iOS 18: In New iPhone Beta, Apple Neatly Improves Web Browsing

There’s a play by Vaclav Havel (the poet and president of the Czech Republic) called The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. It’s a long time since I read it, but the title is what continues to speak to me. The latest developer beta software for the iPhone (as well as for the iPad and the Mac) also touches on this theme with a brand-new feature: Distraction Control.

Even the name is reassuring, and this is what it does. You know how you’re visiting a website and things happen that you don’t mean to, like pop-up windows, sign-in banners or other content overlays? Annoying, right?

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Distraction Control is designed to hide such stuff when you’re using Safari, whether on the Mac, the iPad or the iPhone. Even the name of the feature sounds alluring.

When I spoke to Apple it was clear that it’s not designed to permanently remove ads. Well, you can almost hear advertisers sigh with relief, even if the rest of us quietly groan.

Anyway, this is about clearing the screen of other unwanted items and as such is very welcome.

It’s a new addition to the arsenal of features Safari offers and which will be at their most advanced in this fall’s general releases. These include Highlights, which let you see relevant information from a website more easily, and improvements to Reader, so that it can provide a summary and a table of contents for an online article.

Distraction Control is the newest extra. Go to the Smart Search field, find the Page menu and click on Hide Distracting Items. Now, one person’s unwanted distraction is another’s visual sustenance, but Apple tries to ensure that there are fewer items between you and the thing you’re, you know, trying to read.

The first time you use it, a notification pops up confirming that areas which frequently change content will not be hidden, like those ads. Then, you select the bits you don’t want to see—nothing happens without the user’s proactive choice—and it disappears.

This is all done on-device, so hiding content on a website on your Mac does not perform the same trick on your iPad. But, I asked, what happens when you return to the same page later? Does it remember that you invoked Distraction Control next time? Apple tells me that it does.

So, this seems like a useful addition, and if you change your mind, it’s undone easily. A blue icon in the search field tells you items are hidden and you can click the hide icon and choose “Show Hidden Items” for them to reappear.

Though that may be all you need to remind you how much nicer things are when there are fewer distractions.

This new feature is part of the fifth developer beta of iOS 18, but not part of the current iOS 18.1 beta.

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