The other day I was chatting with a friend who recently bought an iPhone. When I was looking at his iPhone I noticed some icons which I had never seen before. It turned out that these icons were bookmarks to his favorite websites. A nice little feature mobile Safari offers is the facility to drop bookmarks on your Home screen.

1. Open the site you want to have a shortcut for in mobile Safari.
2. Resize and move the page to the section you want to start off the next time you open the shortcut. Mobile Safari will remember the exact position.
3. Press the + sign in the bottom toolbar and select Add To Home Screen. The iPhone will make a screenshot of the page, which will be used as an icon on the Home screen.

Go ahead, now you have a convenient shortcut on your Home screen.

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Here is a short list of the tips and tricks you might find useful when surfing the web with mobile Safari. Some of these weren’t that obvious to me, so I thought I should share them with you.

• Rotate the iPhone by 90 degrees to surf in landscape mode.
• Double tap on a column zooms that column in for better reading. Double tap anywhere on the screen to zoom out again.
• A tap on the status bar (where the carrier, time and, battery information is shown) propels you right to the top of the current web page. This actually works in some other applications as well.
• Tap and hold down the finger on a picture to save that picture into the camera roll of the Photo application.
• You can sync the bookmarks between mobile Safari and your Safari installation on your desktop computer.
• When you are entering URLs you can omit the www. part of the address.
• When entering URLs into the address field you can use the top level domain shortcut I described in The Advantages of a Virtual Keyboard.
• A little lock icon on the left of the address bar shows you whether you are using a secure https connection. This is useful, because normally you will not see the scheme name (http, https, etc.) of the URL.
• Sometimes you want to see where a URL is pointing to before opening it. Tap and hold down the finger on the URL for a second. A little bubble will show you the link’s name and destination.

That’s all that comes to my mind when I think about how to best use mobile Safari. Have I forgotten some useful tips and tricks? Leave a comment to share your secret power tips with us.

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