Join Garrick Chow for an in-depth discussion in this video Manage bookmarks, history, and favorites, part of iOS 12: iPhone and iPad Essential Training.
- [Instructor] As with all other web browsers, you can save your favorite or frequently visited pages in Safari as bookmarks, which allows you to load those webpages with a couple of taps instead of having to manually type in their addresses each time. To create a bookmark, first browse to the page you wanna bookmark. In this case, I'm on this page for the Landon Hotel. I'll tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen, and from the list of options here, I'll tap Add Bookmark. That opens up the Add Bookmark screen. Now, this first field is for giving your bookmark a name. The text Safari has placed here is the title of the webpage, but you're free to edit this to label the bookmark however you like.
Below the name is the actual address of the page you're bookmarking. Now, this can't be edited, it's just here for you to confirm that this is the page you wanna save. Below that is where you can decide which folder to save this bookmark in. I'll show you how to generate new bookmark folders here in Safari in a moment, but for now, I'm just gonna save this bookmark in the main Bookmarks folder on my iPhone. You can see it's currently selected here under Location, so I'll just tap Save. And that's all there is to saving a bookmark. To access your bookmarks, tap the book icon at the bottom of the screen. If you're on an iPad, the button will be at the top left of your screen.
Then make sure the Bookmark tab is selected here at the top. So, here you'll find all the bookmarks you've created, and to load any bookmarked page, I just tap it. And that's all there is to that. Now, as your bookmark list starts to grow, you might wanna do some housekeeping now and then. Just tap the Bookmarks button and then tap Edit. Now you're free to rearrange the order of your bookmark list by dragging the handle next to any bookmark up or down. You'll notice that some bookmarks can't be moved, though. In this case, since I'm using my iPhone on a T-Mobile account, I see a bookmark to the T-Mobile My Account page and the iPhone User Guide here, and I can't move either of those from their current location.
But you're free to delete any bookmarks you like by tapping the red delete symbol and then tapping the Delete button. Now, while in this editing mode, this is also where you can create new folders to organize your bookmarks. Just tap New Folder, and maybe I wanna create a folder called Travel, and I'll store webpages that I use to look up travel information here. Now, if I wanted to put this folder inside another folder, I could tap Bookmarks to navigate to another folder from here. But I want this to be in the main Bookmarks list, so with Bookmarks checked, I'll just go back and you can see I know have the Travel folder at the top of my list.
You can also tap any bookmark to rename it or to move it to another folder. So, I'll tap Landon Hotel, and to move this to another folder, I just tap under Location. Here I can select my Travel folder, and I'll tap Done. So, now I can access my Travel folder, and in here, I'll find my Landon Hotel bookmark that I stored there. I'll tap All to go back to the main Bookmark list. Now, one of the other items you'll find here by default is History, which is found by tapping the tab with the clock on it. And list the history list you'll find in all other web browsers, this gives you a list of pages you've recently visited.
The top of the list shows you the pages you visited today, and as you scroll down, you'll find links to pages you visited prior to today. This is really convenient to have when you want or need to return to a page you visited earlier but can't remember the address of. Just open up Bookmarks and browse through your History list. Now, of course, there may be reasons you might not want Safari to store a list of pages you visited. You can erase your History list by tapping Clear. You can then choose to clear browsing history from just the last hour, all of today, today and yesterday, or tap All Time and it'll erase every item in your History list as well as your search history.
Let's cancel that for a moment. Now, what I mean by your search history is that Safari also remembers your most recently searched terms. So, if I close Bookmarks by tapping Done and then I tap in the Search field, and type the letter L, notice that several pages appear here under the Bookmarks and History heading, all starting with L. So, clearing your history also clears out these Google searches, which you may wanna do at some point for some reason or another. Let me show you one more way to clear your history. I'm gonna go to my Settings, into Safari, and if I scroll down here, I'll find Clear History and Website Data.
But clearing your history from here also removes cookies and other browsing data, like your browser cache. Now, cookies are small pieces of data that websites store in your browser, usually to personalize your experience. That's how sites like amazon.com can display your name at the top of their page when you visit them. If you have an account with Amazon, they placed a cookie in your browser so the website knows it's you when you visit the next time. Clearing cookies prevents that sort of thing from happening. And the other browsing data mostly refers to the browser cache, which is saved data from websites. That includes things like buttons, banners, and other images that are stored on your device so they don't have to be downloaded each time you visit the site.
Now, if you find that a site is behaving or looking strange, you can come here to Clear History and Website Data so it has to download fresh data from the website, which should clear up your problems. I'm just gonna cancel that for now, and let's go back to Safari. So, in addition to saving bookmarks, you can also save favorites. Favorites are the icons that appear when you tap in the address bar and before you type anything in. So, you can see, I have several favorites here already. So, I'll type in an address, I'll go to the jellybricks.com.
To save a page as a favorite, just tap the Share button like before, and next to the Add Bookmark button, we also have Add to Favorites. Again, I have the option here to rename this if I want to, I'll just leave everything as-is and tap Save. So, now whenever I type in the address bar or open up a new blank browser page, I can see my Favorites. There's the one I just created, and I can tap that to go to the page. Favorites can be faster to get to than your bookmarks, so you might wanna save your most frequently visited pages as favorites and pages you just wanna remember or occasionally visit as bookmarks.
You can also manage your favorites just like bookmarks. Just open up the Bookmark screen, and here at the top, you'll find Favorites. And from here, you can tap Edit to rearrange and remove favorites, and even create folders to organize them in. Alright, so that's working with bookmarks, history, and favorites in Safari.
Updated
2/8/2019Released
10/19/2018- Using gestures and 3D Touch
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- Adding events to your calendar
- Using the built-in apps
- Setting important privacy and usage options
- Controlling your device with Siri
- Troubleshooting your iOS 12 device
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Video: Manage bookmarks, history, and favorites