iOS 17: How to Separate Your Browsing Habits With Safari Profiles

[MacRumors]

In iOS 17, Safari has gained a new feature called Profiles, which is designed to help separate your browsing sessions into things like Work, School, or Personal. Here's how to use it in the beta and when iOS 17 is released to the general public later this month.

In ‌iOS 17‌, Apple expands on Tab Groups with a Profile feature that is designed to let you separate your browsing for different use cases. You can create a "Work" profile and a "Personal" profile, for example, so all of your work-related browsing is kept separate from your personal browsing.

• How to Install the iOS 17 Public Beta

Each profile gets its own icon and silos your history, Tab Groups, Favorites, Private Browsing tabs, and cookies. You can even assign specific extensions to different profiles to optimize your browsing experience based on the task at hand.

How to Create a Safari Profile

To set up profiles on iPhones running iOS 17, simply follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app on you iPhone or iPad.
2. Scroll down to Safari.
3. Under the "Profiles" section, tap New Profile.
4. Select an icon, name, and background color for the profile.
   Choose your settings for Favorites and New Tabs.
5. Tap Done.

When you create a new profile, your device will automatically generate a "Personal" profile to differentiate other browsing sessions conducted outside of the profile you created.

Both profiles and additional ones you create can be edited in the same section of the Settings app. When editing an existing profile, you can also opt to enable any Safari extensions you have installed on your device, as well as delete the profile if desired.

How to Switch Between Profiles in Safari

1. In Safari, tap the Tabs icon with two overlapping squares.
2. Tap the middle icon to bring up the active profile's menu.
3. Tap the Profile option to change which profile is active.

The Safari Profiles feature is available in iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, as well as being part of Safari 17 for macOS Monterey and macOS Ventura. Any profiles you create will be synced across devices logged into the same Apple ID.

• How to Download Safari 17 Beta for macOS Ventura and Monterey

The new Safari also brings additional privacy functionality, improvements to search, updated Siri integration, and more. A rundown on all of the new features in the ‌iOS 17‌ update can be found in our comprehensive iOS 17 roundup.

Article Link: iOS 17: How to Separate Your Browsing Habits With Safari Profiles

 

[fatTribble]

This looks like a really cool new feature!
I’m just not sure yet how I’ll use it. 🤔

 

[Rygaard]

how about Google maps 5 hours of driving with GPS dont count towards SCREENTIME ??

 

[Feek]

I hope that switching between profiles is nice and snappy.

 

[fwmireault]

I am on the beta, the feature is nicely implemented! You can tie a profile to your focus mode, which is quite useful

 

[Sorinut]

how about Google maps 5 hours of driving with GPS dont count towards SCREENTIME ??

Yes! Let us exempt certain apps from Screentime. Waze for me.

 

[Bobcat32]

Yes! Now I can separate Facebook, YouTube, instagram etc etc into their own echo chamber! I use the desktop sites for all of these on my phone as I prefer to be private and the app permissions are insane!!!! So that’s why. I’m really hoping this keeps things separate.. it gets old constantly going into settings to reset my browsing history/cookies

 

[TheMacDaddy1]

how about Google maps 5 hours of driving with GPS dont count towards SCREENTIME ??

Is that a new feature in Safari?

 

[TheMacDaddy1]

I wish they would bring back Safari for Windows. I have to use Windows at work sometimes and because I do I use Chrome across Mac and Windows.

 

[klasma]

I hope that switching between profiles is nice and snappy.

According to the article it seems a bit cumbersome, four taps to switch profiles.

 

[timmyh]

According to the article it seems a bit cumbersome, four taps to switch profiles.

It's easier in Sonoma:

 

[Leon Ze Professional]

Great article Macrumors and helpful advice!

 

[Rhhk]

Does this mean I can finally allocate unlimited browsing for my son’s schoolwork sites and restrict YouTube to 15 min a day?

Given the inconsistent, unreliable shambles that is Apple screentime, I seriously doubt it…

 

[contacos]

For some reason this does not work for me as expected. I made a "Private" and "Work" Profile but when I open "Work" I have access to my Bookmarks of "Private" or if I delete an Item from my Reading List on the "Work" Profile, it also wipes it from my "Private" Profile. In fact, it seems like the Reading List is shared between all Profiles for some reason! Separate Passwords does not seem to work either. I use a lot of Work related online tools but I dont need to have those log ins saved on my "Private" Profile.

