We’ll focus on the Mac with macOS 15 Sequoia, but these features other than Video Viewer are also available on the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Macs still running macOS 13 Ventura or macOS 14 Sonoma can get Safari 18 but miss out on the Highlights feature. Regardless of platform or macOS version, you access all these new features from the Page menu at the left of Safari’s address bar, which takes over from the previous Show Reader View button in Safari 17.

Highlights

Sometimes, when you visit a website, you just want a quick bit of information, like a restaurant’s address or a store’s hours. For those running Sequoia, once you turn on Safari 18’s Highlights feature, the Page menu icon in Safari’s address bar will show a purple sparkle if it detects information on the page that it can call out for you. Click it to learn more.

It can be hard to predict what Highlights will call out. It’s fairly reliable at showing location and business information extracted from Maps, and it may display biographical information about people on pages about them. For long articles, it may provide a quick summary you can use to see if it’s worth reading more. Apple says Highlights will also offer quick links to learn more about people, music, movies, and TV shows.

Distraction Control

Every website wants you to SUBSCRIBE TO A NEWSLETTER! and WATCH OUR VIDEO! and SHARE THIS ARTICLE! It’s exhausting. In Safari 18, Apple has added a feature that can help you turn down the volume on websites that constantly try to lure you into doing something other than what you intend. Distraction Control lets you remove annoying parts of a Web page. It works on nearly anything on the first use, but Apple warns that “hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that updates frequently.” (That’s what most people want, of course, but such a capability would anger advertisers and publishers whose business models rely on ads.)

To clean up a Web page, click the Page menu and choose Hide Distracting Items. Then, move the pointer over areas of the screen you want to remove—if Safari can identify an item as a discrete object, it will gain a blue outline. Click it to make it disappear in a cloud of digital dust. Additional clicks will remove more items; Safari keeps count in the location bar. Click the Done button in the location bar to save your changes, or click Cancel if you were just testing. As you can see in the right-hand sidebar of the Yahoo page in the image below, the result is a cleaned-up view with much less distraction.

Redesigned Reader

Another way to eliminate distractions when reading on the Web is to use Safari’s Reader mode. When you click the Page menu and select Show Reader, Safari reformats the text and images in an article, removing extraneous ads and gewgaws. Once you’re in the redesigned Reader, click the Page menu icon again to access the customization options that let you choose from four color themes, nine different font faces, and various zoom levels

With Apple Intelligence on a Mac with Apple silicon, Reader also offers to summarize long articles. It may also provide a table of contents if the article contains appropriate headings, but it’s hard to predict when that will work.

Video Viewer

Finally, those who watch a lot of Web video will appreciate Safari 18’s new Video Viewer, available only on the Mac. Whenever you’re watching a video embedded in a Web page, clicking the Page menu reveals a new Video Viewer command. Choose that to expand the current video to fill the Safari window, overwriting whatever else might have been on the page so you can focus on the video.

Once you’re in the Video Viewer, switching to another tab in Safari or another app whose window obscures at least half the Video Viewer window causes Safari to switch to Picture in Picture, moving the video to a small window that floats above all other apps. You can resize that window and move it to any screen corner while it’s open, and it remembers its size and location for subsequent uses. Although multiple tabs and windows can use Video Viewer simultaneously, only one can be in Picture in Picture at a time.

Even if these changes aren’t world-changing for everyone, they make Safari an ever more capable Web browser, so it’s worth giving them a try to see if they’ll improve your Web experience.

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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But did you know that Safari has a feature that lets you use the search field to search directly within your favorite websites, so you don’t have to wade through unnecessary search engine results or navigate somewhere manually before searching? It’s called Quick Website Search and is available for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s helpful for websites within which you search often. For example, we often search for technical information on Apple’s website. You might find the feature helpful for searching Amazon or another shopping site, a help center, or an events calendar.

