Browsing with Safari on iPhone

Safari is one of the key features of your iPhone. Without Safari you are limiting all of your online capabilities to applications that are taken from the iTunes’ App Store. With Safari, the iPhone evolves into a miniature tablet computer with the ability to do every internet browsing function. Since the iPhone takes the idea of personal device customization seriously, you can expect almost every function and feature to have clear settings that you can alter. This is true of the iPhone’s Safari feature, which has settings that can be altered. The only problem here is that many of these iPhone Safari settings can seriously affect your Safari capabilities.

When you are at the iPhone desktop, start by selecting Settings. Then go to the third block down in iPhone Settings and select Safari, which is under Phone and above Messages. The very first option in the iPhone Safari Settings is to set which search engine you want in your upper right hand search prompt. You only have the choice of Google or Yahoo, so this is really a matter of preference. The next option down is AutoFill, which is defaulted as off.

When you go into the AutoFill option, you can set Contact Info or Names and Passwords to AutoFill. AutoFill will just help you enter information faster, but this is not always going to be useful. If you want to use the iPhone Safari AutoFill, only use it for Contact Info and not Names & Passwords.

The next three options are for JavaScript, Plug-Ins and to Block Pop-Ups. You only have the option to keep these on or turn them off. It is never recommended to turn off JavaScript and Plug-Ins if you want Safari to work correctly, and Block Pop-Ups is a nice feature that should remain.

The following one is for Accept Cookies, which is usually set at “From Visited.” This means that the website will remember you in a certain way and recognize your return. You can also select Never or Always, but both of these options are rather extreme and may cause you problems. If you are very worried about security then you can select Never. The option after this is Databases and is really only to get information about email accounts.

At the bottom, you have a few options to clear information. Here is Clear History, Clear Cookies and Clear Cache. These all have their place, though you should really have a clear reason to do so because it will make your immediate return to the iPhone Safari a little less familiar. You can Clear History if you want to protect your internet activity privacy, but clearing Cookies and Cache are not a common activity.