useragent safari ios

The latest user agents for Safari

Apple's Safari web browser runs on mobile devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches) and macOS computers. Depending on which platform you're using (or want to pretend you're using!) the user agent will be a bit different.

Here we have the latest user agents for Safari on mobile and computer platforms.

Unlike some other popular browsers and platforms, we've noticed that Safari definitely seems to have less "extra" stuff in its user agent - standard Safari will never announce the exact model number of the device being used, and there's generally much less additional fragments added by installed addons/apps - toolbars and so on.

That said, you're welcome to explore our huge listing of various Safari user agents to see the different variations of user agents.

Latest Safari on macOS User Agents

Latest safari on ios user agents, special notes, safari on ios 13.

You may have already noticed, but Safari on the latest version of iOS (version 13) no longer includes fragments to indicate that Safari's running on iOS... instead the user agent is indistinguishable from the desktop version of macOS.

As such, it's not possible to provide valid sample user agents for them any more.

Build numbers and OS version numbers

Test it out.

You can use our User Agent Parser page to try out different user agent varieties, or to test if your user agent switcher is working properly.

Database of user agents

If you're interested in our database of many millions of user agents, please check out our API which provides access to our user agent database . You can perform very detailed and specific queries on it to find user agents that match your exact criteria - version numbers, hardware types, platforms and so on.

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Useragents.me

Last updated: 30 april, 2024.

A self-updating list of the latest and most common useragents seen on the web across all device types, operating systems, and browsers. Data is always fresh, updating weekly.

This user agent list is perfect for web scrapers looking to blend in, developers, website administrators, and researchers.

The most common useragents list is compiled from the user logs data of a number of popular sites across niches and geography, cleansed (bots removed), and enriched with information about the device and browser.

Most Common Desktop Useragents

Most common mobile useragents, latest windows desktop useragents.

• Latest Mac Desktop Useragents

Latest Linux Desktop Useragents

Latest iphone useragents, latest ipod useragents, latest ipad useragents, latest android mobile useragents, latest tablet useragents.

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An updated list of the most common useragents on the web, specifically the most common desktop useragents. You can see the relative share of each useragent included in the data table below. Hint: scroll sideways if you're viewing this page on a mobile device.

Get useragent list as JSON or TSV

Get the most common desktop useragents list conveniently in JSON format

Get the most common desktop useragents list conveniently in TSV (tab separated values) format

An updated list of the most common useragents on the web, specifically the most common mobile useragents. You can see the relative share of each useragent included in the data table below. Hint: scroll sideways if you're viewing this page on a mobile device.

Get the most common mobile useragents list conveniently in JSON format

Get the most common mobile useragents list conveniently in TSV (tab separated values) format

A complete list of the absolute latest Windows (desktop) useragents.

Latest Mac OS X Desktop Useragents

A complete list of the absolute latest Mac OS X (desktop) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest Linux (desktop) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest iPhone (mobile) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest iPod (touch mp3 player) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest iPad (tablet) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest android (mobile) useragents.

A complete list of the absolute latest tablet useragents.

About useragents.me

Useragents.me was created for web scrapers to give them quick and easy access to a list of the latest and most commmon useragents. Many similar lists have appeared in the past before us, but which have been quickly forgotten about and left to die.

Useragents.me is run and developed by someone working directly in the business of web scraping and who uses the site himself daily. Furthermore it's designed to be self-sustaining, self-updating, and low mantinence — meaning it will be a resource you can trustfully rely on for years.

What can I do with the useragents listed here?

The useragents listed here are most commonly used by web crawlers and web scrapers who want to mask their requests.

How often is the list of most common user agents updated?

The list of most common useragents (both desktop and mobile) is updated every week (specifically, on Sunday nights).

What is my current useragent?

As far as we can see, it's:

What is the difference between the most common and latest useragents listed here?

• The most common useragents list is a list of useragents that were observed accessing a set of sites in a given period of time. If you need to scrape a large number of pages and want your scraping requests to 'blend in', you can likely safely use this list in rotation to be successful.
• The latest useragents list is a list of the absolute latest useragents for a specific browser and device type. If you don't have a large scraping task (and so don't need to rotate useragents), you can likely safely use just one of these.