All you have to do to prime Quick Website Search’s pump is search a website using its internal search option. Look for a magnifying glass or Search option, enter a term in the search field, and submit the search. It doesn’t matter what you search for—all you’re doing is teaching Safari how to search on that site, and it will remember the site from then on.

Later, to look for pages only from that site, enter three or four characters from its name (don’t accept any auto-completions!), a space, and then your search term. Don’t press Return or tap Go, however. Instead, pick the suggestion from the suggestion list under the “Search sitename” heading.

Safari then sends the search directly to the site in question, so instead of results from Google or your default search engine, you’ll see the results on the desired site.

The process is the same on the iPhone and iPad, although Safari on those platforms doesn’t remember websites you’ve searched as reliably.

On the Mac, you can see which sites Quick Website Search has remembered and remove them by opening Safari > Settings > Search and clicking Manage Websites next to Enable Quick Website Search.

On the iPhone and iPad, open Settings > Safari > Quick Website Search to see and remove the remembered sites.

This way of searching within a website can be a big productivity win, so it probably won’t take long to get used to this new way of jumping into your most used websites’ internal search engines.

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So is Google Search’s 90% market share because it’s the best search engine or because Google has enough money to pay distributors for top placement?

Along with concerns about whether Google is the best search engine, some people worry about Google collecting information about them to show targeted ads alongside search results. The more information Google has on users, the argument goes, the better that ads can be targeted, and the more likely it is that users will click the ads, which generates money for Google from advertisers. Others worry that Google’s results may reflect certain types of bias.

If you’re perturbed by the privacy implications of Google knowing everything you search for, or if you’ve found Google’s search results less helpful than you’d like, you can easily switch to another search engine to see if you prefer its results and privacy stance.

How to Switch Search Engines

For many Apple users, the main place to choose a preferred search engine is in Safari’s settings. On the Mac, choose Safari > Settings > Search and choose the desired search engine from the Search Engine pop-up menu. You can choose a different one for Private Browsing windows if you want.

In Chrome-based browsers like Google Chrome, Arc, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and Opera on the Mac, open the settings and look for Search Engine. A pop-up menu lets you choose from some standard options, and additional choices let you add search engines like Brave Search that are too new (or not paying) to appear. Firefox offers similar options when you choose Firefox > Settings > Search.

On the iPhone and iPad, go to Settings > Safari >  Search Engine. Again, if you want a different search engine in Private Browsing tabs, turn off Also Use in Private Browsing and choose another option.

Top Alternative Search Engines

Conceptually, what search engines do is simple—they search a set of Web pages for matching keywords and return a list of them in order of relevance to the user. The hard part is dealing with the number of pages—estimates suggest Google indexes 50 billion pages and Bing 4.5 billion—and scaling the service to respond instantly to tens or hundreds of millions of queries per day. (Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day; Bing handles 400 million.) Beyond Google, here are the main search engines and what sets them apart. (You will also likely see Yandex, sometimes called “the Google of Russia.” Avoid it. For so many reasons.)

• Bing: The second-most popular (though far, far behind Google) search engine in the world, Microsoft’s Bing sets itself apart with a busy, highly designed search results page that mixes a variety of results. It may work well for you, or you may find it overwhelming and difficult to parse. Microsoft is also putting a lot of effort into chat-based AI-powered results. Bing claims to offer more user privacy than Google, but it’s still tracking users to target ads better. If Bing has better privacy than Google, it may mostly be due to not being part of the larger Google data-collection empire.
  
• Yahoo: Though it was the first Web search engine, Yahoo hasn’t run its own index since 2009. Today, Yahoo’s search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, so while the look of the search results page may differ, the results should be identical to Bing’s. Yahoo’s privacy stance is also similar to Bing’s.
  
• DuckDuckGo: If privacy is paramount, DuckDuckGo is worth a look because it does not track or store user information at all. Instead, it chooses ads to display only by matching with search keywords. Although it uses Bing for some of its results, DuckDuckGo also incorporates information from numerous other sources, so it won’t seem like an exact clone of Bing.
  
