Tabs, Reading List land in mobile Safari
The mobile version of Safari gets a polish and some modern browsing tools in iOS 5, including tabbed browsing, a Reading List feature, and in-browser tweeting.
The version of the Safari browser that will ship in iOS 5 in July will come with some enhanced features, Apple announced today at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The most visible change is the introduction of tabbed browsing, long a staple of the desktop version of Safari and other browsers. However, other significant changes have been made as well.
The feature for saving stories to be read at a later time, popularized by the Read It Later and Instapaper browser add-ons, will now come as a standard feature in Safari mobile. Reading List provides a more modern, simpler way to bookmark Web sites to be read at a future date. It's most often used for articles, especially lengthy ones, although it can be used to save any site on the fly.
The desktop Safari's Reader feature for streamlining lengthy articles or slideshows is also coming to mobile Safari. Originally introduced at last year's WWDC, Reader streamlines lengthy articles, stripping out ads but not relevant images, and darkens the edges of the browser to make it easier to focus your attention on the story at hand.
Most notably for Twitter users, you can now send tweets from directly within Safari. It's no longer necessary to open the Twitter app separately. This is part of the deeper system integration of social media into iOS. While it doesn't have a major impact in-browser, it's likely to change social networking across many apps that do core tasks like iTunes or the camera app.