offline reading in safari

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How to set offline access for Safari’s Reading List feature

Macworld reader Gavin, was on a cruise with his wife when she asked him, an IT professional, for help getting Safari’s Reading List to work offline, as they had no internet connectivity. She’d saved articles to it to read later. (I know: someone saved articles to read later and then actually tried to read those articles later. It happens! Even to me sometimes.)

iOS prompts you when you first save an article to the Reading List.

She wasn’t missing anything. Despite seemingly having all the right settings enabled to sync her Reading List across all the devices connected to her iCloud account, her marked items didn’t show up and weren’t available. What gives?

Turns out, Safari for both macOS and iOS have a setting you may never have noticed, since we so often have internet access (and perhaps so rarely consult Reading List).

In Safari for macOS, choose Safari > Preferences and then click Advanced . You can then check next to the Reading List label Save Articles for Offline Reading . If that option isn’t checked, you can also view the Reading List in the sidebar, right-click an item, and choose Save Offline .

With iOS Safari, you navigate to Settings > Safari and swipe down to the bottom, and then tap the switch to on for Automatically Save Offline . If you have that option disabled, which it is by default, you’re prompted the first time you choose Add to Reading List from the Sharing sheet whether or not to save items from then for offline reading automatically.

Safari in macOS lets you mark a preference or select articles one at a time for offline reading.

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How To Save A Web Page To Read Offline On Safari

Apple users that are inclined to stick to the brand's slate of default apps often prefer to use Safari for their web browsing needs too. Since its inception , the built-in browser has grown its list of features to include faster loading times, better privacy protection, and 4K video streaming, among other things. Those who own multiple Apple devices can seamlessly use Safari across all their gadgets, as it syncs everything accessed on the web browser — bookmarks, tabs, and passwords. If you are a Safari fan and want to see web content offline, you can do so by utilizing the "Reading List" feature.

When saving a site on Safari, you have two options to choose from: saving the page as a bookmark or adding it to your Reading List. Both methods offer similar access, but the latter is a more convenient method to save timely content, like articles, but you don't want to keep forever. You can easily keep track of the links you've already read, which you can remove from the list page when desired.

What makes Safari's Reading List function worth exploring is that it lets you read saved content even if you don't have internet connectivity , and the process is quite easy. So whether you're off the grid, intentionally minimizing your online app consumption, or are in a place or situation that has limited data service, you can still go through your must-read list of website articles on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac computer.

How to read offline Safari web pages on an iPhone

Adding web pages to Safari's Reading List is useful whether or not you're connected to the internet. The steps are similar on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

• Launch Safari and open a web page you'd like to read.
• Tap the Share button (square with an upward arrow icon)
• Select "Add to Reading List" from the list of options.

If this is the first time you're accessing the feature, you may see a pop-up message that will ask if you want to automatically save articles added to the Reading List for offline reading. Choose "Save Automatically" so that anything you save in the list going forward will be downloaded onto your Apple device. If you don't see the pop-up, you can enable offline reading by going to your iOS gadget's "Settings," scrolling down and tapping "Safari," then enabling "Automatically Save Offline" under the "Reading List" section.

If you are reading an article that has embedded links you'd like to go through later, you can also add them to the Reading List without opening them  or interrupting your current read. Just long-press the link and select "Add to Reading List" from the menu that pops up onscreen.

To view any web page saved into the Safari Reading List, simply launch the app, tap the bookmark button (open book icon) and navigate to the Reading list tab (eyeglasses icon). To find the article link you'd like to view, you can click on "Show All" to view a complete list of added links, or "Show Unread" to isolate pages that you have not viewed and start reading. Once you're done, pull up the Reading List again via the bookmark icon, go to the right tab, and swipe left to delete it from the list or swipe right to mark the page as unread.

How to use Safari's Reading List to save web pages for later on a Mac

Managing your Safari Reading List on a Mac or Macbook offers a bit more functionality compared to accessing it on an iOS device. In addition to being able to add and remove web pages from the list, you can also hide links you've already read and even hide the Reading List entirely from view and see it again by clicking the sidebar icon in the left toolbar of Safari. Here's how you can add and save a Safari webpage on the Mac or Macbook:

• Hover over the URL box and click the (+) icon on the left side of the link field to automatically add it to the reading list.
• If you chance upon an embedded link while reading an article you want to get to later, simply shift-click on the web page link to quickly add it to the reading list.

To ensure that web pages added to Safari's Reading List on a Mac can be read without an internet connection, pull up the Safari sidebar, navigate to the Reading List tab, control-click the summary of the chosen web page, then select "Save Offline." If you'd like to save all the web pages added to the list going forward, click "Safari" from the top menu to go to "Settings," then go to the "Advanced" tab and check the box next to "Save articles for offline reading automatically."

Once you have links saved into Safari's Reading List, you can easily search for specific articles by using the search field at the top of the list of web page summaries in the Safari sidebar. When you reach the end of a web page, it will automatically take you to the next link listed in the Reading List, so there's no need to click on the next one from the sidebar.

Ensuring Safari Reading List links are available offline

Before you lose Wi-Fi or mobile data access or go someplace without internet connectivity, you can test Safari's underrated offline feature  to see if the web pages in the Reading List are actually sufficiently downloaded for reading. Ensure that all settings related to automatically saving web page content for offline reading are enabled within Safari's settings. Then you can turn off your cellular data and Wi-Fi and try viewing a saved web page.

In some cases, when you launch a saved web page, you might see an error that says "Cannot Open Page" because it is not available for offline reading. This could be because there wasn't enough time for Safari to save the web page completely. Wait a few minutes after adding the link to the Reading List so that all the page elements can download.

If you wait for a few minutes and it doesn't fix the error, it's possible that the page you're trying to save doesn't allow offline reading (via Reddit ). To diagnose this, try saving an Apple web page instead and viewing it after turning off internet connectivity. If you are able to access it offline with no hiccups, then that means Safari is able to save links to the Reading List for offline reading, but not the specific one you were trying to read earlier.

Tips & Tricks

Troubleshooting, how to save reading lists offline on iphone, ipad & mac.

If you regularly make use of Safari’s Reading List feature to save web content for reading later in your free time, you may be interested in checking out the offline reading feature that’s available for reading list items. This makes sure your reading list items are accessible at all times, even if the iPhone, iPad, or Mac is not online.

For those who haven’t tried this feature out, Reading List allows you to save webpages and organize them so that you can check them out later. It’s similar to a bookmark, except that its main focus is written content. However, these saved webpages will still require an internet connection to load up by default and you cannot expect to stay connected to Wi-Fi or LTE at all times. This is exactly where the offline reading list items come in handy. For example, you can load up an iPad, Mac, or iPhone with a bunch of news articles to read before going on a trip.

Whether you have an unreliable internet connection or you want to read content while you’re traveling, you may want to save some of your reading list items offline. Let’s take a look at how this works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

How to Save Reading Lists Offline on iPhone & iPad

We’ll be checking out the necessary steps for not just the iPhone and iPad, but the Mac as well. If you haven’t added any reading list items yet, feel free to check out how to use Reading List on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac before you go ahead with these steps.

That’s it. All the webpages you save will now be accessible offline and you don’t have to do it individually.

How to Save Offline Reading Lists on Mac

Now that you know how to use the offline feature on iOS/iPadOS devices, let’s check out the procedure for macOS systems. If you’re wondering, it’s fairly similar and easy.

There you go. Even if your Mac isn’t connected to Wi-Fi, your saved webpages will be available to read.

If you use multiple devices like iPhones, iPads, and Macs, you just need to add reading list items on one device. This is because iCloud will automatically sync your reading list items across all your other Apple devices along with Safari bookmarks and history, provided you’re signed into the respective devices with your account.

As you can see, offline reading list items aren’t enabled by default. You either have to manually save each webpage offline or use the global setting that’s available in the Preferences menu.

If you want to remove any of the reading list items that you’ve read, you can swipe left on the saved webpage to access the Delete option if you’re on iOS/iPadOS. On the Mac, you can access the Delete option by right-clicking on Control-clicking on the reading list item.

We hope you were able to learn how to use Safari’s Reading List feature even when you’re not connected to the internet. How often do you read web content from the Reading List? How many OSXDaily articles have you added to your reading list? Share your experiences and thoughts with us.

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Related articles:

• How to Use Reading List on iPhone, iPad, & Mac
• How to Download Offline Maps in Google Maps for iPhone
• How to Clear Safari Reading List on iPhone, iPad, & Mac
• How to Download Podcasts to Mac for Offline Listening

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How to Find & Search Safari Reading List on iPhone

Your Safari Reading List contains web articles you've saved to read at a later time. In this article, we'll cover how to find the Reading List on iPhone in Safari, how to search for a saved article, and how to save articles for offline reading. Let's get started!

Why You’ll Love This Tip

• Easily find saved articles by searching your Safari Reading List. 
• Sort saved articles to show only items you haven't read. 
• Download Reading List articles for offline reading.

How to View Safari Reading List & Manage Reading List Content

If you don't already know how to save articles to your Safari Reading List , it's best to learn that first and then come back to learn how to find the Reading List in Safari and manage its content. Since this process is a bit different in the new iOS 15 software, if you have an earlier version you will need to  update to iOS 15  before using this tip. For other helpful iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 how-to content, try signing up for our free Tip of the Day newsletter. 

Now, let's learn how to find the Reading List on iPhone and iPad, as well as how to manage your list of saved articles in Safari.

That's it!\ To better enhance your online reading experience, you can also learn how to use Safari Reader Mode  to read articles without ads.

Author Details

Leanne Hays

Leanne Hays has over a dozen years of experience writing for online publications. As a Feature Writer for iPhone Life, she has authored hundreds of how-to, Apple news, and gear review articles, as well as a comprehensive Photos App guide. Leanne holds degrees in education and science and loves troubleshooting and repair. This combination makes her a perfect fit as manager of our Ask an Expert service, which helps iPhone Life Insiders with Apple hardware and software issues. In off-work hours, Leanne is a mother of two, homesteader, audiobook fanatic, musician, and learning enthusiast.

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Enable The Safari Offline Reading Feature Enable Offline Reading On IPhone And IPad Enable Offline Reading On Mac Add Pages To Your Safari Reading List Add Pages On IPhone And IPad Add Pages On Mac Access Your Safari Reading List On IPhone And IPad Access Your Safari Reading List On Mac Wrapping It Up

How To Save Web Pages For Offline Reading In Safari On IPhone

Enable the safari offline reading feature.

