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: 07 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, or Intel/PPC for Mac).

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).

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.

Rumor: iOS 18 to include new ‘Safari browsing assistant’ AI feature

iOS 18 is rumored to include a number of new artificial intelligence features spread across the entire operating system. A new rumor today suggests that one of those features could be “Safari browsing assistant.”

As for what that means, we are left to speculation for now…

Safari browsing assistant rumored for iOS 18

In a post on social media today, code sleuth Nicolás Álvarez shared two new features in the works at Apple:

• Safari browsing assistant
• Encrypted visual search

According to Álvarez, both of these features use Apple’s Private Relay infrastructure to send data back to Apple. Álvarez speculates that this is a privacy-preserving practice on Apple’s part, so it doesn’t learn user IP addresses. Of note, iCloud Private Relay is currently only available to iCloud+ subscribers.

( Update : Álvarez says that it’s not actually iCloud Private Relay but rather an “Oblivious HTTP gateway.”)

Apple already offers different visual search-style features, integrated into Spotlight and the Photos app. It’s not explicitly clear if “encrypted visual search” is just a more secure version of existing features or something new entirely.

The more interesting thing here is the “Safari browsing assistant” feature. Based solely on the name, this feature sounds like it will bring AI features of some sort to Safari, similar to what other browsers already offer. Microsoft’s Edge browser, for example, has different Copilot AI features built in. Arc from The Browser Company also combines a variety of AI features with web browsing.

Bloomberg reports that Apple is likely to team up with a company such as Google to power some of its new AI features. We aren’t expecting any announcement from Apple about a partnership until WWDC at the earliest.

iOS 18 is expected to be announced at WWDC, which kicks off on June 10. Check out our in-depth guide for more details on what to expect from AI in iOS 18 .

Álvarez has also reported that iOS 18 will bring two new features to Apple Maps on iPhone, including custom route creation and new topographic maps.

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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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Apple's 'AI or bust' push to continue with Safari Assistant in iOS 18

Coming in iOS 18: - "Safari browsing assistant" - "Encrypted visual search" Both features seem to use the Private Relay infrastructure to send data to Apple (so that they don't know your IP?). — Nicolás Álvarez (@nicolas09F9) April 10, 2024

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iOS 18 rumored to have a mysterious Safari Browsing Assistant feature

An iPhone running iOS 17

Apple is a few months away from introducing the new features it will be including in iOS 18 at WWDC 2024. As the rumor mill ramps up ahead of the event, two new features have surfaced that could improve how users browse the internet.

According to Nicolas Alvarez on X, the features are titled "Safari browsing assistant" and "Encrypted visual search." Alvarez doesn't go into detail about the features of each, but does say that they each appear to use the Private Relay infrastructure to send data to Apple.

Though actual details of the features remain unknown, the names do at least offer some hint as to what they could be.

Coming in iOS 18: - "Safari browsing assistant" - "Encrypted visual search" Both features seem to use the Private Relay infrastructure to send data to Apple (so that they don't know your IP?). — Nicols lvarez (@nicolas09F9) April 10, 2024

The Safari Browsing Assistant could is naturally linked to Safari itself, but the name may mean some sort of intelligent help could be summoned for users trying to accomplish tasks. Since Apple has been working on AI and machine learning, there's a good chance the technologies will be in play here.

The other, Encrypted Visual Search, could be an evolution of existing search systems available in its operating systems. For example, Spotlight does allow for the content of images to be found, while Visual Look Up offers more information about items detected in images.

Alvarez is uncertain as to what exactly is being changed with Encrypted Visual Search, other than "better privacy" for users. However, Visual Search has also been mentioned in visionOS , albeit not used in the software itself.

It's also entirely plausible that it could be Apple attempting to provide an image-based search system, similar to the function in Google Image Search. But, since Apple doesn't want to offer a full-blown search engine to the public just yet, this seems a little doubtful.

Other recently discovered features include Apple Maps routes , a redesign inspired by visionOS, and more home screen customizations .

