The iPhone’s web browser gets a makeover. iOS 15, which inaugurates a new design that has given Apple a hard time, takes advantage of a cascade of innovations designed to simplify its use.
We had to wait for the arrival of the last beta of iOS 15 to have a final preview of what Safari would look like. Because the final version of the browser does not have quite the same look as the one presented by Apple at WWDC last June.
When Apple imagined Safari’s new interface, it chose to migrate the address bar at the bottom of the screen. If this choice seems rather wise in terms of ergonomics, especially on smartphones equipped with a very large screen, its implementation in iOS 15 was not without concession. Initially, Apple had imagined this new floating address bar at the bottom of the screen, and had relocated the control buttons in additional menus, which made navigation chaotic, especially since the position of this bar concealed certain interface elements of websites, in particular the RPDG banners and their buttons for accepting or rejecting cookies.
Faced with these ergonomic problems, Apple has revised its copy. The Cupertino company finally abandoned the floating bar to integrate it into a static bar on which the usual navigation controls are displayed. To satisfy all users and limit frustrations, the Californian company even decided to leave the choice in the positioning of the Safari address bar. An option was indeed added in the sixth beta to migrate the address bar at the top of the screen in order to find the old browser interface.
Despite its turbulent beginnings, Safari is full of new features and is enriched with a multitude of small functions designed to improve and simplify its daily use.
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A new interface
The first opening of Safari in iOS 15 upsets all your habits. Apple has chosen to natively integrate the address bar, or more exactly the tab bar, at the bottom of the screen. Because that is what it is. By migrating this interface element to the bottom of the screen, Apple has thought about the navigation of small hands on the largest screens. Navigating in Safari can now be done with one hand.
The address bar positioned in this way allows you to switch from one tab to another by sliding them directly from left to right and vice versa. Also, when you get to the last tab, dragging it to the left will allow you to open a new one.
As for the display of all the tabs, a sliding upwards gesture is sufficient to obtain the mosaic of open tabs. If the button allowing to display tabs remains present, the possibility of displaying them quickly without having to actuate it is very useful, especially since positioned as it is, to reach it with only one hand does not. is not always obvious.
Other ergonomic improvements have been made by Apple. So you can now quickly refresh a page by simply dragging it down.
In addition, if you happen to use Safari horizontally, in landscape view, the tab bar will appear as on a Mac, with all the tabs open and the possibility of rearranging them using drag and drop.
On the aesthetic aspect, Apple has added a new option in the Settings of iOS 15 dedicated to Safari. You can now change the coloring of the websites you visit. Thanks to this, the address bar takes on the background color of the visited site when it is reduced during navigation, whether it is displayed at the top or at the bottom of the screen.
If, however, the new positioning of the address bar does not suit you, you can put the address bar back on top in Safari very easily.
As amazing as it sounds, Apple has provided an option to easily switch between displays. It is also possible to modify it in two ways.
A customizable home page
With iOS 15, Safari inherits a customizable home page. When you open a new tab, the browser no longer just displays tiles to the most frequently visited or recently opened pages. Now you can select the items you want to appear there. By default, iOS 15 displays Favorites, URLs that have been shared with you from other apps, Safari’s Privacy Report, and sites saved in your reading list.
You will find these options at the very bottom of the page when you open a new tab. Just press the Edit button to access the Customize page panel. You will be able to add or remove categories, rearrange their display order, and enable synchronization of this home page on all your Apple devices connected to your iCloud account by enabling the option Use home page on all devices.
And to give a touch of aesthetics, Apple even allows you to configure an image to display in the background of a new tab. iOS 15 offers several predefined images, but you can easily draw a personal image from the Camera Roll of the iPhone by pressing the + button.
Grouped tabs
Always with the aim of improving and simplifying navigation in Safari, Apple introduced on iOS 15 a new option to create groups of tabs. This function, already offered by some competitors, helps to strengthen the organization of the pages opened in Safari. You can create an empty tab group, and fill it in manually, or create a tab group from all the tabs already open.
The tabbed navigation system, recognizable by the button showing two overlapping squares, has also had to evolve. If it was relatively easy before to access private browsing in Safari (it was enough to access the tabs to activate the option), you must now display the mosaic of tabs and deploy the navigation menu displayed at the bottom of the screen to switch to Private navigation.
The arrival of extensions
The deployment of iOS 15 on iPhone also marks the official arrival of extensions for Safari. However, don’t look for a way to install them directly through the iPhone’s web browser. To take advantage of it, you must go to the App Store where Apple has integrated a section dedicated to Safari Extensions.
Their activation must then be done through the iOS Settings, from the Safari menu. Under the heading General, enter the section relating to Extensions. This is where the content blockers, already present in iOS 14, and the new extensions for Safari are now grouped together.
Find all shared links
If you still ardently use the Messages application, to send SMS or iMessages, you probably sometimes find that contacts share their good links with you. Rather than having to scroll through conversations or access their detailed information to find these links, you can now easily access them directly in Safari. With iOS 15, Apple is launching a “hub” bringing together all the links that have been shared with you in Message.
To access it, you need to open a new, blank tab. All links received in Messages are then recorded there in the Shared with you section. You can also easily identify the contacts who sent them to you since each link displays the name of the contact and the conversation from which they originate.
On-the-fly and drag-and-drop translation
Finally, Apple has introduced here and there several small features aimed at improving the ergonomics of its browser. Among these, we retain the integration of Live Text. Thanks to this function, you can start a translation on the fly, both on the texts of web pages and on the text displayed in the images, and can very easily extract the text of the images for use in other applications or launch actions on the fly. For example, you can quickly initiate a call to a phone number displayed in a picture.
Another extremely practical little function is drag and drop. While it can be used anywhere in iOS, it will come in extremely handy on Safari, especially when it comes to quickly saving multiple images to iPhone Camera Roll.
While holding your finger on an image to initiate a drag-and-drop, press and hold subsequent images for one second to add it to the selection of drag-and-drop images. Once all of your images are selected, you can close Safari and open Photos to release the selection and see your images saved to your Camera Roll.