4.15. Pop-up Blockers, Cookies, and Security

Internet criminals will try to rip you off no matter what browser you use. Phishing—when a devious website masquerades as a legitimate site to dupe people into entering personal information—has long been a problem. ‘Pad-Safari has a Fraud Warning setting, which alerts you when you might be on a fishy, phishy site. You can turn it on in Settings→Safari.

And the world’s smarmiest advertisers have been inundating us with pop-up and pop-under ads for years—nasty little windows that appear in front of a browser window or, worse, behind it, waiting to bug you when you close the front window. They’re often deceptive, masquerading as alert or dialog boxes, and they’ll do absolutely anything to get you to click them.

Fortunately for you, Safari comes set to block those pop-ups so you don’t see them. It’s a war out there—but at least you have some ammunition.

The thing is, though, pop-ups are sometimes legitimate—notices of new banking features, seating charts on ticket-sales sites, and so on. Safari can’t tell these pop-ups from ads—and so it stifles those pages, too.

What to do? If a site you trust says “Please turn off pop-up blockers and reload this page,” you know you’re probably missing out on a useful pop-up message. In those situations, you can turn off Safari’s universal pop-up blocker. From the Home screen, tap Settings→Safari. Where it says "Block Pop-ups,” tap the On/Off switch.

4.15.1. Cookies

Cookies are something like web page preference files. Certain websites—particularly commercial ones like Amazon.com—deposit them on your hard drive like little bookmarks, so the site remembers you the next time you visit. Ever notice how Amazon.com greets you with “Welcome, Leroy” (or whatever your name is)? It’s reading its own cookie, left behind on your hard drive (or in this case, on your iPad).

Most cookies are perfectly innocuous—and, in fact, are extremely helpful, because they help websites remember your tastes. Cookies also spare you the effort of having to type in your name, address, and so on, every time you visit these sites.

But fear is widespread, and the media fans the flames with tales of sinister cookies that track your movement on the Web. If you’re worried about invasions of privacy, Safari is ready to protect you.

To check all this cookie security out, from the Home screen, tap Settings→Safari. The options here are like a paranoia gauge. If you click Never, you create an acrylic shield around your iPad. No cookies can come in, and no cookie information can go out. You’ll probably find the Web a very inconvenient place; you’ll have to re-enter your information upon every visit to the site, and some websites may not work properly at all. The Always option means, “Oh, what the heck—just gimme all of them."”

A good compromise is From Visited, which accepts cookies from sites you want to visit, but blocks cookies deposited on your iPad by sites you’re not actually visiting—cookies you get, say, from an especially evil banner ad that a hacker has planted on a page. There are quite a few of those these days.

The Safari settings screen also offers a Clear Cookies button (it deletes all the cookies you’ve accumulated so far), as well as Clear History and Clear Cache buttons.

A cache is a little patch of the iPad’s storage area where your iPad retains bits and pieces of web pages you visit—the page’s graphics, for example. The idea is that the next time you visit the same page, the iPad won’t have to download those bits again. It’s already got them on board, so the page appears much faster.

If you worry that your cache eats up space, poses a security risk, or is confounding a page (by preventing the most recent version of the page from appearing), tap this button to erase it and start over.