The Reading List feature in Safari is handy for saving web pages that you want to read later. You can save them in Safari on both iOS and Mac so that you can access them anywhere. What makes the Reading List feature even better is that you can read your items even when you have no internet connection.

In order to take advantage of this, you’ll need to enable the offline feature. This tutorial shows you how to do this and then add and access Safari Reading list items to read offline on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Enable offline reading on iPhone and iPad

1) Open your Settings app and select Safari.

2) Scroll down to Reading List and turn on the toggle for Automatically Save Offline.

Enable offline reading on Mac

1) Open Safari and click Safari > Preferences from the menu bar.

2) Choose the Advanced tab.

3) Next to Reading List, check the box for Save articles for offline reading automatically.

Add pages to your Safari Reading List

Add pages on iphone and ipad.

1) While in Safari on a page you want to save, tap the Share button from the bottom.

2) Choose the Add to Reading List in the pop-up window.

Add pages on Mac

While in Safari on a page you want to save, click the Bookmarks > Add to Reading List from the menu bar. You’ll notice that you have an option to save all of your open tabs if you like with the Add These X Tabs to Reading List feature.

Access your Safari Reading List on iPhone and iPad

1) Open Safari and tap the Bookmarks button on the bottom.

2) Tap the Reading List option from the top which looks like a pair of glasses.

Access your Safari Reading List on Mac

Open Safari and click the Show Sidebar button in your toolbar and the Reading List option or click View > Show Reading List Sidebar from the menu bar.

Accessing your Reading List on iOS and Mac is done in the same way whether you are connected to the internet or not. The difference is, you don’t have to worry about having a connection to reading the pages you save.

Wrapping it up

Is the Safari Reading List feature something that you find useful? If so, do you plan to enable it for offline reading? If you do and change your mind later, it’s easy to turn it off as well as delete the Reading List items you have saved.

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How to use offline mode in Safari

So, I'm kind of falling in love with Safari 4 (sorry, Firefox). However, I'm the type who likes my browser cache. Doing a little bit of Googling, it seems Safari does have an offline mode like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera (where you can view cached web pages offline), but I haven't found any way to activate it and just navigating to web pages with no net connection seems not to do it either.

So, does Safari even really have an offline mode, and if so, how does one use it?

• browser-cache

4 Answers 4

does Safari even really have an offline mode?

• Found by experience? –  Nathaniel Dec 21, 2009 at 1:22

"does Safari even really have an offline mode?"

Yes and no.

It doesn't have an offline mode like Firefox .. which works directly from the cache - but what it does have is the ability to save webpages as full offline html images WITHOUT 3rd party software. These are called webarchives and are known by the extension ".webarchive" These files work completely offline - no internet connection required. As I mentioned before they are native to Safari, thus no need for 3rd party programs like (Scrapbook for Firefox) and webarchives are better than Firefox's or IE's "Save as HTML complete" because the Webarchive is a SINGLE file with all the goodies all packed inside of it. Downside is that it requires safari if you want to read it. But if you use Max OS X there is a quicklook plugin that can also read webarchives without opening Safari. So your best bet is that, if you need to save web data for offline viewing, select File > Save As .. Choose "Web Archive" and save it in a place you'll remember. You can probably even open them and bookmark them in a webarchives folder if you want to keep them for a long time, for quick and easy access.

• And Safari webarchive != MHTML like Internet Explorer or Opera use. –  Nathaniel Apr 21, 2010 at 4:32

I'd like to add that technically Safari DOES have an offline mode, you just can't enable it. When using HTML5 and a site that's defined a cache manifest, those files will be available when Safari is offline. However the only way to put it on "offline mode" is to disconnect/disable any network connection from the computer. There's no "work offline" option like in Firefox.

• What about the "drag to homescreen" thing on iPad or iPhone? Doesn't that force the offline caching? I'm researching this, it's hard to find information. –  user30033 Dec 14, 2010 at 0:27

One simple way to your solution is just stop the server you are using, safari will switch to offline mode automatically.

• 1 What do you mean by "stop the server"? –  Nathaniel Jan 27, 2012 at 2:38
• @Nathaniel Raheel probably thought "stop who serve the data" –  Bruno Jun 14, 2019 at 16:13

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How to manage your Reading List in Safari

The Reading List feature in Safari is a great way to hang onto articles that you want to read later. And if you use it, then you likely have plenty on your list. But after a while, those articles on your Reading List can build up, making it harder to find what you want.

Whether you need a better way to manage your current list or are totally new to how to use the feature, we’ve got you covered. Take control of your Safari Reading List with these tips for reading, managing, and deleting articles.

Manage your Reading List on iPhone and iPad

Viewing, reading, and removing items from your Safari Reading List on iPhone and iPad is simple.

Access your Reading List

Open Safari, tap the Bookmarks button , and select the Reading List tab in the center. You’ll see a list of your saved articles.

Read items from your list

With your Reading List open, just tap any article to open it in the current tab. To open it in a new tab, use Force Touch and pick Open in New Tab from the shortcut menu.

Mark items as read

The Safari Reading List will keep track of those articles you read. So you can easily tap Show Unread at the bottom of the Reading List screen to see those. If you read an article but want to mark it as unread, just use the Force Touch shortcut menu.

Remove an article or clear your list

You can remove articles from your Reading List one at a time or several at once. For one, use the Force Touch shortcut menu or slide from right to left in the list and pick Delete .

To remove several, tap Edit on the Reading List screen, mark the ones you want to remove, then tap Delete at the bottom.

Manage your Reading List on Mac

You can manage your Safari Reading List on your Mac just as easily as your iPhone or iPad.

Open Safari and then click the Show Sidebar button in the toolbar or click View > Show Reading List Sidebar from the menu bar.

With your Reading List open and viewable, just click any article to open it in the current tab. To open it in a new tab or window, just right-click and pick an option from the shortcut menu.

Make articles available offline

A terrific feature of the Safari Reading List is that you can read articles when you don’t have an internet connection. To save a particular article for offline reading, right-click and pick Save Offline .

To remove the offline reading option for an item, right-click and select Don’t Save .

You can remove articles from your Reading List individually or clear your entire list at once. Right-click an article from your Reading List and pick either Remove Item or Clear All Items .

If you choose to Clear All Items , you’ll see a pop-up message asking you to confirm this action.

Wrapping it up

The Reading List in Safari gives you a terrific way to save articles that you want to read later and offline if needed. But again, this list, like any other, can get out of control and become more cumbersome than it needs to be.

Are you going to take some time to manage your Reading List in Safari? Let us know if you have your own tips to share below or hit us up on Twitter !

How-To Geek

How to save an offline copy of a web page on an iphone or android smartphone.

Smartphones still don't have Internet connections everywhere -- and, even if they did, there are times you'll want to save a copy of a web page.

Quick Links

Save as pdf on iphone, save as pdf on android, use safari's reading list on iphone, email the article to yourself on iphone, use pocket or another offline reading app - iphone and android.

Smartphones still don't have Internet connections everywhere -- and, even if they did, there are times you'll want to save a copy of a web page. Modern iPhones and Android phones allow you to save copies of web pages so you can refer to them later.

If you want a copy of a full web page, save it as a PDF. This is ideal for receipts, tickets, maps, and anything with just more than text. If you just want the text of an article to read later, there are other easy solutions.

Apple just recently added a new way to do this on iOS 9. While viewing a web page, tap the "Share" button -- it looks like a square with an up arrow coming out of it -- and tap the "Save PDF to iBooks" icon.

You can then open the iBooks application and view a PDF copy of the web page at any time, even when you're offline. It'll appear under "My Books", and there's a special "PDFs" category that contains your saved PDFs.

Related: How to Print From an Android Phone

On Android, you can use the built-in printing support and print the page to a PDF just as you should on a Windows PC or Mac.

Let's say you're viewing the web page in the Chrome app. Tap the menu button at the top-right corner of the Chrome app and tap "Print".

You'll see a print preview interface. Tap the "Save to" menu at the top of the screen and select "Save as PDF" to save a copy of the web page as a PDF file to your phone's local storage. You could also select "Save to Google Drive" to save a copy of the web page as a PDF and store it in Google Drive. You could then open the Google Drive app, long-press that PDF file, and tap the pin icon to keep it available offline.

Related: 8 Tips and Tricks for Browsing with Safari on iPad and iPhone

Safari's built-in "Reading List" feature allows you to save a copy of a web page's text for later. Note that this only works with the text -- it's useful for saving a text-based article to read later, but it won't save anything else.

This is a bit like making a bookmark in Safari, but -- unlike a bookmark -- you also get a local copy of the text on that web page. Just tap the "Share" button in Safari and tap "Add to Reading List".

You can then tap the "Bookmarks" button in Safari, tap "Reading List", and tap the title of the web page to access it offline. Safari may eventually dump the local cache of the web page, so this isn't a good idea for long-term archival. It's just a convenient way to save an article that you might want to read when you're somewhere you don't have an Internet connection. Swipe to the left on the page in your reading list and tap "Delete" to remove it.

Related: How to Use and Tweak Reader Mode in Safari

On an iPhone, you can tap the "Reader View" button in Safari  and get a slimmed down view of the current web page -- just the text and other important elements. After you do, you can tap the "Share" button and tap "Mail". Safari will put the entire text of that article into an email, and you could email it to yourself. You could then open the Mail app and access the locally cached copy of that email later.

Safari will share the entire text of the web page with any application you choose, so you could share it with another application, too.

Related: The Best Ways to Save Webpages to Read Later

If you want to save just the text of a web page, you're better off doing it with Pocket or another read-it-later application , like Instapaper. Save the article to Pocket (or a similar app) and the application will download a copy of the article's text and keep it offline. It's a more powerful and robust solution than using the reading list feature in Safari or emailing the article to yourself.

Many of these same tricks work on your computer, of course.  Windows 10 includes integrated PDF printing , and so do Mac OS X, Chrome OS, and other modern operating systems. You can also use Pocket on your computer and have it automatically download the text of articles for offline-enabled reading on your phone.

Image Credit:  Japanexperterna.se on Flickr

What's the Difference Between Safari's Reading List and Bookmarks?

Wondering whether to save a link as a Bookmark or to the Reading List in Safari? We'll get into the differences between these features.

Safari has tons of features that make browsing the web easier, including options to keep important links within easy reach using Bookmarks and the Reading List. But what’s the difference between these two?

In this post we’ll look at these two features to explore the subtle differences between them, so you’ll know what to save to as a Bookmark and what to save to your Reading List.