• Ecosia: The main reason to use the Berlin-based Ecosia is if you like Bing’s results (but not its layout) and want to support a “social business” that claims to be carbon-negative, offers full financial transparency, and protects users’ privacy. Founded in 2009, Ecosia today relies entirely on Bing’s search results and ads (clicks on which are how Ecosia earns money), and it claims to have planted over 188 million trees in 35 countries since its inception. It’s hard to argue with Ecosia’s environmental results, but as a search engine, it doesn’t feel special.
  
• Brave Search: A truly independent search engine, Brave Search relies on its own created-from-scratch index (it leaned on Google and Bing for some results early on, but ceased in August 2023). It also emphasizes user privacy and doesn’t track users, searches, or clicks. Although Brave Search displays keyword-based ads by default, users can pay $3 per month for Brave Search Premium, which provides ad-free results pages. You’ll have to set Brave as the default search engine for most browsers manually; for Safari, all you can do is make a favorite to search.brave.com.
  
• Kagi: Speaking of paid search engines, if you really want to avoid ads, Kagi is another independent search engine that rolls its own index and provides access only to subscribers, eschewing ads entirely. You can sign up for a 100-search test account, and if you like it, pay $5 per month for 300 searches or $10 per month for unlimited searches. As with Brave Search, you must manually set Kagi as the default search engine (there’s an extension for Safari).
  

The “best” search engine is the one that gives you the answers you want without triggering privacy worries or concerns about bias. If you want to see if something other than Google will work better for you, set it as your default search engine and try it for a few weeks.

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There’s no avoiding some downtime when installing a full macOS update, which is why we recommend starting such updates at the end of the day or before you leave for lunch. That’s why Apple introduced Rapid Security Responses, which generally install in just 3–4 minutes, including a restart if necessary.

But with a bit of setup, you can pick up where you left off before a restart within a minute or two. There are three settings that can reopen apps, documents, and folders, and all Web browsers have options that reload all previously open tabs.

Apps, Documents, and Folders

If you always want certain apps running or documents open, you can ensure they open at login. In macOS 13 Ventura, open System Settings > General > Login Items (shown below); in macOS 12 Monterey and earlier, look in System Preferences > Users & Groups > User > Login Items.

You can add apps, documents, and even folders to the Open at Login list. To remove an unwanted item, select it and click the – button. If there’s anything you don’t recognize, Control-click it and choose Show in Finder to see where it’s located.

What if you have other apps or documents open that you want to return to immediately after relaunching an app? macOS offers another setting for that. In Ventura, look in System Settings > Desktop & Dock and scroll down to Windows & Apps. Deselect “Close windows when quitting an application” because reopening an app won’t restore its open documents and windows when that’s on. In Monterey and earlier, find this setting in System Preferences > General.

Choose Restart, Shut Down, or Log Out from the Apple menu to reveal the last and most important setting to ensure that your Mac environment is the same after a restart as it was before. In this dialog, select “Reopen windows when logging back in” and click Restart. macOS remembers this setting, so you shouldn’t have to select it each time.

As a bonus, if your Mac crashes or shuts down unexpectedly, it should come back as it was before the crash.

Web Browsers

The macOS settings above should work for most apps, but Web browsers are a special case. Open tabs aren’t quite the same as documents, and you might or might not want all those tabs to come back after relaunching your browser. Control the session settings in these popular Web browsers with the instructions below:

• Safari: Recent versions of Safari always open with windows (and tabs) from your last session, though you can choose whether that includes all windows or just non-private ones in Safari > Settings > General.
  
• Google Chrome: For Google Chrome, you have additional options, but to make sure your open tabs are restored after relaunching the app, choose Chrome > Settings > On Startup, and select “Continue where you left off.”
  