When should I use a mobile or desktop useragent?

Some sites will give you different content depending on the device you're using, so you should select the user agent with the correct device type for the task.

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Browser detection using the user agent

Serving different Web pages or services to different browsers is usually a bad idea. The Web is meant to be accessible to everyone, regardless of which browser or device they're using. There are ways to develop your website to progressively enhance itself based on the availability of features rather than by targeting specific browsers.

But browsers and standards are not perfect, and there are still some edge cases where detecting the browser is needed. Using the user agent to detect the browser looks simple, but doing it well is, in fact, a very hard problem. This document will guide you in doing this as correctly as possible.

Note: It's worth re-iterating: it's very rarely a good idea to use user agent sniffing. You can almost always find a better, more broadly compatible way to solve your problem!

Considerations before using browser detection

When considering using the user agent string to detect which browser is being used, your first step is to try to avoid it if possible. Start by trying to identify why you want to do it.

Look, or ask, in specialized forums: you're unlikely to be the first to hit this problem. Also, experts, or people with another point of view, can give you ideas for working around the bug. If the problem seems uncommon, it's worth checking if this bug has been reported to the browser vendor via their bug tracking system ( Mozilla ; WebKit ; Blink ; Opera ). Browser makers do pay attention to bug reports, and the analysis may hint about other workarounds for the bug.

Your site needs to use a specific Web feature that some browsers don't yet support, and you want to send those users to an older website with fewer features but that you know will work. This is the worst reason to use user agent detection because odds are eventually all the other browsers will catch up. In addition, it is not practical to test every one of the less popular browsers and test for those Web features. You should never do user agent sniffing. There is always the alternative of doing feature detection instead.

This is usually a bad practice, but there are some cases in which this is necessary. In these cases, you should first analyze your situation to be sure it's really necessary. Can you prevent it by adding some non-semantic <div> or <span> elements? The difficulty of successfully using user agent detection is worth a few disruptions to the purity of your HTML. Also, rethink your design: can you use progressive enhancement or fluid layouts to help remove the need to do this?

Avoiding user agent detection

If you want to avoid using user agent detection, you have options!

Feature detection is where you don't try to figure out which browser is rendering your page, but instead, you check to see if the specific feature you need is available. If it's not, you use a fallback. In those rare cases where behavior differs between browsers, instead of checking the user agent string, you should instead implement a test to detect how the browser implements the API and determine how to use it from that. An example of feature detection is as follows. In 2017, Chrome unflagged experimental lookbehind support in regular expressions , but no other browser supported it. So, you might have thought to do this:

The above code would have made several incorrect assumptions: First, it assumed that all user agent strings that include the substring "Chrome" are Chrome. UA strings are notoriously misleading. Then, it assumed that the lookbehind feature would always be available if the browser was Chrome. The agent might be an older version of Chrome, from before support was added, or (because the feature was experimental at the time) it could be a later version of Chrome that removed it. Most importantly, it assumed no other browsers would support the feature. Support could have been added to other browsers at any time, but this code would have continued choosing the inferior path.

Problems like these can be avoided by testing for support of the feature itself instead:

As the above code demonstrates, there is always a way to test browser support without user agent sniffing. There is never any reason to check the user agent string for this.

Lastly, the above code snippets bring about a critical issue with cross-browser coding that must always be taken into account. Don't unintentionally use the API you are testing for in unsupported browsers. This may sound obvious and simple, but sometimes it is not. For example, in the above code snippets, using lookbehind in short-regexp notation (for example, /reg/igm) will cause a parser error in unsupported browsers. Thus, in the above example, you would use new RegExp("(?<=look_behind_stuff)"); instead of /(?<=look_behind_stuff)/ , even in the lookbehind supported section of your code.

This design technique involves developing your website in 'layers', using a bottom-up approach, starting with a simpler layer and improving the capabilities of the site in successive layers, each using more features.

This is a top-down approach in which you build the best possible site using all the features you want, then tweak it to make it work on older browsers. This can be harder to do, and less effective, than progressive enhancement, but may be useful in some cases.