Bookmarks vs. Reading List: Similarities

Bookmarks and the Reading List have very similar features. They both allow you to save webpages for easy and instant access down the line. Both are built-in Safari features that can be accessed on your Safari sidebar or Start Page. They also both sync over iCloud, allowing you to Bookmarks and the Reading List from your other Apple devices.

Bookmarks vs. Reading List: Differences

As the name implies, the Reading List is intended as a list of articles that you want to save for later reading. It serves as a dedicated list of webpages that you can go back to when you have the time to read them, at which point you can work your way through the list.

When you add a new link to your Reading List, it falls under the Unread category. Links remain on your Reading List even after you’ve read them. To remove a webpage from your list, simply Control-click or two-finger tap the list item and select Remove Item .

In contrast, Bookmarks act like a library of websites that you frequently visit. Because of their nature, Bookmarks are often kept indefinitely and link to a site home page, rather than a specific post.

Related: How to Manage Bookmarks and Favorites in Safari on Mac: A Complete Guide

Unlike Bookmarks, your Reading List links are also available for offline reading. Head to your Reading List, Control-click the page you want to save for offline reading, then click Save Offline to download it.

You can also make Safari automatically save articles for offline reading, instead of saving them manually. To do so:

• Go to Safari > Preferences .
• Click Advanced , then tick Save articles for offline reading automatically .

While Reading Lists are useful for saving articles for offline reading, you can do more with Bookmarks because Safari lets you group websites together in folders and even bookmark all your tabs at once .

Choosing Where to Save a Link Boils Down to Your Needs

Bookmarks and the Reading List offer such similar features that you can actually interchange them if you want to. However, since the subtle differences give them different strengths, it’s best to use the Reading List for individual artists you plan to read once and to use Bookmarks for sites you plan to revisit again and again.

How To Use Safari Without WIFI

• Software & Applications
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Introduction

Safari is a versatile and feature-rich web browser that has become a staple for many users across the globe. While it is commonly used to access online content, it also offers a range of functionalities that allow users to navigate the digital landscape even when offline. Whether you find yourself in an area with limited or no internet connectivity, or simply wish to conserve data usage, Safari provides several tools and features that enable you to continue browsing and accessing saved content without relying on a Wi-Fi connection.

In this article, we will explore the various methods and features that Safari offers for offline use. From saving webpages for offline viewing to managing your offline reading list, Safari empowers users to stay connected to their favorite content even when offline. Additionally, we will delve into the option of using Safari with cellular data only, providing insights into how you can optimize your browsing experience while on the go.

By understanding and utilizing these offline capabilities, you can harness the full potential of Safari, ensuring that you can access and enjoy your preferred online content regardless of your current connectivity status. Let's embark on this journey to uncover the valuable tools and techniques that Safari offers for seamless offline browsing.

Using Safari in Offline Mode

Safari, the default web browser for Apple devices, offers a robust offline mode that enables users to access previously visited webpages and content without an active internet connection. This feature is particularly useful when you find yourself in areas with limited or no Wi-Fi access, or when you simply want to revisit saved content without using additional data.

When offline, Safari allows users to access webpages that have been previously loaded, making it possible to view content, read articles, and access information that was available during the last online session. This functionality is especially beneficial for individuals who frequently browse specific websites or refer to particular articles, as it eliminates the need to re-download content each time an internet connection is unavailable.

Moreover, Safari's offline mode seamlessly retains the layout and formatting of webpages, ensuring that the user experience remains consistent even without an active internet connection. This means that images, text, and other media elements are preserved, allowing for a smooth and uninterrupted browsing experience.

In addition to accessing previously visited webpages, Safari's offline mode also enables users to interact with web-based applications that have been cached during prior online sessions. This means that certain web apps, such as productivity tools or entertainment platforms, can still be utilized even when offline, providing a level of continuity and functionality that is not always available in other browsers.

By leveraging Safari's offline mode, users can enjoy a seamless and familiar browsing experience, even in the absence of an internet connection. This feature underscores the browser's commitment to providing a comprehensive and user-centric experience, ensuring that individuals can stay connected to their preferred content regardless of their current connectivity status.

Saving Webpages for Offline Viewing

Safari offers a convenient and efficient method for saving webpages, allowing users to access their favorite content even when offline. This feature is particularly valuable for individuals who wish to preserve articles, reference materials, or other web-based resources for later viewing, especially in situations where internet connectivity may be limited or unavailable.

To save a webpage for offline viewing in Safari, users can follow these simple steps:

Open the Desired Webpage : Begin by navigating to the webpage that you wish to save for offline viewing. This could be an article, a blog post, a product page, or any other content that you want to access without an internet connection.

Tap the Share Button : Once on the webpage, tap the Share button, typically represented by a square with an arrow pointing upwards. This action will reveal a menu of options for interacting with the webpage.

Select "Add to Reading List" : From the Share menu, select the "Add to Reading List" option. This will prompt Safari to save the webpage to your Reading List, making it accessible for offline viewing at a later time.

Access the Saved Webpage : To view the saved webpage offline, simply open Safari and tap the Bookmarks icon at the bottom of the screen. Then, select the Reading List tab to access the saved content. Even without an internet connection, you can now view the webpage and its associated content seamlessly.

By following these straightforward steps, users can effortlessly save webpages for offline viewing, ensuring that their preferred online content is readily accessible regardless of their current connectivity status. This functionality not only enhances the convenience of using Safari but also empowers users to curate a personalized collection of web-based resources for offline consumption.

In addition to the "Add to Reading List" feature, Safari also allows users to save webpages as PDF files, further expanding the options for offline viewing. By selecting the "Save PDF to Books" option from the Share menu, users can store webpages as PDF documents in the Books app, providing an alternative method for accessing and archiving online content without relying on an internet connection.

Overall, Safari's capability to save webpages for offline viewing reflects its commitment to empowering users with versatile and practical features. Whether for casual browsing, research purposes, or entertainment, the ability to access saved webpages offline enhances the flexibility and utility of Safari as a web browser, catering to the diverse needs and preferences of its users.

Managing Offline Reading List

Safari's Offline Reading List feature serves as a valuable tool for organizing and accessing saved webpages, articles, and other online content without requiring an active internet connection. This functionality empowers users to curate a personalized collection of resources for offline consumption, providing a seamless and convenient browsing experience even in the absence of Wi-Fi or cellular data.

Upon saving webpages to the Reading List, users can efficiently manage their offline content within Safari, ensuring easy access and organization. The Offline Reading List is readily accessible from the Bookmarks icon within Safari, allowing users to navigate their saved content with ease. This centralized location serves as a digital repository for offline-accessible webpages, streamlining the process of revisiting and engaging with saved content.

Furthermore, Safari's Offline Reading List offers intuitive management options, enabling users to mark items as read or unread, delete outdated content, and prioritize specific webpages for future offline viewing. By incorporating these organizational features, Safari enhances the user experience, providing a level of control and customization that aligns with individual preferences and browsing habits.

In addition to managing individual items within the Offline Reading List, Safari also synchronizes this content across devices linked to the same Apple ID. This synchronization ensures that saved webpages are accessible on multiple Apple devices, allowing for a seamless transition between, for example, an iPhone and an iPad. This cross-device functionality underscores Safari's commitment to providing a cohesive and interconnected browsing experience, regardless of the device being used.

Moreover, Safari's Offline Reading List is designed to optimize offline access, ensuring that saved webpages are available for viewing even when internet connectivity is limited or unavailable. This capability is particularly beneficial for users who frequently find themselves in areas with unreliable Wi-Fi or cellular data coverage, as it enables uninterrupted access to essential online resources.

By offering robust management features and seamless synchronization across devices, Safari's Offline Reading List enhances the browsing experience, providing users with a versatile and accessible platform for organizing and accessing their preferred online content, regardless of their current connectivity status.

In summary, Safari's Offline Reading List serves as a valuable asset for users seeking to maintain access to their favorite web-based resources, even when offline. Through intuitive management options and cross-device synchronization, Safari empowers users to curate and engage with their personalized collection of offline-accessible content, ensuring a consistent and tailored browsing experience across various Apple devices.

Using Safari with Cellular Data Only

Safari's adaptability extends to scenarios where users rely solely on cellular data for their browsing needs. This capability is particularly relevant for individuals who frequently find themselves on the move or in environments where Wi-Fi access is limited. By leveraging Safari with cellular data only, users can harness the browser's features and optimize their browsing experience while staying connected through mobile networks.

When utilizing Safari with cellular data only, users can benefit from the browser's efficient data management tools. Safari is designed to prioritize data efficiency, ensuring that webpages are loaded in a streamlined manner to minimize data consumption. This approach allows users to navigate the online landscape with confidence, knowing that Safari is mindful of their data usage and strives to deliver a seamless browsing experience even when relying solely on cellular connectivity.

Moreover, Safari's integration with content blockers and privacy features further enhances the browsing experience when using cellular data. By leveraging content blockers, users can mitigate unnecessary data usage associated with ads and tracking scripts, optimizing their browsing sessions for efficiency. Additionally, Safari's privacy features, such as Intelligent Tracking Prevention, contribute to a more secure and streamlined browsing experience, aligning with the preferences and priorities of users who rely on cellular data for their online activities.

Furthermore, Safari's support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) enriches the browsing experience when utilizing cellular data exclusively. PWAs are web-based applications that offer native app-like functionalities, providing users with a diverse range of services and features directly through the browser. By seamlessly integrating PWAs into the Safari experience, users can access a myriad of services and utilities while conserving data and leveraging the convenience of cellular connectivity.

In essence, Safari's compatibility with cellular data usage underscores the browser's commitment to providing a versatile and efficient browsing experience. By prioritizing data management, integrating privacy features, and supporting Progressive Web Apps, Safari empowers users to make the most of their cellular connectivity, ensuring that they can navigate the online landscape with confidence and convenience, regardless of their current connectivity status.

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Home » Tech Tips » Browsers » 8 Ways to Save Webpages for Offline Reading

8 Ways to Save Webpages for Offline Reading

Sometimes you need to rush for a meeting or presentation when reading an interesting article on a website. Browsers offers an easy option to bookmark or favorite the page and sync across your devices to read it later. However, what if you want to read the page offline later while traveling in your flight? Here are the options for you to save the webpage offline. If you are looking for finding the previously visited webpages from cache when they are not available, check our separate article on how to do that in Google Chrome .

Reading Webpages Offline

Since you may be using Chrome, Edge, Firefox or any other browser, the process of saving webpage for offline read depends on the browser you use. Here we will list down options for different browsers and you can choose the one suitable for your need.

