[General Topics] Menneisyys:
Quick scrolling to top / bottom of document?: on the iPhone (as opposed to some other, touchscreen-enabled platforms like Windows Mobile Professional / Classic), there’re no draggable scrollbars to quickly scroll up / down to the top / bottom of the page (or, for that matter, anywhere inside the page). If you know Opera Mini on compatible platforms, you may also remember that it also offers quick scrolling to the top / bottom on non-touchscreen platforms too with repeated pressings of #3.

With Safari (and some other 3rd party Web browsers), you can quickly and easily browse to the top of the page by simply single-tapping the top of the screen. The opposite of this (quick scrolling to the bottom), however, is only implemented in very few browsers – and, unfortunately, Safari isn’t one of them.

Again, my scriptlets to the rescue! As is explained in the (first) UPDATE section of THIS article, you can easily create a scriptlet, which, when activated, quickly scrolls down to the bottom of the page.

Cookies: Clear cookies?: some browsers allow for clearing cookies, should you be afraid of privacy issues.

Fine-tuning acceptance?: In addition, Safari allows for fine-tuning (in the system-level Settings menu) them.

Misc.: Interrupting page loading?: the first row of the Misc. (miscellaneous) group concentrates on whether you can interrupting (stop) loading a page. Say you only need the text of a page and, when it’s already rendered, you want to stop loading the in-line images. If the browser doesn’t support this, you’re shot.

Full screen?: the built-in Safari doesn’t support full screen mode (not even in OS 3.0). This is the problem that made most 3rd party browser developers embark on developing their own browsers.

In this row, I elaborate on whether the full screen mode (if supported) is really full screen mode (where you can exit from either shaking the phone or, as with fgBrowser, some special three- or two-finger gestures) or one where you’re still shown icons to exit the full screen mode. Of course, you may want to prefer browsers that offer true full srcreen mode. As you can see, again, iCab Mobile is the best in this respect – it doesn’t display any icons and entirely operates based on shaking.

Remembers last visited page(s) upon relaunching?: some Web browsers automatically reload the last page (or, when in multitabbed mode, even pages – as is the case with VanillaSurf 1.2) when you relaunch them.

Interaction with Safari (passing a link to / receiving a link from): in cases, you may want to pass the address of a given page to Safari so that you can continue browsing the Web in that browser. (The opposite is true in very few cases.) Note that, now with OS3’s supporting copy/paste operations, this isn’t that important a functionality any more.

User-Agent faking?: in some cases, you may want to "fake" your User-Agent HTTP request header telling the Web server you’re browsing pages from you’re from another Web browser, not Safari on the iPhone. Very few Web browsers support this.

Nevertheless, if you really need this functionality with, say, Safari, you can use third-party some sites effectively changing your User-Agent – which is also a widely used practice of Opera Mini users.

File download?: in Safari (and most 3rd party browsers), when you tap a link pointing to for example a PDF, DOC, MP3, MP4 or other file otherwise supported by iPhone (that is, the phone can play it back or render its contents), it will invoke the application assigned to the particular file type straight away – without storing the files in the file system so that you can, later, play it back without having to download it again.

Of the tested browsers, only one (BigBrowser+ 1.1) is able to not only "Open" (see the above-explained, default functionality), but also "Save" these files into the file system. (This browser, otherwise, is pretty basic; I only recommend it for file saving.)

View source?: only one browser (Journey Web Browser 1.0 ) makes it possible to view the source of a Web page.

Copy-paste?: back in the pre-OS3 pages, probably the most important feature missing from the operating system was copy/paste. This was of special interest in the Web browser, as it’s mostly there that you may encounter text you’d like to quickly paste into your notes or mail.

Before OS3’s radical changes, you only had two ways of fixing this: first, mailing the address of the current Web page (this is supported by almost all browsers, including Safari), or, going for the very expensive ($6) and, comparatively, weak Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) – the only Web browser to have reduced (it’s only able to copy full blocks of texts and to mails and the address bar only) copy/paste support. If you were lucky enough, with some kinds of content, you could use third-party scriptlets: for example, if you needed copy/paste functionality to convert non-HTML links to HTML ones (so that they become activatable and can be followed) with, for example, the Linkify scriptlet HERE.

Can image loading be disabled?: particularly when you’re on a slower connection or you need to reduce your data usage (images can eat up pretty much data), you may go straight for a client that supports disabling images. The majority of third-party browsers do so; unfortunately, Safari doesn’t.

Offline browsing?: there’s one browser that allows for automatically reading back the pages that were open last time you have exit: VanillaSurf.

Note that the two browsers that allow for Web page saving (BigBrowser+ 1.1 and Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) 2.5) also allow for this – to some degree: they don’t save images.

Save web pages?: See the above explanations about saving a Web page so that it becomes offline.

Auto forms fill-in?: another welcome addition in the OS3 Safari is the form autofill. In order to have an idea of other mobile browsers’ supporting the same, I need to point out that none of the Windows Mobile Web browsers have the same (except for, probably, SkyFire, which I haven’t tested in this regard so far), and the same stands for the BlackBerry and Symbian S60.

https support? (ebay test): some Web browser developers state there’s no HTTPS (Secure HTTP) support in some browsers. This is why I’ve run a HTTPS test too with eBay (and, at the same time, I was able to test whether cookies are retained over browser restarts). All the browsers that I’ve tested in this regard turned out to be supporting HTTPS.

Input keyboard: the one with ".com"?: one browser (Magic Browser (iBlueAngel) 2.5) present the user an on-screen keyboard not specially tailored for entering Web addresses; for example, it lacks the .com button.

Ad filtering?: some browsers support ad filtering. The most important of them is iCab Mobile 1.5, which allow for even manual editing of filters – excellent!