Arguably the most common use and misuse of user agent sniffing is to detect if the device is a mobile device. However, people too often overlook what they are really after. People use user agent sniffing to detect if the users' device is touch-friendly and has a small screen so they can optimize their website accordingly. While user agent sniffing can sometimes detect these, not all devices are the same: some mobile devices have big screen sizes, some desktops have a small touchscreen, some people use smart TV's which are an entirely different ballgame altogether, and some people can dynamically change the width and height of their screen by flipping their tablet on its side! So, user agent sniffing is definitely not the way to go. Thankfully, there are much better alternatives. Use Navigator.maxTouchPoints to detect if the user's device has a touchscreen. Then, default back to checking the user agent screen only if (!("maxTouchPoints" in navigator)) { /*Code here*/} . Using this information of whether the device has a touchscreen, do not change the entire layout of the website just for touch devices: you will only create more work and maintenance for yourself. Rather, add in touch conveniences such as bigger, more easily clickable buttons (you can do this using CSS by increasing the font size). Here is an example of code that increases the padding of #exampleButton to 1em on mobile devices.

As for the screen size, use window.innerWidth and window.addEventListener("resize", () => { /*refresh screen size dependent things*/ }). What you want to do for screen size is not slash off information on smaller screens. That will only annoy people because it will force them to use the desktop version. Rather, try to have fewer columns of information in a longer page on smaller screens while having more columns with a shorter page on larger screen sizes. This effect can be easily achieved using CSS flexboxes , sometimes with floats as a partial fallback.

Also try to move less relevant/important information down to the bottom and group the page's content together meaningfully. Although it is off-topic, perhaps the following detailed example might give you insights and ideas that persuade you to forgo user agent sniffing. Let us imagine a page composed of boxes of information; each box is about a different feline breed or canine breed. Each box has an image, an overview, and a historical fun fact. The pictures are kept to a maximum reasonable size even on large screens. For the purposes of grouping the content meaningfully, all the cat boxes are separated from all the dog boxes such that the cat and dog boxes are not intermixed together. On a large screen, it saves space to have multiple columns to reduce the space wasted to the left and to the right of the pictures. The boxes can be separated into multiple columns via two equally fair method. From this point on, we shall assume that all the dog boxes are at the top of the source code, that all the cat boxes are at the bottom of the source code, and that all these boxes have the same parent element. There a single instance of a dog box immediately above a cat box, of course. The first method uses horizontal Flexboxes to group the content such that when the page is displayed to the end user, all the dogs boxes are at the top of the page and all the cat boxes are lower on the page. The second method uses a Column layout and resents all the dogs to the left and all the cats to the right. Only in this particular scenario, it is appropriate to provide no fallback for the flexboxes/multicolumns, resulting in a single column of very wide boxes on old browsers. Also consider the following. If more people visit the webpage to see the cats, then it might be a good idea to put all the cats higher in the source code than the dogs so that more people can find what they are looking for faster on smaller screens where the content collapses down to one column.

Next, always make your code dynamic. The user can flip their mobile device on its side, changing the width and height of the page. Or, there might be some weird flip-phone-like device thing in the future where flipping it out extends the screen. Do not be the developer having a headache over how to deal with the flip-phone-like device thing. Never be satisfied with your webpage until you can open up the dev tools side panel and resize the screen while the webpage looks smooth, fluid, and dynamically resized. The simplest way to do this is to separate all the code that moves content around based on screen size to a single function that is called when the page is loaded and at each resize event thereafter. If there is a lot calculated by this layout function before it determines the new layout of the page, then consider debouncing the event listener such that it is not called as often. Also note that there is a huge difference between the media queries (max-width: 25em) , not all and (min-width: 25em) , and (max-width: 24.99em) : (max-width: 25em) excludes (max-width: 25em) , whereas not all and (min-width: 25em) includes (max-width: 25em) . (max-width: 24.99em) is a poor man's version of not all and (min-width: 25em) : do not use (max-width: 24.99em) because the layout might break on very high font sizes on very high definition devices in the future. Always be very deliberate about choosing the right media query and choosing the right >=, <=, >, or < in any corresponding JavaScript because it is very easy to get these mixed up, resulting in the website looking wonky right at the screen size where the layout changes. Thus, thoroughly test the website at the exact widths/heights where layout changes occur to ensure that the layout changes occur properly.

