encounter a webpage that has frames, navigation can become pretty tricky. This is especially true if it's an iFrame with a text box, and this can be inconvenient in some situations. For example:

Imagine that you're editing the contents of that region and you type a long winded complaint letter to some company about poor services you received. You scroll down down as you type and eventually you can no longer see anything you typed. What happened?

Just remember that in this situation, your fingers are the key. If you use one finger, Safari will scroll the entire page up, down, or sideways. If you use two fingers inside of that editable region, you scroll just the contents of that region.

Here's an external website that you can use to experiment with these techniques.

Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Revisit Previously Viewed Websites

Here's something you might have missed about Safari on Apple's iOS devices. You can revisit previously viewed websites by tapping:

and then tapping History.

You'll see a list of recently visited websites. Locate the one you want and tap it. Safari will reopen that page.

If you want to clear your history on the iPhone or iPod touch, tap the Clear button. On the iPad, tap the Clear History button.

Compatibility: iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.


Follow this articles author, David W. Martin on Twitter.