• Firefox: Mozilla’s browser puts its session settings front and center. Choose Firefox > Settings > General and select “Open previous windows and tabs.”
  
• Arc: The new browser Arc encourages users to set up workspaces containing pinned tabs, both of which persist across sessions. However, to ensure all your windows and regular tabs load after relaunching, open Arc > Settings > Advanced and select “When opening Arc, restore windows from previous session.”
  
• Brave: As a Chrome-based browser, Brave offers a setting similar to Chrome but in a different location. Find it in Brave > Settings > Get Started.
  
• Microsoft Edge: Although it is also based on Chrome, Microsoft Edge stores its session setting in a different location, with a different name. Choose Microsoft Edge > Settings > Start, Home, and New Tabs, and then select “Open tabs from the previous session.”
  

Between these macOS and browser settings, you can ensure that a restart presents the minimum interruption possible, such that when your Mac finishes restarting, all your apps, documents, windows, and browser tabs will be the same as when you left off.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

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Here then are six ways that you can make it easier to use the same sites every day. This list is far from comprehensive, but we hope it gets you thinking about how you can spend less time typing URLs and searching for sites. We’ll focus on Safari here, but similar features are available in most Web browsers.

Bookmarks

Many of you probably know about bookmarks, so let this serve as a nudge to remember how useful they can be. Dating from the earliest days of the Web browser, bookmarks are the original way to simplify revisiting a site.

In Safari on the Mac, save a bookmark by navigating to a page and then choosing Bookmarks > Add Bookmark. See your full list in the sidebar by choosing Bookmarks > Show Bookmarks. Click one in the list to load it. On an iPhone or iPad, tap the share icon and tap Add Bookmark; on the iPad, you can also drag a tab to the sidebar when it’s displaying bookmarks. You can see and visit your bookmarks by tapping the Bookmark icon in the toolbar (iPhone ) or the sidebar (iPad ).

Favorites

To make a particular bookmark even easier to access, add it to your Favorites. On the Mac, you can display the Favorites bar underneath the Location bar (View > Show Favorites Bar) and then click bookmarks for quick loading. Create a new favorite by putting a bookmark in the Favorites folder when you create it or by dragging it in later.

On the iPhone and iPad, favorites appear when you tap the Location bar, and adding a favorite is as simple as choosing Add Favorite instead of Add Bookmark in the share sheet.

As long as you have Safari enabled in your iCloud settings, your bookmarks and favorites sync among all your Apple devices.

Home Screen Icons

Want to go one step further? You can turn a Web page into a Home Screen icon on the iPhone or iPad. To set this up, just as with a bookmark, you navigate to the page and tap the share icon. Then select Add to Home Screen.

The Mac doesn’t have the same concept of Home Screen icons, but if you drag the URL for a Web page from the Location bar to your Mac’s Desktop, it will turn into a Web Internet Location file with a .webloc extension. It’s a normal file that you could put in the Dock, a Finder window’s toolbar, or anywhere else you want. Open it to load its page.

Bookmark Folders

Bookmarks and favorites are great for a site or two, but what if you want to open the same handful of sites every morning to get your daily dose of news and comics? Put all those sites in the same folder in the Favorites folder, either by adding them to the folder when you create them or by dragging them in afterward.

Once you have collected the desired bookmarks, you can open them all in new tabs by clicking the folder on the Favorites bar and choosing Open in New Tabs (or just Command-click it). If you don’t want it on your Favorites bar, the folder can live anywhere in your bookmarks—just Control-click it and choose Open in New Tabs.

This feature is available on the iPhone and iPad as well. Once the folder is in your Favorites, tap the Location bar and then touch and hold the folder. Choose Open in New Tabs from the menu that appears.