1. Download Webpage in HTML Format

The best option is to download the entire webpage to your computer which should work on all the browsers. Simply press “Control + S” in Windows and “Command “ S” in macOS and choose the location on your computer to save the webpage. This will create two files:

• HTML file – double click on this HTML file to open with the default browser .
• A folder – containing all the files required for the webpage to work.

Both HTML and folder will be named from the title of the webpage which you will see on the browser’s title bar.

Note that you can also download the entire website with complete structure locally on your Mac using apps like SiteSucker.

2. Save Webpage in PDF Format

Though downloading HTML file works on all the browser, as mentioned it will have HTML file as well as a corresponding folder containing files. If you want to keep the entire webpage as a single PDF file , then there is also an in-built option available for you.

• Press “Control + P” in Windows or “Command + P” in macOS to open print dialog box.
• Select the “Destination” as “Save as PDF” and click on “Save” button.
• Choose the location on your computer and save the file.

3. Pocket – Read It Later

Pocket is a freemium service that allows you to save pages for offline reading later. You need to register for an account and access the saved webpages across your devices by logging in to your account. In addition, you can also get content curation based on your interest from pocket. If you are using Firefox, you can see a small “Save to Pocket” icon showing next to address bar of the browser. Since Mozilla is the owner of pocket service, they simply integrate it on their Firefox browser.

Good part is that “Save to Pocket” extensions are available for all popular browsers like Chrome, Edge and Mac Safari. In addition, you can use the iOS and Android apps to synchronize webpages offline from all your devices in one single place.

Note: Since Microsoft Edge is based on the same Chromium backend used by Google Chrome browser, you can use all extensions from Chrome Web Store in Edge also.

It is a non-profit, free and open source service that compress and offers online websites as offline ZIM files. You can download these ZIM files and link to Kiwix desktop/mobile apps and browser extensions. This helps to browse the linked website content offline without internet connectivity. You can use the entire Wikipedia and other educational material offline. Though you can only read the content offered by Kiwix, there are huge library of content you can get from their library. The apps are available for Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android and you can download the browser extensions for popular browsers like Chrome, Edge and Firefox.

Note that this app can consume large storage space depending upon the library file you download. For example, the entire Wikipedia file will need more than 90GB size. Therefore, make sure you have sufficient storage space on your device to use this app.

5. Evernote Web Clipper

If you love Evernote for notes taking, then this extension is for you. It allows you to save webpages to Evernote account for offline reading. You can use the entire page or a screenshot to integrate with your notes easily. It is also possible to highlight text and annotate content on the saved webpages.

Evernote Web Clipper extension is available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox.

6. SingleFile

As explained above in method 1, saving the webpage content as a HTML file will create an addition folder containing all backend files. This will create problems like some images not loading properly when you open the HTML file. SingleFile browser extension, as the name indicates allows you to save the entire webpage as a single HTML file without any additional folders. This is super useful when you want to share the webpage as a single file. You can simply click on the extension icon to download the entire page for offline reading with all images.

SingleFile extension is available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox.

7. EpubPress – Read the web offline

This extension allows you to create an eBook by collecting multiple webpages. You can read the collection offline later without internet connection. EpubPress extension is available for Chrome and Firefox.

8. Instapaper

Instapaper offers iOS and Android apps allowing you to save webpages for reading them later. You need an account to save webpages including videos and sync across all your devices. There is also an official Instapaper Save app for Mac and a third-party app called Storyvoid­ for Windows. Alternatively, you can login to Instapaper website and view all your saved webpages. You can also use the browser extensions on Chrome and Firefox to save webpages to your Instapaper account for reading them later.

Final Words

We hope one of the above listed services or apps helped you to save webpages for offline reading. You can use the default save as HTML or PDF option in browsers for reading webpages offline once in a while. However, if you frequently want to read the pages later then using browser extensions or services like Pocket is the best choice.

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Editorial Staff at WebNots are team of experts who love to build websites, find tech hacks and share the learning with community.

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Apple touts major 60% leap in Safari and WebKit performance

Apple’s WebKit team has published a new blog post this week detailing how they’ve made significant upgrades to Safari’s performance over the last several months. The improvements come following the debut of Speedometer 3.0 in March, described as a “major step forward in making the web faster for all.”

Back in March, Apple, Google, and Mozilla teamed up to launch the new Speedometer 3 browser benchmark. The goal of Speedometer 3 is to “create a shared understanding of web performance so that improvements can be made to enhance the user experience.”

The results provided by Speedometer 3 offer more details on how the test “captures and calculates scores, show more detailed results and introduce an even wider variety of workloads.” Apple says:

The introduction of Speedometer 3.0 is a major step forward in making the web faster for all, and allowing Web developers to make websites and web apps that were not previously possible.

Apple’s WebKit team says that it has successfully improved Safari’s Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60% between the release of Safari 17.0 in September and Safari 17.4’s release in March. These improvements, Apple says, mean that developers can build websites and web apps that are faster than ever before:

With all these optimizations and dozens more, we were able to improve the overall Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60% between Safari 17.0 and Safari 17.4. Even though individual progressions were often less than 1%, over time, they all stacked up together to make a big difference. Because some of these optimizations also benefited Speedometer 2.1, Safari 17.4 is also ~13% faster than Safari 17.0 on Speedometer 2.1. We’re thrilled to deliver these performance improvements to our users allowing web developers to build websites and web apps that are more responsive and snappier than ever.

The full blog post has a ton of technical details on the work that has been done to optimize WebKit and Safari for Speedometer 3.0.

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iOS 18 May Feature All-New 'Safari Browsing Assistant'

iOS 18 will apparently feature a new Safari browsing assistant, according to backend code on Apple's servers discovered by Nicolás Álvarez . MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris confirmed that the code exists, but not many details are known at this time.

Update: Álvarez has since said that iCloud Private Relay might not be related to this feature.

A browsing assistant in Safari could be one of the many new generative AI features that are rumored to be coming to the iPhone with iOS 18 later this year. There are already multiple iPhone web browsers with AI tools, such as Microsoft Edge with a GPT-4-powered Copilot and Arc Search , which can summarize web pages to provide concise information.

Álvarez also uncovered a so-called "Encrypted Visual Search" feature in the backend code on Apple's servers, but no specific details are known. MacRumors contributor Steve Moser last year discovered a new Visual Search feature for Apple's Vision Pro headset in visionOS beta code, which would allow users to copy and paste printed text from the real world into apps and more, but the feature has yet to launch. It is possible that Apple is planning to debut a more secure version of the feature. However, the code could also relate to the iPhone's existing Visual Look Up feature that can identify objects in photos and videos.

Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10 , so we should learn more about these potential new features in a few more months.

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Safari User Guide

• Change your homepage
• Import bookmarks, history, and passwords
• Make Safari your default web browser
• Go to websites
• Find what you’re looking for
• Bookmark webpages that you want to revisit
• See your favorite websites
• Use tabs for webpages
• Pin frequently visited websites
• Play web videos
• Mute audio in tabs
• Pay with Apple Pay
• Autofill credit card info
• Autofill contact info
• Keep a Reading List
• Hide ads when reading articles
• Translate a webpage
• Download items from the web
• Share or post webpages
• Add passes to Wallet
• Save part or all of a webpage
• Print or create a PDF of a webpage
• Customize a start page
• Customize the Safari window
• Customize settings per website
• Zoom in on webpages
• Get extensions
• Manage cookies and website data
• Block pop-ups
• Clear your browsing history
• Browse privately
• Autofill user name and password info
• Prevent cross-site tracking
• View a Privacy Report
• Change Safari preferences
• Keyboard and other shortcuts
• Troubleshooting

Keep a Reading List in Safari on Mac

To quickly save webpages to read later, add them to your Reading List. To read pages in your Reading List even when you’re not connected to the internet, you can save them offline.

Open Safari for me

Manage your Reading List

You can also Shift-click a link on a webpage to quickly add the linked page.

Save a page in your Reading List to read when you’re not connected to the internet: Control-click the page summary in the sidebar, then choose Save Offline. You can also swipe left over the page summary, then click Save Offline.

To automatically save all pages in your Reading List, choose Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Save articles for offline reading automatically.”

Remove a page from your Reading List: Control-click the page summary in the sidebar, then choose Remove Item.

You can also swipe left over the page summary, then click Remove. Or, swipe all the way to the left until the page summary disappears.

Read from your Reading List

Search your Reading List: Enter text in the search field above the list of page summaries. You may have to scroll to see the search field.

Read the next page in your list: Keep scrolling when you reach the end of a Reading List page—no need to click the next page summary in the sidebar.

Hide pages you’ve read: Click the Unread button above the list of page summaries. Click the All button to show pages you’ve read in your list. You may have to scroll to see the buttons.

Mark a page as read or unread: Control-click the page summary in the sidebar, then choose Mark as Read or Mark as Unread.

Note: Safari uses iCloud to keep your Reading List the same on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac computers that have Safari turned on in iCloud preferences . On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, go to Settings > [ your name ] > iCloud, then make sure Safari is turned on. With iCloud, your Reading List and bookmarks are archived automatically, and you can restore them from an earlier version at any time.

‘This Will Finish Us’

How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland

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I t was high safari season in Tanzania, the long rains over, the grasses yellowing and dry. Land Cruisers were speeding toward the Serengeti Plain. Billionaires were flying into private hunting concessions. And at a crowded and dusty livestock market far away from all that, a man named Songoyo had decided not to hang himself, not today, and was instead pinching the skin of a sheep.

“Please!” he was saying to a potential buyer with thousands of animals to choose from on this morning. “You can see, he is so fat!”

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The buyer moved on. Songoyo rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He’d spent the whole night walking, herding another man’s sheep across miles of grass and scrub and pitted roads to reach this market by opening time. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t eaten. He’d somehow fended off an elephant with a stick. What he needed to do was sell the sheep so their owner would pay him, so he could try to start a new life now that the old one was finished.

The old life: He’d had all the things that made a person such as him rich and respected. Three wives, 14 children, a large compound with 75 cows and enough land to graze them—“such sweet land,” he would say when he could bear to think of it—and that was how things had been going until recently.

The new life: no cows, because the Tanzanian government had seized every single one of them . No compound, because the government had bulldozed it, along with hundreds of others. No land, because more and more of the finest, lushest land in northern Tanzania was being set aside for conservation, which turned out to mean for trophy hunters, and tourists on “bespoke expeditions,” and cappuccino trucks in proximity to buffalo viewing—anything and anyone except the people who had lived there since the 17th century, the pastoralists known as the Maasai.

