Your history and bookmarks are stored as normal html web page files in the directory ~/Library/Application Support/Lightning. When the bookmarks page is displayed it is editable like any normal document. Use the "Save Bookmarks" menu item to make your changes permanent. If you would like to add search engines to Lightning, edit the application's setup file config.txt in the directory above. Add the url of your search site with the search term replaced by %@. To clear cookies or to set Lightning to be your default browser you can select it in System Preferences/General.

A note about tabs which sometimes confuse people. Lightning aggressively caches web pages which can be shared between tabs. By analogy when Lightning opens a new web page it effectively uses a new piece of paper to show it rather than erasing the current page and redrawing it. This is why it is so fast returning to previously viewed pages as they just need to be switched back onto the screen rather than redrawn. When you create a new tab this stack of papers with your history is copied and the new tab takes up navigating where the previous one left off.

The usability of the unique "Split View" feature has been considerably improved. Pressing the "Dual Head" icon will split your web view into two halves where links clicked in the left half will generally be displayed on the right hand half. This is useful for working through search results and news sites. Not all sites work in a way that supports this feature however.

The new "site watcher" functionality complements the RSS reader giving you the option of automatically polling individual sites or blogs for changes effectively creating a type of synthetic RSS feed for the site. Differences in the text of the site are displayed in a style you can set in the app's preferences.

Complementary to reader mode is the "Link Viewer" best suited perhaps to idle browsing of Wikipedia. It is activated by either visiting wikipedia.org or using the "Manage/Links Button" menu item. This displays in a graphical form the names of links on a page giving an overview of associations between pages.

The final key new feature is the site analysis function which shows you all the components which are fetched to display a web page. By clicking on the link to display the "tracker report" you can block individual domains which look as if they might be tracking your web browsing for targeted advertising. Open the "Analysis View" by pressing the star shaped icon to the right of the title bar.