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Safari 18 Features: Highlights, New Reader Mode, and Video Viewer

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In macOS Sequoia, Apple has some additional features in Safari 18 that are likely to be welcomed by Mac users. Here's a quick rundown of what's new.

safari-highlights.jpg

Safari's headline feature in macOS 15 is something called Highlights, which aims to make it easier to discover information on the web.

Highlights can be accessed via a new site menu icon that appears in the address bar, from which you can quickly pull up relevant information about a site, such as directions, summaries, or quick links to learn more about people, music, movies, and TV shows.

As of writing this, Highlights does not appear to work outside of the United States, so it is likely to be region-specific at this early state. However, there are other changes to Safari that are live wherever you are located.

safari-18-reader.jpg

The Reader mode in Safari has received an overhaul, and now offers more customization options once you have enabled it on a site using the Reader button in the address bar.

If you click the button again, a dropdown menu lets you change the theme (white, off-white, gray, black) and choose your preferred font (Athelas, Charter, Georgia, Iowan, New York, Palatino, San Fransisco, Seravek, and Times New Roman).

In this menu, you can also find text size options by percentage (from 50% to 300%), as well as a "Find..." option to find a word or phrase on a page, and a button to Hide Reader mode.

Apple says that Reader can also provide a summary of an article, along with a table of contents in a sidebar, but we could not get this to work, likely because it is an aspect of Apple Intelligence, which will not be introduced until later in the year.

safari-video-viewer.jpg

Meanwhile, when Safari detects a video on the page, a new Video Viewer mode puts the media front and center, which allows you to adjust the window without obscuring the video. It also helpfully presents system playback controls within an overlay, including Picture in Picture.

In other Safari-related changes, macOS Sequoia beta adds support for opening links directly in web apps. Now, when you click a link, that link should open in the web app instead of your default web browser. You can also now personalize web apps on Mac with Safari Web Extensions and Content Blockers.

Lastly, Safari 18 beta for iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, macOS Sequoia and macOS Sonoma brings inline predictive text to the web, and you can now set which Safari profile should be used to open particular websites.

Article Link: Safari 18 Features: Highlights, New Reader Mode, and Video Viewer
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/safari-18-highlights-new-reader-mode-video-viewer/
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"Highlights does not appear to work outside of the United States"

Shows up here in the UK

Edit: Maybe not (VPN) :)
 
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>You can also now personalize web apps on Mac with Safari Web Extensions and Content Blockers

That's a small feature, but it has so much impact! It was the only thing I miss to start using web apps.
 
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If you click the button again, a dropdown menu lets you change the theme (white, off-white, gray, black) and choose your preferred font (Athelas, Charter, Georgia, Iowan, New York, Palatino, San Fransisco, Seravek, and Times New Roman).

These functions have been part of macOS for years!
 
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People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
 
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Ad47uk said:
People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
Click to expand...
I do. I was quite happy with it, until I got this weird issue where composing emails in hotmail was so slow that the typing experience was unbearable. Other than that, works all right for me.
 
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Ad47uk said:
People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
Click to expand...
I do. I use the handoff between macOS and iOS a lot, which works perfectly, and I love the feature of automatically filling in 2fa codes for SMS and emails. And it's worked very well, I think Safari has improved a lot in the last few years.
 
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Ad47uk said:
People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
Click to expand...
I still use it.

It feels lighter to me and less of a RAM hog than Chrome (having 300+ tabs (yes, I know I'm insane) would still not be as intensive as 70 tabs in Chrome for me, but maybe I just have bad luck, I don't know).

I could never be able to fit Firefox. For whatever reason, the design just feels... off. (To be clear, I don't hate the design per se (it's a good design). I just can't seem to get myself to... like it for whatever reason.)
 
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Ad47uk said:
People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
Click to expand...
I do since 2006. But since the last maybe 1-2 years, I notice it's crashing quite a lot, on my iPhone at least. Pages need to reload often and I think after 3 times it doesn't want to reload anymore and gives an error. Disabling plug-ins doesn't help, actually I only had Noir and I installed Honey last week.

The thing that's missing which Gemini AI has is "Ask this..." such as "Ask this PDF" or "Ask this webpage". This was one of the features I wanted the most in Apple Intelligence.
 
Ad47uk said:
People still use Safari? I tried it when i first had my Mac, but I could nto get on with it, then I tried it again a few weeks ago, but had problems with some sites not working, so I have gone back to Firefox.
Click to expand...

Safari is still the second-most used browser. Far behind Chrome but also far ahead of Firefox.