They were the ones tourists saw through their windshields selling beaded key chains at the gates of Serengeti National Park, or performing dances after dinner at safari lodges. They were famous for their red shawls and recycled-tire sandals. They grazed their cattle with zebras and giraffes, and built mud-and-dung houses encircled by stick fences barely distinguishable from the wild landscape. They were among the lightest-living people on the planet, and yet it was the Maasai who were being told that the biggest threat to conservation and national progress was them. Their whole way of life had to go.

From the April 2020 issue: Ed Yong on the last giraffes on Earth

And so Songoyo, after considering his alternatives, had devised a last-ditch plan for his own survival, one that had brought him to a town in Kenya called Aitong, where a cool wind was slapping sand and dung into his face as he scanned the market for buyers. He was far from home, roughly 65 miles north of the village in Tanzania where he had been tear-gassed and shot at for the first time in his life. He had seen elderly men beaten and guns fired at old women, and now it was down to this: He was a herder for hire, working for a distant relative, trying to make enough money to buy one single cow.

“Come!” he called to the buyers who kept passing his herd and weaving through the bleating mass. “You will not find any better!”

This was his plan: one cow, because that was the starting point of what it meant to be a Maasai man, which was what he still wanted to be.

The forces arrayed against Songoyo, whom I met in the course of two long trips to Tanzania late last year, include some of the world’s most powerful people and interests. (I have not used Songoyo’s last name out of concern for his safety.) What these people and interests want is what the Maasai are trying to keep: the land they live on.

Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030 . Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.

The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.

For all its accomplishments, the cause of saving the planet has become a trillion-dollar business, a global scramble in which wealthy nations are looking to the developing world not just for natural resources, but for nature itself. The wealthy players include not only Europeans and Americans but Arabs and Chinese and others. On the African continent, political leaders are enthusiastic about what so-called green foreign investment might mean for their own economies (and, maybe, their bank accounts).

Such are the pressures being brought to bear on northern Tanzania, where the Maasai migrated with their cattle 400 years ago, settling in an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles of grassy plains, acacia woodlands, rivers, lakes, snowcapped mountains, salt flats, forests, and some of the most spectacular wildlife on the planet. They called it Siringet, which in the Maa language means “the place where the land runs on forever.” The Maasai see their recent history as a struggle to save that land from those who claimed it needed saving.

First came the British colonial authorities, who established the 5,700-square-mile Serengeti National Park, pushing the Maasai to an adjacent zone called the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with its famous crater, where they were promised they could live. Then came UNESCO. It declared both Serengeti and Ngorongoro to be World Heritage Sites, which came with new restrictions. Western tourists began arriving, seeking an experience of Africa that a thousand movies promised—one of pristine beauty and big game, not people grazing cattle. Tanzanian authorities began leasing blocks of land to foreign hunting and safari companies, many of which promoted themselves as conservationists—a word the Maasai have come to associate with their own doom. Spread among the villages that dot the northern tourist zone, the Maasai have meanwhile been growing in number—their population has doubled in recent decades, to about 200,000. Inevitably, the clash of interests has led to bitter and occasionally violent conflict.

Still, the threat unfolding now is of greater magnitude. It emerged soon after President Samia Suluhu Hassan took office, in 2021. “Tourism in Ngorongoro is disappearing,” she declared during one of her first major speeches. “We agreed that people and wildlife could cohabitate, but now people are overtaking the wildlife.” The Maasai listened with alarm, realizing that the people she was referring to were them.

Not long after Hassan’s speech, officials announced plans to resettle the roughly 100,000 Maasai who were living in and around Ngorongoro to “modern houses” in another part of the country. Meanwhile, in a region north of Ngorongoro, bordering Serengeti National Park, government security forces began rolling into Maasai villages. They were carrying out another part of the plan: annexing 580 square miles of prime grazing land to create an exclusive game reserve for the Dubai royal family, which had long hunted in the area. The government characterized the move as necessary for conservation. Traditional Maasai compounds, known as bomas , were burned. Park rangers began seizing cattle by the tens of thousands.

And more was coming: a $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates , of which Dubai is a part, that included new plans for tourism and conservation. A $9.5 million deal with the Chinese for a geological park that overlapped with additional Maasai villages. An offer from Tanzania to make Donald Trump Jr.—an avid trophy hunter—an official “tourism ambassador.” New maps and proposals from the government indicated that further tracts could soon be placed off-limits, including a sacred site that the Maasai call the Mountain of God.

Read: What trophy hunting does to the elephants it leaves behind

“This is 80 percent of our land,” a Maasai elder told me one evening during a meeting with other leaders in northern Tanzania. “This will finish us.” They had tried protesting. They had filed lawsuits. They had appealed to the United Nations , the European Union , the East African Court of Justice, and Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Tanzania in 2023. They’d unearthed old maps and village titles to prove that the land was theirs by law, not just by custom. They’d written a letter to John and Patrick McEnroe after hearing that the tennis stars were hosting a $25,000-a-person safari-and-tennis expedition in the Serengeti. People made supportive statements, but no one was coming to help.

This is what Songoyo understood as he paced the market in Aitong. It was closing soon. Buyers were filtering out through the wire fence, and he still had 12 sheep left to sell, one of which was lame. A man tapped it with a stick.

“A cow stepped on his leg; that’s why he walks like that,” Songoyo said, bracing the animal with his knees.

The man walked away. Another came and tapped his stick on the lame sheep, and then on the rest of them. They agreed on a price, and the buyer pulled out a roll of bills.

“Please, can you add 500?” Songoyo said, asking for the equivalent of an extra $3.60 in Kenyan shillings. “I need 500. Please.”

The man added 200, and Songoyo brought the day’s earnings to the relative who had hired him. They sat under a tree, and he counted out Songoyo’s share for a week of work, roughly $10. One cow would cost about $200.

“See you next week,” the man said.

“May God give you favor,” Songoyo replied, putting the money in the pocket of his blue track pants. His cellphone rang, a battered plastic burner.

“I am coming,” he told one of his wives, who was waiting for him at their home in Tanzania.

He’d had options other than this. There had always been Maasai who’d given up traditional ways to reinvent themselves, shedding their red shawls for all kinds of lives. Now many more of them, having lost their cattle, were moving to cities, where the Maasai reputation for bravery and rectitude meant there was always work as a security guard—I saw them everywhere in Arusha and Dar es Salaam, in front of shops and banks. Others had taken a government offer to resettle in a town called Msomera, far to the south, only to return home with stories of loneliness and conflict with locals. Still others were falling apart. Songoyo had seen them, drunk men hobbling along the road or passed out on their red shawls under trees in the daytime. That would not be him.

“Never,” he said, and began the long walk back to his village in Tanzania, a tall man wrapped in a pink-and-purple plaid shawl passing cinder-block taverns where he would not drink, and motorbikes he would not hire, because the point was to save money for the cow. No cows, no life , he told himself, picking up the pace along an orange dirt road stretching into the late afternoon.

His earliest memories were of cows; he had never been without them. They were the huge, warm, brown beasts kept in the center of the boma. Their dung formed the walls of his home. Their milk and blood were what he drank as a child, when his father told him what Maasai children were traditionally told: that when the earth split from the sky and God left the world, he entrusted the Maasai with all the cattle, and by extension the land and the other animals that shared it. Songoyo learned how to herd with rocks, pushing them around in the dirt. He got his first calf when he was a small boy, herding it with a stick near the boma. When he was big enough, he followed his older brothers out into the wider grazing areas, including one the Maasai called Osero , a word that refers to lush grasslands—in this case, the 580 square miles of land adjacent to Serengeti National Park where Maasai had lived and kept cattle for generations.

It was in Osero that he learned about different kinds of grasses and trees: which ones had good branches for bows or good bark for tea that could ease a backache. He learned where to find natural salt and the coolest streams, and he learned certain rules: Never cut down a tree. Keep cattle away from wildebeests during calving season, because they carry a disease deadly to cows.

He listened to older boys tell stories, including one whose lesson he still lived by, about a group of Maasai heading out on a cattle raid when one of the warriors broke his sandal. The warrior turned to the man behind him and asked if he would stay and help, but the man refused. He asked another, who also refused, and so on until the very last one agreed to stay, while the rest continued on to cattle-raiding glory. The stern moral was: Be prepared. Don’t fall behind. Stay with the group. Struggle.

Songoyo had struggled. He held himself together after his father died, when he was still a boy, a moment when he might have turned delinquent but didn’t. He endured his adolescent coming-of-age ceremonies with dignity, by all accounts managing not to cry or shake during his circumcision, when people scrutinize and taunt boys for any sign of weakness, and he was rewarded with cows. He learned how to shoot arrows and use a machete, and became a moran —entering a stage of life when young Maasai men bear responsibility for protecting their village—and was given more cows, each with a name, each with a certain character he came to know. In this way, the life he wanted became possible.

He married his first wife, then a second and a third, and eventually built a boma in the village where his children went to school, and a larger compound on the edge of Osero, where the cattle were kept, and where he’d had one of the happiest moments of his life. This was just before everything began to unravel, an otherwise ordinary day when the rains were full and the cows were fat and he’d walked out into the middle of them, their bells jangling, realizing how far he’d come and thinking, “Yes, I am a real Maasai.”

Not that life was an idyll. In village after village that I visited, people described years of tensions with safari companies and conservation authorities. People who lived within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area—a vast zone that was almost like its own country—had complained about schools falling apart and poisoned salt licks and the indignity of their identity being checked as they came and went through the tourist gate. In other areas, people had accused certain safari companies of illegally acquiring leases and paying local police to beat herders off concessions. One company was notorious for using a helicopter to spray scalding water on cows.

In Osero, the problems went back to 1992, when an Emirati company called Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC) was first granted a hunting license for the Dubai royal family. They had their own private camp and a private airstrip and, for the emir himself, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a compound on a hill, guarded by a special unit of the Tanzanian military police. When the rains ended each year, cargo planes full of four-wheelers and tents and pallets of food would buzz low over villages before landing, followed by private jets delivering the royal family and their guests. A few weeks later, they’d buzz out with carcasses of zebras and antelope and other trophies. For a while, OBC had its own cellphone tower, and Maasai villagers noticed that when they were near it, a message would pop up on their phone screens: “Welcome to the U.A.E.” The arrangement had been that the Maasai were supposed to keep away when the royals were in residence, but just about everyone had caught a glimpse. Songoyo had seen them speeding around, shooting animals from trucks with semiautomatic rifles. “Once, they pulled up in the middle of my cows and I saw them shooting so many antelope,” he told me. “They just kill, kill, kill!”

