In followup on Safari in iOS 15 from two months ago, here are some more tips for interacting with webpages and tabs in Safari on iPhone and iPad.

Zoom Out to Show Tabs

Looking at any webpage in Safari on iPhone or iPad, you can pinch to zoom out of the page and show it among all your tabs, which are now shown as tiles.

Group Tabs

If your web browsing experience benefits by focusing on a specific set of webpages that you want to keep separate from others, you can aggregate them in a tab group.

On iPhone, view your tabs and then tap the menu at the bottom center. On iPad, the menu is in the top right, left of the plus. You can create a New Empty Tab Group or make a tab group from the current set of tabs.

Alternatively, if your desired set of webpages is already collected in a folder of bookmarks, you can long press on the folder and open the contained pages in a tab group. (Oddly, this functionality does not yet work for Reading List.)

Tab groups sync across devices so you’ll see them on iOS 15, iPadOS 15, as well as Safari 15 on macOS.

Keep Tabs Clean

If you couldn’t care less about returning to tabs you recently viewed, you might simply want to let them close automatically after a while. Visit Settings > Safari. In the Tabs section, Close Tabs > After One Day/Week/Month. I have mine set to Week.

[Update: In 2022, I became way more attentive and intentional about my tabs, including closing them when I’m done. I dropped the scheduled cleanup. Instead, I consistently have fewer than 100 tabs open and often closer to 50.]

One more thing… I just discovered that Safari on iPhone and iPad now supports Swipe to Refresh. If you’re at the top of a webpage, you can swipe down on the page to reload it.

For some, this might be easier than pressing the refresh arrow on the right side of the search bar, especially on iPad where the bar can only be at the top of the screen.

What kind of browser tab user are you?