IMG_3343.jpg


Of course, most of that is iOS/iPadOS. But even on the desktop, Safari is ahead of Firefox and Safari is not even available on Windows & Linux, unlike Firefox. So yeah... People still use FireFox? :D

IMG_3344.jpg
 
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So these are all of the confirmed changes for Safari on iOS 18? There was a rumor before WWDC about a web eraser. I'm guessing that rumor turned out to be false?
 
dredlew said:
Safari is still the second-most used browser. Far behind Chrome but also far ahead of Firefox.

View attachment 2388104

Of course, most of that is iOS/iPadOS. But even on the desktop, Safari is ahead of Firefox and Safari is not even available on Windows & Linux, unlike Firefox. So yeah... People still use FireFox? :D

View attachment 2388106
Click to expand...
People love Chrome... Never understood why.
 
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All these features seem great. I wish I could use them. But Safari is frequently the one browser that doesn’t work with many of the important websites that I (and my wife) use. So on MacOS, my default browser has been Firefox for the past couple years. Firefox is good, but I wish I could take advantage of new Safari features.

I know the issues haven’t been resolved, because occasionally my wife tries to use the latest Safari on various financial, health-related, or shopping sites — and the same old incompatibilities come roaring back. UI that doesn’t appear (popup blocker off), code that should be running — but doesn’t. We have no 3rd party security programs that would interfere.

Once a month, we’ll even run into a site that’s incompatible with Firefox, and then we have to quickly switch over to Chrome (just for that site) — which always works.

I was always led to believe that some of these issues were due to the design of websites and the components they use not being fully tested or compatible with Safari. But if Firefox and Chrome can get past those issues — Safari should be able to.

I can’t believe we’re the only people that run into these issues. I’ve been a Mac software developer for nearly 40 years — I can’t understand why Apple can’t resolve these incompatibilities.
 
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No fixes to the messy interface? I have no idea where to find stuff anymore. Scattered around the share sheet, under the A button, the refresh button, the extensions menu, third party buttons, …

And there are iCloud tabs, tab groups, profiles, tab group favorites, ….
 
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This is the second place I've seen the "new" reader view features mentioned.

As others have said, they have been around for as long as I can remember.
 
hagar said:
No fixes to the messy interface? I have no idea where to find stuff anymore. Scattered around the share sheet, under the A button, the refresh button, the extensions menu, third party buttons, …

And there are iCloud tabs, tab groups, profiles, tab group favorites, ….
Click to expand...
Don't forget the sidebar!
 
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I want to get into Safari but there are a few things holding me back.

One, the way Safari does tab groups is not good. Much prefer the way Chrome does it. Putting the in a the side bar takes up too much space.

Two, ad blocking seems to better in Chrome. I use uBlock on Chrome and it does a fine job of keeping pop ups/videos from getting out of control.

I guess I want Safari to be more like Chrome if I need to use it.
 
chrisf60647 said:
I want to get into Safari but there are a few things holding me back.

One, the way Safari does tab groups is not good. Much prefer the way Chrome does it. Putting the in a the side bar takes up too much space.

Two, ad blocking seems to better in Chrome. I use uBlock on Chrome and it does a fine job of keeping pop ups/videos from getting out of control.

I guess I want Safari to be more like Chrome if I need to use it.
Click to expand...
Wipr is an ad blocker for Safari that works fabulously and is lightweight!
 
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chrisf60647 said:
I want to get into Safari but there are a few things holding me back.

One, the way Safari does tab groups is not good. Much prefer the way Chrome does it. Putting the in a the side bar takes up too much space.

Two, ad blocking seems to better in Chrome. I use uBlock on Chrome and it does a fine job of keeping pop ups/videos from getting out of control.

I guess I want Safari to be more like Chrome if I need to use it.
Click to expand...
Wipr is a really good ad-blocker for Safari and it only costs $2. And in Safari you can install extensions in the mobile version, unlike Chrome which is unusable on mobile with all the ads.
 
gk_brown said:
Don't forget the sidebar!
Click to expand...
The arbitrary UX separation of certain features is the thing that gets me. Why is Private Browsing not just a profile choice? Why is the tab context menu and drag-and-drop reordering not available in tab thumbnail mode, especially given that Tab Groups is to me the most useful feature Safari has gotten in years?
 
Hope theses features come to iOS / iPadOS + the missing “web eraser”, and multi-language, and without new hardware requirements.

What‘s happens with one of most valuable company (Apple)? Other companies (e.g. Google) support other countries from the first day!
 
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