When you open a PDF web link under mobile Safari, the PDF document will be displayed for browsing from within Safari. It might be useful to save the PDF into iBooks for read-later such as when there is lesser Internet connection or to take advantage of the better PDF reader in iBooks.

When the PDF document is fully loaded, tap anywhere on the document to bring out the gray color toolbar bar. On the right end of the toolbar there will be buttons for “Open in iBooks” or “Open In…”.

Tap “Open in iBooks” to save the PDF into iBooks. Safari will save a copy of the PDF into iBooks and switch over to iBooks app. If the PDF size is big, it might take a moment for Safari to switch to iBooks. Tap on the “Open In…” button to choose a different app to manage the PDF document.

Apple probably just had its greatest software updates in its history. For the past 2 days, Apple software relating to iOS 5 and iCloud are updated, together with few new apps. Here are the list:

• iOS 5
• OS X Lion 10.7.2
• OS X Lion Recovery Update
• iCloud & iCloud.com website (new)
• Safari 5.1.1
• iTunes 10.5
• Apple TV 4.4
• Updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS
• Updates to Remote, iMovie, Find My iPhone for iOS
• iPhoto 9.2
• Aperture 3.2
• iCloud Control Panel for Windows (new)
• Cards app for iOS (new)
• iTunes Movie Trailers app for iOS  (new, US only)
• Find my Friends app for iOS (new)
• AirPort Setup utility app for iOS (new)
• XCode 4.2

Safari 5.1 is available for both Snow Leopard and Lion, but there are notable improvements in Safari for Lion that makes it a better browsing experience. These Lion only improvements are made possible due to the new features in the underlying OS X Lion, and are good enough reasons for some to upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard.

Using Safari in full-screen mode is just a pleasure. Each window and its tabs occupies one full screen, and you quickly switch between multiple full-screen by a quick three-fingers swipe. You can have one or more Safari windows in full-screen mode with the rest remain as original size within one desktop.

Multi-touch gestures gets an overwhelming emphasis in Lion with new gestures for switching spaces, access the mission control and launchpad etc. For Safari, new in Lion is the ability to double-tap to zoom and magnify part of a page. This is similar to what you can do on iPhone and iPad. You can also use the two-fingers swipe left-right to navigate forward and back the visited pages. And you switch between full-screen mode and other full-screen spaces by swiping three-fingers left or right.

When you mouse over a word, you can bring out the dictionary and thesaurus of the word by simple tapping on the word with three fingers. This is more convenient than the keyword shortcut Control-Command-d.

The Download window is a popover window for Safari on Lion. You access the download popover by clicking on the download button on the right of the search bar. This is how download window should be.

Besides all these changes from the Snow Leopard version, we notice Safari on Lion uses less memory. We have not conduct any actual test, but based on our normal browsing pattern, Safari for Snow Leopard consistently hits over 800MB to over 1GB of memory usage. In Lion, the memory is hovering in a healthier 500MB-700MB range. This is not a conclusive result, as memory usage depends also on how many and what type of plugins you are running within Safari.

We have to conclude that Safari is the best browser right now for Lion with its full-screen mode, multi-touch gestures support and features such as Reading List and Reader.

A guy by the name of Oliver Poitrey has created a free and open source Safari plug-in that merges the location bar and search bar into a single what he called an Omnibar. The Omnibar mimics the same bar as found in Chrome browser.

Just type on the bar web address or search term, Omnibar is able to detect if it is a URL or launch the search engine for the search term. You can define the search engine to use by holding Option key while clicking on the bar. Typing “?” to begin your input will launch a search. Typing “w” to begin your input will search for Wikipedia.

Safari Omnibar

Apple has released Safari 5.1 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, bringing the improvement of Safari on Lion over to Snow Leopard such as Reading List, new privacy pane preference and new process architecture. Several notable new features in Safari 5.1 are however Lion specific and are not available when running under Snow Leopard: Multi-touch Gestures, Resume, Full Screen Browsing, Sandboxing, Downloads Popover, better HTML Canvas graphics etc.

Safari homepage

When you’re online at Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr, the sites normally will allow you to “remember” your signin. This is very convenient as you do not have to reenter your username and password for the next visits. It is not so convenient if you have to manage multiple identities as you have to keep signing in and out with separate accounts.

It is not uncommon to have separate identities for online accounts, some people like to separate their personal account from their work accounts. For example you might be using your company’s email identity for promoting social media marketing for the company. And you like this to be separated from your personal social activities at Twitter and Facebook.

To avoid the hassle of having to sign on and sign out, one quick and dirty solution is to make use of different browser for each identity. For example you can delicate Safari for the accounts you use for the social media marketing works you are doing for Company X, and use Chrome for your personal activities at Facebook and Twitter. Using separate browser will also make it easier to identify the accounts you’re using, to reduce the chances of posting your personal tweets into your company’s Twitter account.

Apple has pushed out a minor 5.0.5 release for Safari on the Mac. The download notes for Safari 5.0.5 indicate only that the update includes the latest security update. Please note that this update requires a reboot of your Mac.

If you have an iPhone, do a Google search on the word “tilt” to get a bizarre search result that actually tilts. This trick works on iPhone and does not work on iPad.

Apple releases Safari 5.0.4, the latest update to its browser for Mac OS X and Windows. The last update to desktop Safari was in November last year.

This update contains improvements to stability, compatibility, accessibility and security, including the following:

- Improved stability for webpages with multiple instances of plug-in content
- Improved compatibility with webpages with image reflections and transition effects
- A fix for an issue that could cause some webpages to print with incorrect layouts
- A fix for an issue that could cause content to display incorrectly on webpages with plug-ins
- A fix for an issue that could cause a Screen Saver to appear while video is playing in Safari
- Improved compatibility with VoiceOver on webpages with text input areas and lists with selectable items
- Improved stability when using VoiceOver

Safari browser comes with Google search as its default search engine. If you’re annoyed by the increasing spam-filled search results using Google, you might want to consider alternative such as Bing.

On the Mac, it is easy to change the default search engine for Safari. Simply click the search icon beside the search area on the right end of the toolbar. A drop-down menu will appear for you to select the default search engine.

On iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, the default search engine is set using the Settings app.

From the Settings app, tap on the Safari icon. Tap the “Search Engine” option to select the new default search engine.