Tab Groups

Web browser makers were apparently unsatisfied with letting users open all the bookmarks in a folder in new tabs because they have come up with a similar feature called tab groups. Let’s say you’re researching new speakers to buy, and you want to compare options from different companies. Once you have open tabs for all the sites, you can open the sidebar in Safari on the Mac or iPad and use the Add Tab Group icon at the top to create and name a new tab group.

From then on, it appears in the sidebar, and when you select it, those tabs load automatically, replacing the ones that were there before (which are stored as another group). The feature is also available on the iPhone, where you must tap the tab icon in the toolbar first. Unlike a folder of bookmarks, when you close a tab in a tab group, it disappears, and if you want it back, you have to open it again manually.

Pinned Tabs

Perhaps you have several sites that are so important to you that you want them open at all times. For such situations, you can pin tabs to those sites. The utility of pinned tabs is that they stay in place even when you open a new window or quit and reopen Safari. Plus, if you click a link to a different website in a pinned tab, it opens in a new tab—pinned tabs always show the website you pinned. On the iPhone, where there’s no tab bar, pinned tabs live at the top of the tab screen. Each tab group can have its own pinned tabs.

To pin a tab in Safari on the Mac or iPad, drag an open tab all the way to the left in the tab bar until it shrinks into a tiny box showing only the site’s favicon. Or, on the Mac, Control-click the tab and choose Pin Tab (shown below). On the iPad, touch and hold the tab and select Pin Tab. To pin a tab on the iPhone, tap the tab icon first and then touch and hold a tab and select Pin Tab.

So there you have it! None of these features are particularly new, but they’re easily overlooked, and from what we’ve seen while watching people browse the Web, lots of people could benefit from them.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

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Thanks to the incredible processing power of Apple’s recent devices, this digitization of graphics to text takes place instantly—hence “live” text. Apple says it works on any Mac that can run Monterey, but on the iPhone and iPad, it requires a model with an A12 Bionic processor or later, which means anything in this list (check your device in Settings > General > About > Model Name):

• iPhone XR, XS, XS Max, and later, including the iPhone SE (2nd generation)
• iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd generation) and later
• iPad Pro 11-inch
• iPad Air (3rd generation) and later
• iPad (8th generation) and later
• iPad mini (5th generation) and later

Live Text in Photos

The main place you’ll use Live Text is in Photos. In iOS and iPadOS, when viewing a picture containing text, touch and hold a bit of text until it highlights in blue. (For text-intensive images, Photos displays a Detect Text button in the lower-right corner; tap it to highlight recognized text.) The familiar text popover then appears. Drag the blue selection handles to adjust the selection as desired or tap Select All. Then you’ll most likely want to copy the text, switch to another app, and paste, though you can also do a Web search by tapping Look Up or have the device read the text out loud by tapping Speak.

Two quick tips:

• Want to copy text from an app that doesn’t even let you select text? Take a screenshot of the app and use Live Text to copy it.
• If you have an animated Live Photo that contains text, touch and hold the text to select it; touch and hold away from the text to animate the photo.

In Monterey, move the pointer over the text so it turns to a text selection cursor, then select the text, after which you can copy it as you would any other text. You can also Control-click the selected text to access Look Up or Translate.

As a bonus in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, text from Photos that Live Text has recognized is indexed by the system-wide search. So when you pull down from the middle of the Home screen and search, a Text Found in Photos section shows images that contain the search text. Tap one to view it, and note that there’s a Detect Text button in the preview that identifies text you can select right there. Or tap the Photos button in the lower-right corner to open the image in Photos.

Live Text in the Camera App

Sometimes you may want to capture some text in the real world without having a photo to store and later delete—getting an appliance’s model or serial number is a perfect example. When Live Text detects text in the Camera app’s viewfinder, it puts a faint yellow outline around it and displays the Detect Text button. Tap the Detect Text button to freeze and zoom the selection—it even rotates sideways text to be readable—and then tap the text to select and copy it. Tap the Detect Text button again when you’re done.

