Apple's Safari browser will get an AI makeover this year

Apple's getting ready to overuse the AI buzzword just like everyone else has been doing for a while, and the big AI push is also coming this year to Safari, the company's web browser, according to a new report.

The next version of Safari will be AI-infused, and it's expected to launch alongside iOS 18, which means it will most likely be presented at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Safari will get Intelligent Search, which will leverage on-device AI to identify topics and key phrases within a web page you're looking at in order to summarize its contents for you. Apple's large language model (LLM) will identify sentences that provide explanations or describe the structure of objects, depending on the text on the page, and words which are repeated and key sentences will be recognized as topics.

This is said to come in response to (what else?) ChatGPT but of course Apple will deliver its usual twist in that the experience, being on-device, will be much more secure.

Web Eraser will let you remove specific portions of web pages - things like banner ads, images, text, or even entire page sections, with "relative ease". The erasure will be persistent across sessions too, as Safari will remember the changes even after you close the original tab or window.

When you visit the same page again you'll be informed that the page has been modified to reflect your desired changes, and you'll then get an option to revert changes and restore the webpage to its unalerted state if you want.

This sounds a lot like an overcomplicated way to create an ad blocker and use the AI buzzword for that, but ad blockers also do exist, and have predated all these AI shenanigans, so we're not sure what to make of this.

The new Safari will also come with an updated UI, with a new page controls menu giving you easy access to a lot of options that were previously scattered across the UI. Aside from the aforementioned Intelligent Search / Intelligent Browsing and Erase Web Content, this will house other stuff like zoom options, privacy controls, content blocking options, in-page text search, reader mode, and extension shortcuts.

Next year, Apple will integrate a "much more powerful visual search feature" into its browser that will let you "obtain information on consumer products when browsing through images". This is apparently similar to the Visual Lookup feature which lets Siri identify plants, pets, and landmarks in photos.

While all of these things are purportedly already in development, keep in mind that it's not impossible for Apple to delay their launch or cancel some altogether - things that have all happened before.

Source