Safari offers a great web browsing experience on both the iPhone or iPad, but truthfully speaking, the smartphone and tablet versions of this stock web browser aren’t created equally.
A new free jailbreak tweak called SafariPad by iOS developer LonestarX takes note of this caveat and brings one of the best iPad-centric Safari features to smaller handsets like the iPhone and iPod touch: browsing tabs.
If the tweak idea sounds familiar, that’s because it already existed; LonestarX directly ported the existing tweak, initially made by Bensge, to jailbroken iOS 11 devices.
The screenshot examples above depict the differences between Safari on a stock iPhone and Safari after installing SafariPad. Take note of the polarizing dissimilarities between the stock rotating web page carousel and the tabbed browsing experience.
Apple’s reason for implementing the vertical rotating web page carousel on the iPhone out of the box is simple: to prevent a tab bar from taking up valuable screen real estate on a cramped display. But as smartphone displays become taller, like on the iPhone X, we inch one step closer to having enough space for an iPad-like tabbed browsing experience.
From a usability standpoint, the tabbed browsing experience is more user-friendly than the rotating web page carousel because it only requires a single tap to move between web pages. For comparison, the rotating web page carousel requires a two-step process, which is both cumbersome and time-consuming.
SafariPad doesn’t have any options to configure, so what you see is what you get. If you want to try SafariPad out for yourself, then you can download it for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak works on all jailbroken iOS 11 iPhones and iPod touches.
Do you like the idea of a tabbed browsing experience on your iPhone? Share in the comments!