There’s another way to use Live Text in conjunction with the iPhone or iPad camera that’s useful if you need to insert a large amount of text directly into a document. In an app that supports Live Text, like Notes, tap in the text entry area and then tap the Scan Text button. A viewfinder appears on the bottom half of the screen, with a yellow outline around detected text, and the recognized text above. If that’s what you want, tap the Insert button to put the text into your note or document.

Live Text in Safari and Other Apps

Because Apple integrated Live Text into its operating systems, it’s available nearly anywhere you might see an image that contains text. For instance, in Safari, you’re likely to run across such images, or you might have embedded photos in Notes that contain text. Selecting text using Live Text works exactly the same as in Photos—either touch and hold on an iPhone or iPad, or just select the text on the Mac. And on the Mac, Live Text even works when you select an image in the Finder and press the Space bar to view it in Quick Look.

Other Live Text Tricks

• Identify types of data: When Live Text recognizes text that contains an email address, phone number, postal address, or date, you can touch and hold it to bring up special options to send an email, call the number, map the address, or make an event or reminder.
• Translate Live Text: The Translate app in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 is now a system-wide service, so it can translate any text you can select, including text recognized by Live Text in a photo or in the Camera app. Just select it and tap Translate.
• Hear Live Text: If you rely on VoiceOver to help you navigate your iPhone or iPad, note that you can leverage Live Text to get VoiceOver to read text in your photos out loud. Go to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > VoiceOver Recognition and turn on Text Recognition. Then, while viewing a photo, tap the text in the photo to have VoiceOver read to you.

It may take a little while to remember that you can select and copy, look up, or translate nearly any text you see in a picture—or in your camera viewfinder—but once you’ve tried Live Text a few times, we’re betting that you’ll find it surprisingly useful.

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Here’s what you may have missed.

Apple Fitness+

The highest-profile change in Apple’s recent updates is support for Apple Fitness+. It provides studio-style streamed video workouts that you can participate in using an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. The linchpin of the system is the Apple Watch, which tracks your fitness metrics and progress and stores them in the Fitness app (previously called Activity).

Apple Fitness+, which can be shared by up to six family members through Family Sharing, costs $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year. All current owners of an Apple Watch Series 3 or later get a free month to try it out, and if you buy a new Apple Watch, Apple will give you 3 months for free.

If you have an Apple Watch and more exercise figured in your New Year’s resolutions, give Apple Fitness+ a try and see if you find it fun and worthwhile.

Intercom

Tired of yelling to get the attention of other members of your household? If you have two more HomePod speakers, you can use the new Intercom feature to send and receive messages through the HomePods. You can also send and receive messages through an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch, or in your car with CarPlay.

To enable Intercom, open the Home app, tap the house icon at the upper left ➊, and tap Home Settings. In the Settings screen, tap Intercom ➋ and set when you want to receive notifications, who should be allowed to send and receive them when away from home, and which HomePods to use.

Once you’ve enabled Intercom, you can most easily invoke it with Siri on any of your devices using trigger words like “intercom,” “tell,” “announce,” or “ask.” You can also send messages solely to a HomePod in a specific room or zone by specifying its name in the message. For example:

“Hey Siri, announce ‘It’s time to leave now!’”
“Hey Siri, ask upstairs ‘Did anyone feed the fish?’”

You can also access Intercom from within the Home app. Tap the waveform button in the upper-right corner of the screen (➌ above), record your message, and tap the Done button to send it.

When you hear an Intercom message, you can reply. If the message went to the entire Home, your reply will as well. However, if the message was sent to your specific room, your response will go only to the device that sent the message. And you can always direct a reply to a particular speaker. For example:

“Hey Siri, reply ‘I’m almost ready to go, honest!’”
“Hey Siri, reply downstairs ‘Yes, I fed Goldie.’”