Making the best of user agent sniffing

After reviewing all of the above better alternatives to user agent sniffing, there are still some potential cases where user agent sniffing is appropriate and justified.

One such case is using user agent sniffing as a fallback when detecting if the device has a touch screen. See the Mobile Device Detection section for more information.

Another such case is for fixing bugs in browsers that do not automatically update. Webkit (on iOS) is a perfect example. Apple forces all of the browsers on IOS to use Webkit internally, thus the user has no way to get a better more updated browser on older devices. Most bugs can be detected, but some bugs take more effort to detect than others. In such cases, it might be beneficial to use user agent sniffing to save on performance. For example, Webkit 6 has a bug whereby when the device orientation changes, the browser might not fire MediaQueryList listeners when it should. To overcome this bug, observe the code below.

Which part of the user agent contains the information you are looking for?

As there is no uniformity of the different part of the user agent string, this is the tricky part.

Browser Name and version

When people say they want "browser detection", often they actually want "rendering engine detection". Do you actually want to detect Firefox, as opposed to SeaMonkey, or Chrome as opposed to Chromium? Or do you actually want to see if the browser is using the Gecko or the WebKit rendering engine? If this is what you need, see further down the page.

Most browsers set the name and version in the format BrowserName/VersionNumber . But as the name is not the only information in a user agent string that is in that format, you can not discover the name of the browser, you can only check if the name you are looking for exists. But note that some browsers are lying: Chrome for example reports both as Chrome and Safari. So to detect Safari you have to check for the Safari string and the absence of the Chrome string, Chromium often reports itself as Chrome too or Seamonkey sometimes reports itself as Firefox.

Also, pay attention not to use a simple regular expression on the BrowserName, user agents also contain strings outside the Keyword/Value syntax. Safari & Chrome contain the string 'like Gecko', for instance.

[1] Safari gives two version numbers: one technical in the Safari/xyz token, and one user-friendly in a Version/xyz token.

Of course, there is absolutely no guarantee that another browser will not hijack some of these things (like Chrome hijacked the Safari string in the past). That's why browser detection using the user agent string is unreliable and should be done only with the check of the version number (hijacking of past versions is less likely).

Rendering engine

As seen earlier, in most cases, looking for the rendering engine is a better way to go. This will help to not exclude lesser known browsers. Browsers sharing a common rendering engine will display a page in the same way: it is often a fair assumption that what will work in one will work in the other.

There are three active major rendering engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. As sniffing the rendering engines names is common, a lot of user agents added other rendering names to trigger detection. It is therefore important to pay attention not to trigger false-positives when detecting the rendering engine.

Rendering engine version

Most rendering engines put the version number in the RenderingEngine/VersionNumber token, with the notable exception of Gecko. Gecko puts the Gecko version number in the comment part of the User Agent after the rv: string. From Gecko 14 for the mobile version and Gecko 17 for the desktop version, it also puts this value in the Gecko/version token (previous version put there the build date, then a fixed date called the GeckoTrail).

The Operating System is given in most User Agent strings (although not web-focused platforms like Firefox OS), but the format varies a lot. It is a fixed string between two semicolons, in the comment part of the User Agent. These strings are specific for each browser. They indicate the OS, but also often its version and information on the relying hardware (32 or 64 bits, Intel/PPC for Mac, or x86/ARM CPU architecture for Windows PCs).

Like in all cases, these strings may change in the future, one should use them only in conjunction with the detection of already released browsers. A technological survey must be in place to adapt the script when new browser versions are coming out.

Mobile, Tablet or Desktop

The most common reason to perform user agent sniffing is to determine which type of device the browser runs on. The goal is to serve different HTML to different device types.

• Never assume that a browser or a rendering engine only runs on one type of device. Especially don't make different defaults for different browsers or rendering engines.
• Never use the OS token to define if a browser is on mobile, tablet or desktop. The OS may run on more than one type of device (for example, Android runs on tablets as well as phones).

The following table summarizes the way common browser vendors indicate that their browsers are running on a mobile device:

In summary, we recommend looking for the string Mobi anywhere in the User Agent to detect a mobile device.

