Safari wants to fix your broken internet browsing experience with its new ‘distraction control’ feature
Apple doesn’t appear to have packed all of its new Safari features into its jam-packed WWDC 2024 keynote in June, as it just announced “one more thing.” Along with updates to Reader, a new web page summarization tool called Highlights, and Viewer (to make watching video less of a chore), Apple also wants to help clean up web pages.
Safari, called Distraction Control, now lets you select elements on a web page, like a pop-up asking you to enter your phone number for a coupon code. You can hide the pop-up and remember to hide it.
The app will be available for Safari on macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18 starting this fall (September through October 2024), but developers are getting the app now as beta 5 of those operating systems rolls out.
Like Reader, Apple wants to make its new feature as simple as possible. You start by navigating to the smart search bar, clicking and selecting “Hide Distracting Items.” You can then select items on a web page that you want to hide. Once you select it, the item floats away, becomes invisible, or turns into magical Safari stardust.
While you can click an “X” or hit the escape key to close most pop-ups or content overlays on the web, the advantage of this feature is that it has memory. So if you navigate to J.Crew to shop for button-downs and close the email or phone number entry with Distraction Control, it will remember that the next time you open it on your Mac. You’ll know it’s working if you don’t see the pop-up, but there will also be a glowing icon in the search bar. Additionally, you can easily show hidden items.
This feature doesn’t sync across platforms, though. If you hide content in Safari on your Mac, it will remember it the next time you use the browser on that device, but it won’t sync to your iPhone on iOS 18 or iPad on iPadOS 18. You can use it on all of Apple’s devices, though, because it’s built in.
No ad blocker
Since we haven’t tried the new feature yet, there’s a chance you can hide other elements. It’s not necessarily designed to hide ads – although you can already bypass them with this Reader – but it doesn’t work on content overlays or changing popups. Distraction Control isn’t designed to hide promotions or ads.
Once we get to try it out in the latest developer beta, we’ll be curious to see what elements can be hidden and how many, since it supports more than one. Of course, as with all features in the developer beta, expect some bugs, and even aspects of the interface or controls may change before this is rolled out to all users.
Apple isn’t powering this feature with AI – neither general artificial intelligence nor the special flavor of Apple Intelligence. Instead, Safari has some built-in intelligence that allows it to read a web page and recognize when the content changes or adapts.
Distraction Control joins Highlights, Reader, and Viewer in the latest developer betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, and will be available when the operating systems ship to all users later in 2024. You’ll need to be running the standard version of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, or macOS Sequoia developer beta to play with it, as there’s no new developer beta for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, or macOS Sequoia 15.1 yet.
Unlike Apple Intelligence, there are no specific device requirements here. If your iPhone has iOS 18, your iPad has iPadOS 18, or your Mac has Sequoia, you’re already good to go.
A few changes in Photos
Additionally, developer beta 5 of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia will also bring some changes to Photos, which already has a major upcoming redesign. It mirrors the Control Center and home screen to some extent, and offers a lot of customization options.
With Beta 5, the Recent Days tab, which lets you swipe through captures grouped by date, will no longer integrate saved content, and the Carousel view is gone altogether. The All Photos view will now better display your entire library, and albums will now automatically appear higher on the page for heavy users.