Loud Headphone Alerts

If you’re worried about damaging your hearing with too-loud headphone volumes (and you should be), go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Headphone Safety. There you can enable a notification that will tell you if you exceed the recommended limit for noise exposure (volume and time) as set by the World Health Organization.

That’s nice from a retrospective point of view, but more useful are the controls below, which let your iPhone actively protect your hearing by reducing the volume of sounds over a certain decibel level.

Optimized AirPods Pro Charging

Apple says that it has now tweaked AirPods Pro charging to increase the lifespan of the battery. It does this by delaying charging past 80% to reduce the amount of time the batteries stay fully charged. Apple previously did this with the iPhone and Apple Watch. Given that there’s no way to replace the battery in the AirPods Pro, anything that extends their useful life is welcome. Sadly, this feature isn’t available for the standard AirPods. If you find that the feature regularly prevents your AirPods Pro from having a full charge, you can turn it off in Settings > Bluetooth (make sure the AirPods Pro case is open or they’re in your ears). Tap the i button next to your AirPods Pro and turn off Optimized Battery Charging.

Launch Shortcuts on the Home Screen Directly

In iOS 14, the Shortcuts app lets users assign custom icons to shortcuts, which has led some to become obsessed with customizing their Home screens with shortcuts that launch their favorite apps. Dedicated designers have created all sorts of Home screen looks, ranging from the minimalist to the wacky. The only problem was that these shortcuts first launched the Shortcuts app and then switched to the desired destination app. As of iOS 14.3, shortcuts now launch directly from the Home screen without passing through the Shortcuts app.

Use Ecosia as Safari’s Default Search Engine

Want to move away from Google as your default search engine? iOS has long provided other options, including Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo. Apple has now added Ecosia, which is privacy-friendly and donates 80% or more of its profits to non-profit organizations that focus on reforestation. It’s a small way you can help fight climate change. It’s worth keeping in mind that Yahoo is a rebadged version of Bing, DuckDuckGo relies heavily on Bing, and Ecosia delivers results from Bing, enhanced by its own algorithms. In other words, when it comes to the quality of the search results, your choices are really between Google and Bing.

New Privacy Labels in the App Store

In Apple’s latest salvo against privacy-abusing apps and services, the company now requires all developers to provide information in App Store listings about what data collected by the app is linked to you personally and what data will be used to track your online movements. Apple doesn’t verify the information, and there’s no way to know if the developer is being truthful. Nonetheless, it’s good to see Apple pushing developers to be more transparent about their privacy practices. In the screenshot below, compare the ten screens of App Privacy details for what Facebook hoovers up with what is collected by the privacy-focused messaging app Signal: just your phone number, which is necessary for others to contact you.

App Clip Codes

In non-pandemic times, the new App Clips feature of iOS 14 might have gotten more attention. App Clips are lightweight versions of an app that let people perform quick tasks—ordering a latte, renting a scooter—without downloading and configuring the full app. Apple encourages developers using App Clips to advertise their presence with App Clip Codes, which look a little like QR codes but are dedicated to launching App Clips. Now that iOS 14.3 has added support for App Clip Codes, if you notice one while you’re out and about, try scanning it with your camera to see what App Clip pops up.

iOS 14’s updates have added plenty of smaller features as well, such as over 100 new emojis, an Apple TV+ tab in the Apple TV app, additional data options in the Health app’s Cycle Tracking feature, air quality data and recommendations in more countries, and detection of people in Magnifier (which is helpful for users who are blind or who have low vision).

So if you have kept your iPhone or iPad up to date but haven’t noticed these new features, give them a try!

(Featured image based on an original Web page by Apple)

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All major Web browsers provide two features to help you protect your privacy from people who can access your Mac: private browsing and clearing your browsing history.

After you invoke private browsing, the browser doesn’t store the URLs of visited pages in your browsing history. This makes it so others can’t go back through to see where you’ve been. Private browsing also avoids recording your searches so they don’t pop up for future search suggestions, doesn’t store the names of downloaded files, and more—the specifics vary a little by browser. In short, if you ever anticipate visiting a website that you wouldn’t want someone else with access to your Mac to know you had visited or don’t want to be embarrassed by a search suggestion when someone is peering over your shoulder, use private browsing.