There had been attempts at diplomacy. Sometimes the Arabs, as the Maasai called them, would give out bags of rice. They had hired Maasai men to work as guides and drivers and had flown some of their favorite employees to Dubai, buying them clothing and cars. One driver recalled being at the camp on a day when the emir arrived. The driver lined up with other staff, and the emir greeted each one of them while an assistant followed behind with a large bag of cash, inviting each worker to reach in. The driver said he pulled out $1,060.

But a bitterness was always there. Maasai leaders had long claimed that Osero belonged to 14 adjacent villages, and that they had never consented to the OBC deal. Tanzanian officials asserted authority over not only Osero but a far larger expanse—Loliondo—citing its colonial-era designation as a game-controlled area; they often resorted to violence to enforce this view. Maasai villagers described to me how government security forces had collaborated with OBC at least twice in recent years to conduct a large-scale torching of bomas in the vicinity of the camp. Young men grazing cows had been beaten and shot at. One man described to me being shot in the face, then handcuffed to a hospital bed as he was bleeding through his ears and nose and eyes, slipping in and out of consciousness. He remembered a police officer shouting at a doctor to let him die, and the doctor refusing the order and saving his life. He lost his left eye, the socket now scarred over with skin, and had kept a thin blue hospital receipt all these years in the hope of receiving restitution that never came. Most villages have people who can tell such stories.

Read: The war on rhino poaching has human casualties

In 2017, amid rising complaints and lawsuits filed by Maasai leaders, Tanzanian authorities suspended OBC’s license and accused the company’s director of offering some $2 million in bribes to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, which led to a court case that ended in a plea deal. Requests to interview OBC executives, representatives of the Dubai royal family, and officials of the U.A.E. government about their involvement in Tanzania went unanswered.

By the time Hassan became president, in 2021, the director was back on the job and the OBC flights had resumed.

Samia Suluhu Hassan was widely embraced by West and East. Her predecessor, John Magufuli, who died in office, had been a populist with an authoritarian streak and became infamous for downplaying the dangers of COVID. He suspended media outlets, banned opposition rallies, and alienated foreign investors, even as many Maasai saw him as a hero for brushing back OBC.

Hassan eased his more repressive policies and embarked on an ambitious plan to bring foreign investment into the country, especially through tourism. She branded herself a forward-looking environmentalist.

And she found willing collaborators. The World Bank had been encouraging more tourism , arguing that it could help Tanzania achieve what official metrics define as middle-income status. One of the country’s main conservation partners, UNESCO, had been pressing Tanzanian authorities for years to implement what it called “stringent policies to control population growth” in Ngorongoro, although UNESCO also says it has never supported the displacement of people. A German conservation group called the Frankfurt Zoological Society, a major partner in managing Serengeti National Park, has expressed concern that traditional Maasai practices are becoming less tenable because of population growth. “There is a risk of overuse and overgrazing that should be addressed,” Dennis Rentsch, the deputy director of the society’s Africa department, told me. “I don’t want to vilify the Maasai. They are not enemies of conservation. But the challenge is when you reach a tipping point.”

In response to these pressures, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism produced a report that blamed rising Maasai and livestock populations for “extensive habitat destruction” in conservation zones. It recommended resettling all of Ngorongoro’s Maasai. It also recommended designating the 580-square-mile Osero tract, farther away, as a more restrictive game reserve, describing the land as an important wildlife corridor and water-catchment area for the Serengeti ecosystem. The designation left the Dubai royal family with an exclusive hunting playground. But none of the Maasai who lived in the area would be allowed to graze their cattle or continue living there.

Maasai leaders countered with two reports of their own—more than 300 pages covering colonial history, constitutional law, land-use law, and international conventions, and providing copies of village titles, registration certificates, and old maps—to prove their legal right to the land as citizens. They blamed habitat destruction on sprawling lodges, roads bisecting rangeland, trucks off-roading across savannas, and “huge tourist traffic.” Overgrazing was a result of being squeezed into ever smaller domains, which kept the Maasai from rotating grazing zones as they normally would. Citing their own surveys, they said the government had inflated livestock numbers, a claim supported by Pablo Manzano, a Spanish ecologist with the Basque Centre for Climate Change, who had conducted research in the region and found that the government was perpetuating a tragic misunderstanding.

Manzano and others pointed to a growing body of scholarly research demonstrating what the Maasai had long known: that their management of the land did not degrade the Serengeti ecosystem but had actually helped sustain and even create it—the grasslands the Maasai had cultivated for hundreds of years were the same grasslands that many wild animals needed to thrive. In that sense, the land had already been conserved before the Germans, the British, and various international groups decided that they needed to save it.

In their reports, Maasai leaders concluded that the government was engaged in “a calculated process to wipe out animals” and to “devastate their livelihood and culture.” They took a bus to the capital and delivered the two reports in person to government officials.

But there would be no debate, no discussion of complexities. Hassan moved forward with her agenda. She was finalizing the $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, the fourth-largest (after China, the EU, and the U.S.) investor in Africa. One deal turned over management of roughly two-thirds of Dar es Salaam’s port to DP World, a company owned by the U.A.E. government. Another deal turned over management of some 20 million acres of forest —roughly 8 percent of the nation’s entire territory—to a company called Blue Carbon, which is run by a member of the royal family, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, and uses conserved land to generate carbon credits that it sells to other companies. The package also included money for tourism.

Hassan invited travel agents to the country for a “tourism reboot.” She spoke of wanting more five-star hotels. She filmed a promotional documentary called The Royal Tour , which at one point involved helicoptering with a travel reporter over some Maasai villages near the Serengeti.

“All those round things down there are the Maasai bomas,” Hassan says in the film, as several villagers look up into the sky. The reporter then comments in a way that Maasai leaders found ominous: “Over the years, the Tanzanian government has tried to persuade the Maasai to become traditional farmers or ranchers, but they’ve persisted in clinging to their ancient ways. And yet, they may not have a choice now.”

Some 400 miles to the south, in the hotter, flatter farming area of Msomera, bulldozers broke ground on a new development. The military was building 5,000 cinder-block houses intended for Maasai families. Officials had been dispatched to villages in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to present the government’s offer: a free house on 2.5 acres. Electricity. Piped water. New schools. A cash bonus of roughly $4,000 for early takers. At one such presentation, a crowd pelted the officials with rocks.

I requested an interview with Hassan to better understand her decisions. In response, a government spokesperson arranged interviews with several other officials, one of whom was Albert Msando, a district commissioner, who told me, “Whatever I am answering is whatever the president would have answered.” We met in the town of Handeni, near Msomera. Msando’s office was inside a former British-colonial building, where a portrait of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding father, hung on one wall and a portrait of Hassan hung on another.

“For the public interest,” Msando said of the Maasai, “we have to relocate them.” A lawyer by training and demeanor, Msando emphasized that any relocation is voluntary, at least for now. He also made it clear that if persuasion fails, the government maintains the legal right to remove the Maasai from conservation areas, by force if necessary. “That’s why there are guys here with their shoulders decorated,” Msando said, pointing around the room to police and military officers.

He told me that anyone in Tanzania would be lucky to get what the Maasai were getting. “We are giving them nice houses, I believe, according to modern standards.” He said that the Maasai currently live in “filthy conditions” and should be helped to “live a better life.”

He and other officials I spoke with said that they disliked even using the term Maasai . They invoked the spirit of Nyerere, saying that Tanzania was supposed to have a national identity, not tribal ones. Msando said he could understand the Maasai’s concern about losing their culture, even if he had little sympathy for it. “Culture is a fluid thing,” he said. “I am Chaga—the Chaga were on the verge of having their own nation. Today look at me. People do not even know I’m Chaga. My kids don’t even speak Chaga.” He was unapologetic: “The Maasai are not exempted from acculturation or cultural acclimatization, or cultural extinction.”

The government’s plans moved forward. In June 2022, a convoy of trucks carrying hundreds of security personnel rolled into the 14 villages bordering Osero, a show of force that the Maasai had never seen before. Soldiers, police, and park rangers set up camps on the outskirts of each village, announcing their intention to demarcate the boundary of the new game reserve. What happened next unfolded sporadically over several days. It has been documented in reports by human-rights groups and was described to me by dozens of witnesses and victims.

First, village leaders summoned to what was billed as a routine ruling-party meeting were arrested after they refused to go along with the demarcation—27 of them in all. The security forces then began planting a long line of three-foot-high rectangular cement markers called beacons along the perimeter of Osero. Villagers came behind them, kicking the markers down before the concrete foundations had set; women hacked at them with machetes. “I felt like I was fighting for myself,” one woman told me later. “I knew if this land goes away, there is nowhere for my children to be, and that forced me to lose my fear.” But the security forces kept beating the villagers back. Elders called more than 1,000 moran to take up positions with bows and arrows in forested areas along a main road where government trucks were patrolling.

“How many are ready to die?” a leader said to the group, and at some point, one of them shot an arrow at a police officer, killing him.

After that, the security forces opened fire. They shot at the legs of elderly women waving grass as a sign of peace. They shot an elderly man, who fell and then was heaped onto a truck “like a sack of maize,” his son told me. He has not been found. The security forces shot at men and women trying to destroy the beacons, wounding them in their arms and legs and backs. They shot tear gas into bomas and burst into one where a traditional ceremony was being held, firing into the crowd. The moran waited for orders to retaliate, but the elders, seeing what the government was willing to do, called them off. “It’s only because we didn’t have guns,” a Maasai elder told me. “If someone helped us with guns, they cannot even fight with us, because they are very cowardly.” Another elder said, “You cannot fight a gun with arrows.”

Dozens of people with bullet and machete wounds, blocked by police from local clinics, limped their way across the border into Kenya for treatment. Several thousand more fled there for safety. Others hid in the forest. Then the burning and bulldozing began. For several days, security forces plowed through circles of stick fences. They crushed houses and corrals and lit the debris on fire, burning more than 300 bomas, including Songoyo’s, and finishing the work before the start of high safari season. In a statement issued a few days after the violence , the Tanzanian government said the new game reserve had “no settlements as it is alleged and therefore there is no eviction” taking place. It described what had happened as “normal practice for all wildlife and forest protected areas in Tanzania”—a necessary step to keep the Serengeti ecosystem from being “disrupted and eventually erased from the face of the Earth.”

Songoyo’s boma had been by a hot spring. His father’s and grandfather’s graves were nearby. In the aftermath of the violence, he moved his family and cattle from Osero to a smaller boma nearer to his village, where he and others returned from hiding to find homes ransacked and skeletons of cows that had been eaten by wild animals.