Note: If the device is large enough that it's not marked with Mobi , you should serve your desktop site (which, as a best practice, should support touch input anyway, as more desktop machines are appearing with touchscreens).

Chromium Blog

Changing the chrome on ios user agent for request desktop site.

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User Agent in Safari on iPadOS

During authentication flow in Safari, we have a case when in order to satisfy a condition policy, user needs to install the app on his device. Depending on the OS, we ask him to install different applications. Since on iPadOS User Agent in Safari is same as on MacOS Catalina, what is recommened way to distinguish OS on server side?

Safari : Mozilla/5.0 ( Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15 ) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0 Safari/605.1.15

MacOS Catalina:

Safari : Mozilla/5.0 ( Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_0 ) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.100 Safari/537.36

I have a similar situation as antrix1989 where our webclient determines if a user is browsing via an iPad with JavaScript and alters/restricts the content. We can then market our clients to a subscription on/with our native iOS app. Would be super helpful if the User Agent stated it was iPad OS instead of Mac OS X:

so a regex match could be done to fairly certain determine a user was on iPad.

Hopefully this will change closer to or after the release?

Any update on this? Will the issue be solved before ios13 is released? I'm facing the same issue on iPads.

In our case we use the user agent to detect if the browser belongs to a mobile device.

This is important because on mobile devices we set our web application to listen the touch events such touchstart, touchend, etc, to drag some elements. But currently we cannot subscribe to those events since we cannot detect it is a mobile device.

Somebody in another forum suggested me to verify if Safari browser is not set to show the desktop version of the web site. I'll check that today. But I think this is still an issue because even if user agent is retrieved as the desktop device, mouse events are not being emulated by safari.

I opened Settings -> Safari -> Request Desktop Website -> All websites. That option is enabled by default. I disabled it and the proper User Agent is now displayed.

Mozilla/5.0 ( iPad ; CPU OS 13_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

IMO it should be disabled by default and if a user enables it a modal window should be displaying indicanting not all web sites will be supported properly. Or maybe you may consider to add the iPad word to the first user agent to allow us to detect if it is an ipad emulating safari desktop or enable mouse event emulation, because I think when it is released several websites will fail.

I have the same issue with one of our sites, we render certain functionality for mobile devices (ipad included) based on the user agent.

The workaround esteban26 suggested works, but it's not ideal if it's enabled by default, It would be great if Apple considers adding the iPad word, or any other identifier to the user agent string.

Agree this should be disabled by default. The current user-agent lies about both the OS and the chipset (Intel vs Arm)

I had submitted a request to add a User Agent change function similar to the Desktop. On my desktop, there are some enterprise web apps speicifally look at browser versions and break on the latest version even though the app would work perfectly fine. I've done this several times where I change the Safari user agent to Chrome or IE11 and apps function just fine. It's just one more thing that would release corporate users from a desktop.

We have same issue here, certain functinalities are dependent on iPad word as well. I also expecting also Apple added back iPad or other keyword to identify iPad.

I have a similar situation.

Any solution or update ?

Again we need some way of determining an iPad

FYI, I submitted feedback/bug report via the Feedback app on the iPad back on July 3rd, 2019. Apple responded on the 19th wanting specific details/steps on how to reproduce the error... I gave specific steps on how to view the user agent via the safari developer console and have yet to hear back from them. The feeback app is reporting "More than 10" recent similar reports and the resolution is still "Open".

Starting to think they're not concerned about this.

Hopefully it will be resolved before launch.

This will impact thousands of our users 😟

Any news on this?

This is a problem for one of our application which is provided for major clients.

Would there be any meta tag which if present by default will launch the site in mobile?

Anyone else have any update on this?

Hi Antrix1989,

from what I've observed another way to load a mobile version of a given website on iPadOS is to ensure that the browser's width is compact. To achieve this you must use the multi-tasking feature and place safari in a popup or split paned with another app such that Safari now has compact width.

This doesn't work for me running iOS 13.1.2 on iPad. I turned "Request Desktop Website On All Websites" OFF and UserAgent still reports "Macintosh".

Is there something obvious I'm missing here? I am shocked this isn't causing complete chaos with all the web apps out there.

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User agent changer for Safari

katagaki/Unagent

Folders and files, repository files navigation.