What if you forget, or realize only after you’re done that your browsing history might reveal something you’d prefer stayed private? In that case, you’ll want to clear your browsing history, a feature that all browsers provide.

You should keep two important facts in mind when using these features:

• Both of these features are focused on reducing privacy worries related to someone accessing your Mac. They do not, for the most part, keep your activities private from your ISP, the organizations whose websites you access, or advertisers (through ad trackers).
• Neither of these features is meant to protect state secrets, sensitive journalistic research, or important business plans. If you’re interested in that level of security, contact us for personalized advice about what apps and devices to use.

Invoke Private Browsing

The hardest part of invoking private browsing is merely remembering to do so. In Safari, Firefox, and Brave, simply choose File > New Private Window to get a new browser window with private browsing enabled. Slightly different are Google Chrome, where you choose File > New Incognito Window, and Microsoft Edge, where the command is File > New InPrivate Window.

In all cases, the browser alerts you that you’ve enabled private browsing, are in a private window, or have gone incognito. Safari is the most subtle (top left, below), whereas Firefox (bottom left, below), and Chrome (right, below) make it painfully obvious and provide links to additional information about precisely what is protected and what’s not.

Additional tabs you create in that private browsing window are also private, so you don’t have to keep making new windows as you browse, although there’s no problem with opening multiple private windows at once. The main annoyance of using private browsing is that websites won’t recognize you or know you’re logged in.

To leave private browsing, simply close that window.

Clear Browsing History

How you clear browsing history varies by browser. Although they all let you choose how far back to go, only some give you choices about what type of data to clear.

• Safari: In Safari, choose History > Clear History. A pop-up menu lets you clear your history from the last hour, today, today and yesterday, or all time. Happily, Safari also clears your history from other devices signed into your iCloud account.
  
• Firefox: In Firefox, choose History > Clear Recent History and select the information to remove. You can clear data from the last hour, two hours, four hours, within the last day, or everything.
  
• Google Chrome: With Chrome, choose Chrome > Clear Browsing Data. You can switch between two modes: Basic and Advanced, the latter of which gives you more control over exactly what you’re removing. Chrome provides the most flexible time periods from which to remove data: the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, the 4 weeks, or all time.
  

The history clearing interfaces in Brave and Microsoft Edge are similar to Chrome since those browsers are based on the same underpinnings. However, both add an On Exit mode that removes the specified types of data every time you quit. Firefox also offers the option to clear cookies and site data every time you quit, but remember that doing so will sign you out of all websites.

In the end, don’t get too caught up in a Spy vs. Spy scenario with your browsing history. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your birthday present research private or working to avoid an embarrassing situation with a search suggestion, but it’s better to have and build trusting relationships than to worry constantly about someone discovering what you’re doing.

Check out another security/privacy tip. 

(Featured image by Robinraj Premchand from Pixabay)

The post Stop Snoops with Private Browsing and by Clearing Your Web Browsing History first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

(Featured image by Startaê Team on Unsplash)

The post Prevent Unsightly Tab Buildup in Safari on Your iPhone and iPad first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

Do you sometimes find it difficult to read articles on your iPhone because of ads, banners, extraneous layout, social media icons, and too-small fonts? We certainly do, and there’s often a quick fix for the myriad ills of modern Web pages: Safari Reader. Whenever you see the Safari Reader

icon to the left of the site’s domain name in the address bar, tap it to switch to a cleaner view that dispenses with all the unnecessary trimmings and presents the content in a larger, more readable font. Tap the font

(Featured image by Atlas Green on Unsplash)

The post Read More Easily on the iPhone with Safari Reader first appeared on MacTech Solutions.