Either I am doing something wrong or this is an half assed execution compared to Profiles on Chrome

 

[lazyrighteye]

According to the article it seems a bit cumbersome, four taps to switch profiles.

Hmm yes. Maybe there’s a way a tap-and-hold on the Tabs icon (bottom right corner) pulls up a list view where Profiles is an option. Then slide up to Profiles to reveal your Profile options, slide over to your desired Profile to deject and release to open in that Profile. Is that even a possible Mo e in iOS’ UX? 🤪

Or maybe the Profiles icon becomes a permanent icon in the bottom nab bar. Touching-and-holding sends Safari into a similar reduced screen state, similar to when you press-and-hold a Lock Screen to then swipe between saved Lock Screen looks. Here, you would swipe between Profiles.

Anyway… I like the idea of designating Safari activities and settings to profiles. My one concern is how quickly I will likely have profiles with a couple hundred open tabs. That could quickly be one a resource hog. As of the writing, I have 275 open tabs in Safari - which is super common. Quick searches can really see the tab count increase. It’s at around 275-300 where I go through and tidy. 🤪

All that said, I look forward to trying Safari Profiles.

 

[Rygaard]

Is that a new feature in Safari?

no but it is another side of the same problem, metrics is worth nothing if your data is bad

 

[klasma]

Hmm yes. Maybe there’s a way a tap-and-hold on the Tabs icon (bottom right corner) pulls up a list view where Profiles is an option. Then slide up to Profiles to reveal your Profile options, slide over to your desired Profile to deject and release to open in that Profile. Is that even a possible Mo e in iOS’ UX? 🤪

Or maybe the Profiles icon becomes a permanent icon in the bottom nab bar. Touching-and-holding sends Safari into a similar reduced screen state, similar to when you press-and-hold a Lock Screen to then swipe between saved Lock Screen looks. Here, you would swipe between Profiles.

Anyway… I like the idea of designating Safari activities and settings to profiles. My one concern is how quickly I will likely have profiles with a couple hundred open tabs. That could quickly be one a resource hog. As of the writing, I have 275 open tabs in Safari - which is super common. Quick searches can really see the tab count increase. It’s at around 275-300 where I go through and tidy. 🤪

All that said, I look forward to trying Safari Profiles.

They could add recently used profiles to the recently closed tabs list.

 

[Nimrad]

which is designed to help separate your browsing sessions into things like Work, School, or Personal.

You mean things like Work, School, Personal and Porn-watching.

 

[gpat]

Enable multiple profiles for every app as well, and I might just switch to iOS.

 

[Populus]

This feature has my interest but I never quite understood it. I’ll read the article thoroughly, but I wanted to ask a couple of things:

1) Are tab-groups shared among the profiles? Or each profile contain it’s own tab-groups? Or are tab-groups gone?

2) Does any cookie or metadata get shared between profiles, or are they secured against “web fingerprinting”?

And 3) Whenever you activate a Safari Profile in one device, do Safari change the profile automatically on the other devices? Without the need of using Focus Modes (I’m not familiar with Focus Modes and I don’t use them).

That’s all!

 

[CarAnalogy]

Looking forward to trying this with work websites to make an "app" folder.

Hopefully they've fixed the issue I've had preventing me from really using it as a work browser, though. We use one web app that launches a local program. Every other browser asked me the first time if I wanted to allow the site to do this, with a checkbox to remember.

Safari asks me every. Single. Time. Same domain, not that complicated, but Safari just will NOT remember that.

Looking forward to installing the .1 release of the updates next month to see all the little improvements (hopefully) like this that they don't talk about.

 

[ProfessionalFan]

It works really well, I find it more seamless than the other browsers which have similar features

 

[Agent OrangeZ]

Why not just give us user profiles for the WHOLE DEVICE? (because that would just make too much sense)

 

[Kingcoherent]

Profiles is about the only reason I use the privacy ******** that is chrome. I really like the fact that it allows you to colour code the whole browser according to profiles. When I do consultancy work for multiple organisations, each with google authenticated logins, it allows me to make sure I know which email/calendar/app I'm in.

 

[Kingcoherent]

Why not just give us user profiles for the WHOLE DEVICE? (because that would just make too much sense)

+1

and to tie them to desktops on MacOS.