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Apple to Introduce AI-Powered Safari Assistant in iOS 18

T he space for browser market competition in Europe increased following regulatory constraints, which means Apple is getting in the race with its newly launched AI-powered instructional assistant that is already embedded in iOS 18.

Safari’s response to competitive pressure

Apple has to accept the installation of alternative browsers and apps as default tools on its iPhones and iPads in Europe, it is facing the daunting task of the crowd-out of Safari browser by others such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other competing versions. To survive, Apple exploits the AI technological capacities, as a part of its AI strategy to merge it in all the products it sells.

The latest betas of the upcoming iOS release, due to the annual WWDC event of Apple in 2024, two new AI capabilities have been detected to be hidden in their codebase. One of these features, Encrypted Visual Search, signals the transition of Safari that will be based on AI-assisted features. The second, “Safari Browsing Guide,” provides evidence of Apple’s goal of integrating AI capacities into the browser’s user experience.

Apple just like Microsoft is integrating AI into Safari across different domains just like they have done through Edge’s copilot which is powered by AI. From the perspective of Apple, this is achieved through smart AI search or chatbot-enabled browsers that seek to enhance user experience and give Apple an edge against competitors.

Leveraging AI partnerships

Apple’s AI integration plan likely would lay its first steps on partnerships with major AI market participants at first. In the US, Apple may encash the May used by Google and OpenAI, but, in China, it may try partnerships with companies like Baidu’s Ernie Bot. This way Appel makes use of the potential of the AI experts across the globe and also enriches Safari with their powers. In connection with the change in emphasis from the concept of the car Apple on the AI by Apple has created the ML toolity-Ferret-AI. 

This AI-based solution is intended to recognize and communicate with native iOS interface components shopping process. AI will get smarter thanks to interaction with users. Since Apple continues to push for AI investment, the roadmap and specifics of the Safari Browsing Assistant’s functionalities and usability, however, are yet to be released. While there’s still uncertainty left to clear up, the faithful Apple fans and Safari users generously look forward to next year’s WWDC where they expect to get more detailed information about the impact of AI technologies on Safari and the overall iOS performance.

AI-powered safari assistant

The move of Apple to release the AI-enabled Safari Assistant contends the company’s vision to stay serious in terms of competitiveness and innovations in the category of browsers. By harnessing the power of AI, Apple intends to carry across the improvement of browsers, distinguish itself from competitors, and remain one of the best companies in the digital sphere. Standing in the shadow of approaching WWDC 2024, all prying eyes are set on the Apple brand that will unleash the next Safari version and its AI capacity.

This article originally appeared in PhoneArena

iOS 18 could bring a Safari browsing assistant, but little is known at this time

Safari Browsing Assistant is rumored to be part of a set of generative AI features thought to be coming to iPhone with the iOS 18 update this fall.

Nicolás Álvarez discovered code on Apple’s servers, indicating that some kind of a browsing assistant is coming to the Safari browser with iOS 18. MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris has confirmed the existence of the code.

Álvarez said the feature appears to use iCloud Private Relay (which requires an iCloud+ subscription) to send data to Apple without compromising user privacy.

iOS 18 rumors ramping up ahead of WWDC24

Little is known at this point how Safari Browsing Assistant might work. It sounds like some kind of an AI-based feature to summarize pages.

We’ll soon know what new features might be coming down the pike when iOS 18 launches this fall. Apple will hold its yearly developer event in a few weeks, kicking it off with a pre-taped keynote broadcast on June 10.

Apple will release the first developer betas of iOS 18 and other updates that afternoon. In July, the betas should be available for testing to the general public.

Apple will continue releasing betas throughout the summer to smooth out the rough edges, eliminate bugs and incorporate feedback from testers. iOS 18 should launch before new iPhones in September.

What to expect from iOS 18?

Other changes in iOS 18 are said to include topographic maps and custom routes , support for the RCS standard in the Messages app for improved chatting between iPhone and Android, the ability to arrange Home Screen icons more freely , hearing aid mode for AirPods Pro and light design tweaks .

The biggest news should be the rumored generative AI improvements across not only Siri but also stock apps and the iWork productivity suite. They could be based on large language models Apple is thought to license from Google  and Baidu .

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