A Safari extension to modify the user agent per website.

Download: App Store

Why I built this

There wasn't any user agent changer per website on the App Store at the time I started developing this extension, and using a separate browser/app on iOS to do web searches was troublesome.

Since Safari supports the web extensions manifest, I decided to port bing-chat-unblocker-chrome and build it for iOS and macOS.

Development

• Basic user agent selection
• Per site settings
• Custom user agents

To build Unagent, open the project in Xcode and build it.

Follow the instructions to change the signing identity when necessary.

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Apple to unveil AI-enabled Safari browser alongside new operating systems

Safari getting new AI tools in iOS 18

The software — expected to debut as Safari 18 later in 2024 — is currently undergoing evaluation alongside internal builds of Apple's next-generation operating system updates, namely iOS 18 and macOS 15, according to people familiar with the matter. Should all of the new features make it to the release candidate stage, users will be treated to a new user interface (UI) for customizing popular page controls, a "Web eraser" feature, and AI-driven content summarization tools.

Intelligent Search - AI-enhanced browsing and text summarization

Engineers evaluating the latest builds of Safari 18 can find a toggle for the new page controls menu within the browser's address bar. The menu consolidates — and provides quick access to — old and new page control tools, among them being the browser's new "Intelligent Search" feature.

This feature is not automatically enabled in test builds of Safari 18 and instead requires manual activation from the page controls menu. Once enabled, it's believed the tool leverages Apple's on-device AI technology — specifically the Ajax language-learning model — to identify topics and key phrases within a webpage for which to base the summarization.

In selecting key phrases, Apple's LLM software identifies sentences that provide explanations or describe the structure of objects, depending on the text in question. Words repeated within a text and key sentences are recognized as text topics.

These early indications suggest Apple is striving to deliver text summarization alongside Safari 18 later this year, though the exact implementation of this feature remains fuzzy.

Apple's text summarization features could be a response to rival generative AI tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. But Apple's on-device models and technologies like Private Relay could make the experience much more secure for users. Intelligent Search is also likely to be the same AI browser assistant that one X user hinted at a couple of weeks back.

Web Eraser for better content-blocking

Also accessible from the new page controls menu is a feature Apple is testing called "Web Eraser." As its name would imply, it's designed to allow users to remove, or erase, specific portions of web pages, according to people familiar with the feature.

The feature is expected to build upon existing privacy features within Safari and will allow users to erase unwanted content from any webpage of their choosing. Users will have the option to erase banner ads, images, text or even entire page sections, all with relative ease.

The erasure is said to be persistent, rather than limited to a browsing session. This means that Safari will remember the changes even after the original tab or window has been closed.

When visiting a web page with previously erased content, Safari will inform the user that the page has been modified to reflect their desired changes. The browser will also give the user the option to revert changes and restore the webpage to its initial, unaltered state.

As for where Apple got the inspiration for Web Eraser, the company could have Sherlocked the feature from the third-party app 1Blocker. The application features a similar way of erasing ads, where users would tap ads to make them disappear.

Updated UI will move key tools into one easy location

The new page controls menu referenced throughout this article will attempt to offer Safari 18 users quick and easy access to several options previously located across different menus and the Share Sheet. Running on pre-release versions of macOS 15, for instance, the menu also pulls in the "Aa" menu common on existing iPadOS versions of the browser. These include zoom options, webpage settings for privacy controls, content blocking options, extension shortcuts, and access to the new AI and erasure tools.

These various options existed previously on macOS, but were found by navigating through the Safari settings menu. Having all of these controls in one central location in the Address Bar will make these options more discoverable for end users. Other options like on-page text search and reader mode are also in this menu.

This all suggests Apple intends to unite the iPadOS and macOS Safari UI paradigms when it unveils its new OS releases during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

AI-enhanced Visual Lookup feature could be available in 2025

Simultaneously, Apple is also working on a much more powerful visual search feature scheduled for integration sometime in 2025 that will allow users to obtain information on consumer products when browsing through images. People familiar with the tool say it's similar to the Visual Lookup feature, through which Siri can identify plants, pets and landmarks from photos.

Visual Search could be implemented as a system-wide feature. So, instead of surfacing search results in the Photos app, the user may be able to use Visual Search directly in Safari by selecting an image.