Security forces roamed up and down the roads. Officials called people into immigration offices and accused them of being Kenyans, requiring them to show up in court for weeks on end, until judges threw out their cases for lack of evidence. Rangers patrolled Osero more heavily than ever, shooting at and beating herders who went anywhere near the new reserve, punishments that now came with a kind of psychological torture—forcing people to consent to the legitimacy of their own dispossession. One young man told me that rangers dragged him to their truck and beat him on his back with a stick for hours, calling him “rubbish” and yelling, “You don’t agree this land was taken? We will punish you until you agree!” They would feed him cornmeal, he said, and beat him some more. But he never did agree. Now he can barely walk.

The Maasai had other problems. One was grass: There was not enough. Everywhere I went, I saw bony cows picking at short clumps of weeds in dry patches of dirt. Out of desperation, some people were taking their cows to graze in Kenya, while others were sneaking into Osero at night. To avoid alerting rangers, cows went in without bells, making them harder to keep track of in the dark. Herders used cheap flashlights for safety, shining them fleetingly in the bush to detect the eyes of lions and other predators. They struggled to keep themselves awake, wearing small radios around their necks, playing tinny music at a low volume only they could hear.

Another problem was worse: Rangers were seizing cattle. Not just a few here and there, but huge herds of them, by the hundreds and then by the thousands. One day, Songoyo got a call from his brother, who had been grazing Songoyo’s 75 cows near Osero with other herders.

He said rangers had chased them down and seized more than 700 cattle, including all of Songoyo’s. He said the rangers had then crossed with the cattle into Serengeti National Park, and were holding them in a pen. Songoyo imagined them staying like that, not eating, not drinking. He imagined his favorite, Kiripa, a brown heifer he could always count on to lead the other cattle to distant grasses and home again, slowly dying, and rushed with the other owners to the park gate.

“I tried to reason with the rangers, but I totally failed—it was like they were ready to shoot us,” he recalled, and so the group contacted a Maasai lawyer, Melau Alais, whose practice had been overwhelmed by such emergency calls in the past year.

After several days, Songoyo learned that the rangers were alleging that the cattle had been illegally grazing inside Serengeti National Park, and that they would all be auctioned off unless the owners prevailed in court. The court was in a town called Mugumu, clear on the other side of the park, a two-hour drive away. The hearing was in a few days. So Songoyo and the other owners scrambled together the park fees and set off in the lawyer’s car past lush green grass and fat, grazing zebras and Land Cruisers full of tourists enjoying the scenery. When they reached the courthouse, the owner whom they had elected to represent all of the owners in the case, a man named Soloi Toroge, was formally charged with illegal grazing and jailed until the hearing.

The next day, Songoyo and the others sat in the gallery as Toroge took the stand. Both Songoyo and Alais recalled for me the day in the courtroom.

“So what happened?” Alais asked Toroge, and as the defendant began telling the story of how the rangers had beaten the herders and taken the cattle, Songoyo said he felt his anger rising.

Alais asked Toroge how he knew the cows were his, and as he described their particular colors and markings, Songoyo thought about his own cows, and became more desperate.

At another point, Alais asked Toroge how many children he had, and as Songoyo thought about his own, he began to feel physically ill.

“So what other business do you do?” Alais continued.

Toroge said he depended only on livestock.

“This livestock, or others?” Alais asked him.

This livestock, he answered. There was no other.

“So if the court decides to auction the cattle, what will happen?” Alais asked.

“All of us will die of hunger,” Toroge answered.

As he continued, Songoyo remembered thinking that this was it. That he really was about to lose everything he’d worked his whole life to achieve—not because of drought or his own foolishness, but because of his government, and the Arabs, and something called conservation. He said he began making noises, and felt himself becoming so disoriented, so altered, that he thought he could kill someone, or that someone might kill him, and soon people were surrounding him, court officers threatening to arrest him. Songoyo was saying, “Then let us die. There is no special death.”

He did not return for the other days of testimony. He was back in his village when Alais called to tell him that the judge had ruled that the cows would be auctioned off unless the owners paid a fine, and that his share—calculated per head of cattle, per day, for more than 30 days and counting—would be roughly $5,000.

He briefly considered what others had done, which was borrow money from a Somali loan shark who was doing a brisk business, but decided that was no solution.

“Let them sell them all,” he told Alais.

He did not leave his boma for days.

Normally, relatives and neighbors would give someone in his position one of their cows to help him rebuild, but nothing was normal any longer. More than 50,000 head of cattle had been taken by rangers, according to a local tally. Between the seized cattle and the fines, a huge transfer of wealth was under way from the Maasai community to the government.

People came by Songoyo’s boma to say they were sorry. They tried to encourage him. He considered what to do. He could be a security guard. He imagined standing still for hours in front of some building in Arusha. Then he began thinking that death would be preferable. Traditional Maasai cosmology includes no afterlife, no reward or punishment in the hereafter, so that would be that. Hanging or poison were the usual methods; hanging was more certain. Then he thought about his children. “And I said no,” he recalled. He told himself what others had told him since his father had died. He was a hard worker. He knew how to struggle. He thought, “Maybe something good is ahead of me.” He thought that if he just kept going, “God will bless me for that.”

He tore down a large corral where he had kept his cattle and built a smaller one for the seven goats he still had, and for the one cow he hoped to buy. He remembered a distant relative, a businessman in Kenya; they got in touch, and the plan was set: Pick up the livestock at a market near his village. Herd them across the border to a market in Kenya, and if he didn’t sell them there, go on to Aitong, a roughly 130-mile circuit every week. He had been doing this for months.

When he got home from Aitong, he would give half the money he’d earned to his wives for food. He would rest, and then start out again. He noticed himself becoming skinnier.

Songoyo headed north with his next herd of sheep, through a clearing with a seasonal stream and smooth rocks. He skirted Serengeti National Park, where he was not allowed to be, then crossed over a low mountain range that marked the Tanzania-Kenya border, his sandals splitting at the soles. At the gates of the park, some of the half a million people who visit every year were lining up in Land Cruisers, the bumpers displaying flag decals representing the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the United States. And as the sun rose one morning, in they went, tourists with bucket lists, anniversaries, dreams, and romanticized images in mind.

They roamed the dirt roads through grassy plains that really did seem to stretch on forever—a rolling sea of greens and yellows and flat-topped trees. They slowed for herds of gazelles and elephants. They sped to a leopard sighting in trucks bearing the wishful names of various outfitters—Sense of Africa, Lion King Adventures, Peacemakers Expeditions—and soon they began gathering along one side of the Mara River.

On the other side, great black herds of wildebeests were massing, waiting for the right moment to dive off a small cliff and swim across. What the animals saw waiting for them was a long line of trucks, a metal fortification.

“I want a picture!” said a woman hoisting her camera.

“My God, I want them to come down!” said her companion.

An hour passed. Another hour. The wildebeests were not migrating. A Maasai driver grumbled that obviously there were too many trucks. A man pressed binoculars to his face.

“See, it looks fine to us, but to them, something’s not right,” he said.

He wondered if it was crocodiles. They waited. A woman took a nap. Then some wildebeests began moving downriver, opposite some gaps in the otherwise solid wall of trucks. And then one hurled itself over the cliff in heroic fashion, and soon they were all diving.

“They’re flying!” someone said.

The animals were flailing, tumbling, and splashing down into the river, swimming for their lives, and now engines were cranking as trucks roared toward the crossing point, wedging into every open gap.

“We got ’em!” yelled a woman holding up a camera, and as far as anyone could see, the view was wildebeests, river, trees, and the grassy savanna beyond—no cows, no goats, no Maasai herders, no people at all, except the ones beholding the spectacle they’d been promised.

What they could not see was a tall man in blue track pants and a pink-and-purple plaid shawl herding sheep across a rocky path, trying not to think about how his knees hurt, his ankles hurt; trying to forget about all that had come before now.

Songoyo reached the first market, where he did not sell the sheep but picked up some more animals for another client and kept going, heading for Aitong.

It was late afternoon when he began crossing the Maasai Mara—the Kenyan national park—with only a stick for protection because bows and arrows are not allowed in the park. He hustled the sheep through the bush, past thorns, under branches, over sharp rocks and soft grass. He saw zebras. He saw giraffes . At one point, he saw a lion, which began following him, then another, coming closer and closer, and as he began to think that this would be how his life ended, a tourist truck came speeding along the road and scared the lion away, and he took off running with the sheep until he came upon elephants—“So, so many elephants,” he said—and managed to dodge those, too.

He kept walking, trying to stay alert. The night was moonless and very dark. After some hours, he reached the edge of the park and saw a boma—a cultural boma, as it turned out, the kind set up for tourists, where Maasai act out versions of the life now being extinguished—and asked if he could sleep there, but the people at the park said that was against the rules, even though welcoming him would have been the true Maasai way. So he waited outside a while and then entered anyway, lying down in a corner. It was cold, and he felt himself becoming sick.

He reached Aitong the next morning but still didn’t sell the sheep, and this meant he would have to press on another 50 miles to a town called Kilgoris. By now he was so exhausted that he decided to sleep, and this was when, as he put it, “evil came during the night,” in the form of a hyena that killed five of his sheep, two of which belonged to the new client. When Songoyo called to tell him, the man told Songoyo that he would have to repay him for the animals. Songoyo told him he didn’t have any money. The man said in that case, he would have to work without pay. Songoyo set off for Kilgoris, now in debt.

He walked along a dirt road as trucks blasted him with fumes. He walked across one farm after another. He felt so hungry. At times he knelt on the ground and said, “God, can you see this?,” then got up and kept going. Another farm. A man who gave him water. A man who yelled at him to get off his land. A tree where he took a nap. His dreams lately were of cows grazing in lush grass, and of dying. More hours crossing an area that belonged to a rival pastoralist tribe, sneaking along the edges and behind stands of trees, feeling like a thief, he said, feeling like he had no place to be in this world. He kept going like that, across more land that was not his.

The land Songoyo considered his was now part of the new Pololeti Game Reserve . That was what Osero had become. The government had constructed a gate bearing the name along the main road into the area, not far from where Songoyo’s boma had been, and when the Dubai royal family was not around, tourists could pay a fee and go inside.

“As far as you can see, all this is now Pololeti,” said a Maasai driver who had grown up on the land and been away from it for a year, ever since the violence. “I feel like crying.” The only reason he was able to go inside now was that I had hired him as a guide.

What he saw was miles and miles of a particular grass that was good for cattle, at the moment so tall and golden. “If your cows are weak and they eat this, in two days they will stand,” he said, driving ahead.

He saw the yellowing tops of grasses that zebras favored, and thick, wetter grasses that wildebeests favored. He saw some impalas in the distance and said, “I wish to see my goats there,” because they would usually graze together.

He saw wiry red oat grasses, and thick swirls of cattail grasses, and here was the kind of acacia with bark that helped with nausea and there was the tree with large, rough leaves useful for sanding down a staff. He saw lavender morning glories used for tissues, and a sacred stream whose water was used for ceremonies. He smelled the familiar scent of bush mint in the cool afternoon, and heard such a strange quiet without the bells of cows.

“In this area, in the evening, you’d see so many cows,” the driver said, and soon he reached a clearing where it was possible to see grass pressed into faint circles.

“Over here used to be houses,” he said.

“Over here, there used to be more than 20 bomas,” he said, continuing on.

“Here used to be a boma, because you can tell the difference between this grass and the other grass,” he said. “We always have soft-soft.”

He navigated by trees he remembered and small hills he knew by heart.

“Here was a very large boma—you can see the fence,” he said, pointing to some scattered branches with thorns. He continued on.

“Over here was the Pyando family,” he said, passing a certain spot in the grass.

“The Kairungs were here,” he said, but it was hard to tell.

“Here were the Saing’eus,” he said, pointing to black weeds that grew where cow dung had been.

Here lived the Purengeis and the Ngiyos. The Kutishos, the Oltinayos, the Kikanais, the Mungas. A whole world that would soon be gone with no trace.

The driver turned and headed back toward the gate, noting a road that led up to a compound on the mountain, where the emir could look down and enjoy one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth, with no cows or bomas or red shawls obstructing the view.

“Just imagine,” the driver said, and soon he was passing a line of white beacons.

“Oh, our land,” he said, exiting through the gate, wondering what would become of all the life that had been here.

One answer was taking shape 5,000 miles to the north, in the United Arab Emirates, at a place called Sharjah Safari park. It had been open a year, a project sponsored by an Emirati royal who wished to re-create the experience of a real African safari. It was an hour’s drive from the Dubai airport, out along a smooth, straight highway lined with green palms and bright-yellow marigolds, past mirrored skyscrapers, many mosques, discount strip malls, a crematorium, camels, and miles of desert.

At the entrance was a concrete elephant. The $75 gold package entitled visitors to tour 12 distinct African landscapes with animals procured from Africa itself, and on a 70-degree December day, tourists climbed into a modified Land Cruiser that whisked them through a series of metal gates.

“Savanna,” the tour guide said as the first gate slid open to reveal some fake termite mounds, some half-dead acacia trees, and a living waterbuck. “Ngorongoro,” she said as another gate slid open, revealing a few gazelles and four white rhinos. “Serengeti,” she said, and on it went.

Soon the tour arrived at the last exhibit: “Boma.” At the end of a curved path lined with grass was a collection of round structures made of cement, not mud and dung, with wooden doors and thatched roofs. There was a corral with goats and donkeys. And here and there were signs with cartoons explaining life in this place. One of them included a drawing of a man. He was wearing a blue-plaid shawl. His features were simply drawn, and he stared blank-faced from the confines of a rectangular wood frame.

When he saw the low mountain range, Songoyo felt a burst of energy, knowing he was near home, such as it was, the place where he was trying to start over. He crossed the clearing with the smooth rocks, and soon he arrived at a grassy slope, and there were the remnants of the larger corral he’d torn down, and there was the smaller one he’d built for the goats and the cow he still could not buy, a circle of sticks with jackets and plaid shawls drying on top. There was a mud-walled house, and a child running out of it.

His wife made him some tea. He gave her money for the market. He’d made roughly $20 on this trip, but of course he was now in debt for the sheep the hyena had killed. They discussed which neighbors were still around. So many had left. Then Songoyo went outside to check on his seven goats.

He looked inside the corral. Four, he counted. Another two were running around outside, so that made six. He kept looking. He walked to where the old corral used to be, then back to the new corral. No goat. He began walking faster, looking around the house. Still no goat. He walked farther out into the grass, seeing nothing, becoming more alarmed.

“Where’s the other one?” he said. “There is one missing!”

His wife came outside and began looking too. He ran out beyond a thorn fence and into the taller grass, now frantic, scanning the landscape for all that he had left of a vanishing life he loved and still wanted.

He kept looking, and finally he spotted the goat. It was sitting in the grass. As he came nearer, he saw that it was injured. A back leg was bloody, and seemed to have gotten stuck in some thorns. Songoyo knelt down to examine the wound more closely. He was a Maasai man without a cow, in debt, getting skinnier, and now he was shaking his head.

“Who did this?” he shouted, expecting no answer.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Great Serengeti Land Grab.” Stephanie McCrummen can be reached at [email protected] .

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Internet Traffic Dipped as Viewers Took in the Eclipse

Internet traffic dropped by 40 percent or more during the eclipse in states in the path of totality, including Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio, Cloudflare found.

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By Jenny Gross

As the moon blocked the view of the sun across parts of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Monday, the celestial event managed another magnificent feat: It got people offline.

According to Cloudflare, a cloud-computing service used by about 20 percent of websites globally, internet traffic dipped along the path of totality as spellbound viewers took a break from their phones and computers to catch a glimpse of the real-life spectacle.

The places with the most dramatic views saw the biggest dips in traffic compared with the previous week. In Vermont, Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio — states that were in the path of totality, meaning the moon completely blocked out the sun — internet traffic dropped by 40 percent to 60 percent around the time of the eclipse, Cloudflare said.

States that had partial views also saw drops in internet activity, but to a much lesser extent. At 3:25 p.m. Eastern time, internet traffic in New York dropped by 29 percent compared with the previous week, Cloudflare found.

The path of totality made up a roughly 110-mile-wide belt that stretched from Mazatlán, Mexico, to Montreal. In the Mexican state of Durango, which was in the eclipse zone, internet traffic measured by Cloudflare dipped 57 percent compared with the previous week, while farther south, in Mexico City, traffic was down 22 percent. The duration of the eclipse’s totality varied by location, with some places experiencing it for more than four minutes while for others, it was just one to two minutes.

The total solar eclipse concluded off the eastern coast of Canada. At 4:35 p.m. local time, traffic in the province of Prince Edward Island was down 48 percent.

Jenny Gross is a reporter for The Times in London covering breaking news and other topics. More about Jenny Gross

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Given the choice —

Report: people are bailing on safari after dma makes changing defaults easier, indie browsers report significant spikes in users in the past month..

Ashley Belanger - Apr 10, 2024 5:15 pm UTC

Smaller web browsers are gaining traction in the European Union after the Digital Markets Act (DMA) started requiring designated gatekeepers like Google and Apple to make it easier to switch default web browsers on devices.

Previously, tech giants were able to lock users into setting their own browsers as defaults—or at least make it complicated to update the defaults—offering the majority of users their own browsing services for free while collecting data used for ad-targeting. This, the EU feared, kept users from switching to defaults that offered superior or more private web browsing experiences.

Reuters collected data from six companies, confirming that, when presented with a choice screen, many EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options. And because iPhones have a larger market share than Google-branded phones in the EU, Apple is emerging as the biggest loser, Reuters reported, noting that under the DMA, "the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari."

Some indie browsers are benefiting more than others from users shifting away from Safari. In the month since the DMA took effect on March 7 , the Cyprus-based Aloha Browser told Reuters that its total users in the EU spiked by 250 percent in March. In Belgium, Aloha users increased threefold, Aloha said in a press release .

Aloha attracts about 10 million monthly average users globally by promising "total privacy." The company profits from paid subscriptions to premium features like "advanced VPN and privacy-oriented AI," instead of from tracking users for invasive ad-targeting, the press release said.

Aloha does not and has "never collected, stored or monetized any user data of any kind, making Aloha the only major browser that does not receive any money for user data," Aloha CEO Andrew Frost Moroz said in the press release, adding that "we were not surprised to see this increase."

"By enacting these regulations, the EU has done two things: They've cut down on some of big tech's monopolistic practices, and they've made consumers more aware of their choices in the tools they can use online," Frost Moroz said. "And many of those consumers are clearly saying they want to take back control of their digital privacy and personal data."

At least five other browsers have also benefited, Reuters reported, confirming that Norway's Vivaldi and Opera, Germany's Ecosia, and US-based Brave and DuckDuckGo all reported increased users after the DMA took effect. Jan Standal, Opera's vice president, did not share specific numbers but said that Opera is experiencing "record user numbers in the EU right now."

While these numbers are encouraging for smaller browsers hoping to gain a larger market share in the EU, some browser companies have criticized Apple and Google for "slowing the migration of mobile users to new browser choices" by rolling out "slow and clunky" updates, Reuters reported.

Vivaldi CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner directly criticized Apple's process for swapping default browsers as "just so convoluted that it's easiest for (users) to select Safari or potentially some other known name." The CEO told Reuters that Apple only displayed the required choice screen—currently "curated for each of the 27 countries in the EU" and "showing up to 11 browsers in addition to Safari"—when users clicked on Safari and said Apple failed to provide useful information about alternative choices.

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Google takes another bite out of Apple, offering Find My Device for Android phones even if they're offline

• Google on Monday announced its enhanced Find My Device feature for Android phones is now available.
• Using a crowdsourced network of Androids, the feature can find your device even if it's offline.
• The release narrows the gap between Android and iOS "Find My" capabilities.

After missing its original summer 2023 release target, Google announced Monday that its enhanced Find My Device feature is now available for Android phones and tablets.

The feature leverages Bluetooth technology across a network of over a billion Android devices to help users find their misplaced devices — even if they're offline. Pixel 8 and 8 Pro devices have the added benefit of being able to be located even if they've been powered off, according to a Google press release .

When participating devices in the network report the location of a Bluetooth tag or device, the location is end-to-end encrypted and can only be viewed by the missing device's owner.

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"With end-to-end encrypted location data, Google cannot decrypt, see, or otherwise use the location data," a Google blog post about the security features of the tracking experience reads.

Google's new feature narrows the gap between Android and iOS "Find My" capabilities , bringing the industry closer to alignment in smart device's abilities to be tracked down when they've gone missing.

Expect an additional release and update to the Find My Device app in May that will enable the ability to locate everyday items like keys or luggage as long as they're equipped with a tracker tag from Chipolo and Pebblebee, Google said in its press release. The tags will be compatible with both Android and iOS alerts that notify users of unwanted tracking, with new compatible tags from Eufy, Jio, and Motorola set to be released later this year.

A spokesperson for Google pointed Business Insider to official blog posts regarding the enhanced Find My Device experience and its security features but declined to comment further on the release.

A representative for Apple declined to comment on the new Android feature when reached for comment by Business Insider.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

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