Given development of this tool is in the earlier stages, it remains unclear how Apple will ultimately go about implementing it. It also remains to be seen whether or not the feature will make it through internal testing.

The iPhone maker has expressed significant interest in artificial intelligence and more recently published research related to on-device language learning models. This goes hand in hand with widespread rumors about several other AI-powered software features, many of which are expected to make their debut later this year with iOS 18.

Another big year for Safari

From its inception, Safari was always meant to rival existing web browsers.

Safari was originally added to macOS as a means of replacing Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac, which was the default browser. Over the years, the app made its way to the iPhone , and has since received various upgrades over the years.

More recent versions of Safari provide users with personalized web suggestions, and allow for greater privacy protection with features such as iCloud Private Relay.

This latest set of enhancements only serves to better position Safari against the competition, in an ever-increasing landscape of generative AI tools and third-party ad-blockers.

While Apple tests many such features during different development stages, it is important to remember that not all of them make it to release. Apple has been known to delay features or cancel them entirely, so there's always a chance we may not see these new Safari features after all.

Along with Safari 18 and its associated improvements, we should also see a revamped Calculator with Math Notes make its way to iPadOS 18. Freeform Scenes and Adaptive Voice Shortcuts are new OS features, which are also expected to debut later this year.

Apple is expected to introduce various AI-related enhancements as part of iOS 18 and macOS 15, both of which should be announced at the company's annual WWDC on June 10.

36 Comments

"As for where Apple got the inspiration for Web Eraser, the company could have Sherlocked the feature from the third-party app 1Blocker. The application features a similar way of erasing ads, where users would tap ads to make them disappear." They may also have been inspired by Simplified Page....

As long as I can turn it off/hide it they can knock themselves out. 

Will the web eraser feature remove pop up videos, such as the ones that appear on this site?

I use the 'Reader' function in Safari quite a bit, but sometimes it doesn't work very well. Seems like something that AI could help make better. 

Web ads suck but how else do you think your favorite websites will stay in business? Are you prepared to pay a subscription to every site? I doubt it…

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New iOS 18 leak reveals how Apple's AI will transform Safari and Siri

Published on May 3, 2024

• A new report sheds light on specific AI features Apple may roll out in its next iOS update, improving core apps like Safari and Siri.
• On-device text analysis seems to be a major focus, potentially enabling features like quick website summaries and smarter Siri interactions.
• Apple’s commitment to privacy remains evident, with the report suggesting that much of the AI processing could happen locally on your device.

The buzz surrounding Apple’s major AI push with the iPhone 16 series and iOS 18 has been building for months. Now, we might finally have a first look at what we can expect from Apple’s AI deployment.

In a detailed leak, Apple Insider has revealed key details about the AI-powered upgrades that Apple is planning across its core iOS applications. These updates, aimed at Safari, Spotlight Search, Siri, Mail, and Messages, promise to elevate the user experience while preserving privacy — a key factor in Apple’s AI strategy.

According to the report, a major feature in Apple’s AI development is a lightning-fast, on-device generation of complete sentence responses. The ‘Ajax’ LLM reportedly analyzes text input at incredible speeds, offering multiple potential replies ranked by accuracy and relevance.

Text analysis will be a cornerstone feature, with the built-in LLM identifying keywords and phrases for succinct text summaries within both Safari and Messages. Apple’s upcoming Safari 18 update may introduce a new ‘Intelligent Search’ feature that would allow users to generate concise summaries of web pages.

Apple’s AI model also demonstrates remarkable integration with the device and its apps, identifying contacts mentioned in a text and pulling relevant information from the Calendar app to craft contextually appropriate responses. Siri will likely benefit from this, as it will be able to analyze Messages content and potentially offer simplified summaries or responses.

Of course, more complex tasks like creative text generation or in-depth text analysis might still rely on some cloud processing, which aligns with previous reports of Apple exploring partnerships with OpenAI and Google for the same.

Apple Insider further reports that even within testing environments, the software shows a clear dedication to user privacy. The company aims to minimize cloud-based processing, ensuring that sensitive data remains protected.

It’s anticipated that Apple will formally unveil these AI-powered features at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) later this year.

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