Safari on iOS 26 is a mess, but you can fix some of it

This is a bigger issue with drop-down or multiple choice menus. You get one big Liguid Glass panel with all the options you have to tap on. No separators between them or anything. When you tap something, you get no indication of where your finger landed — you just hope you were accurate until Safari loads up whatever it was you were going for.

You can fix some of this in Settings

Thankfully, Safari does allow for some customization within Settings. Just go to Apps -> Safari and scroll down for the Tabs options.

If you were used to the way iOS 18 had the address bar and all navigational buttons at the bottom of the screen, switch to the Bottom option. Though that does add a huge chunk of interface at the lower end of the screen.

The classic look with the address bar on top and nav bar on the bottom seems the most balanced to me — choose the Top option to try it out.



While you are here, go to the Open Links menu and choose “In Background”. This will stop Safari from constantly changing what you are looking at every time you decide to open a link in a new tab. By definition, we do that because we are not done with our current tab, yes?

Speaking of fixes — if you’ve been annoyed by how some of Safari’s translucent elements become hard to see, depending on the website content behind them, you should download iOS 26.1. Now, there’s an option where Liquid Glass can be a bit more tinted and opaque, making things across the entire interface a bit more legible. Though, it will lose some of that shiny luster.

In general, it was a step in the wrong direction

It’s wild that, in 2025, Safari doesn’t give us a “New tab” button at the very face of the interface. If you look at Google Chrome on mobile, you will see the “+” button right next to your address bar — because it makes sense, and every other operating system has it there. iPadOS, macOS, Windows, Android — no matter what you are using, you have been “taught” that New Tab is just a click away!

But OK, let’s say the minimalist approach has some appeal to it. Safari is meant to have a “swipe-first” type of interface, and it’s a legitimate way of implementing it, considering the way we interact with smartphones. For example, if you are swiping on the address bar to swap between tabs, swiping all the way to the right will always open a new tab, and apparently that’s how you are meant to do it.



Still, it doesn’t make sense that in iOS 26’s Safari, the “All Tabs” button is in the bottom-right corner of the screen, but after you access it, the “New Tab” button is in the bottom left. It’s a very “Un-Apple” thing that the interface element for “New Tab” is on the left side when tapping, but to swipe to a new tab, you have to go to the right-most side.

And, if you are old school, and you want to tap your way to “New Tab”, it requires two to three taps to do so, and said taps are located on the opposite ends of the screen. Almost as if Apple makes sure you are not going to open a new tab… by mistake? Is that a fatal error I should be worried about?

Also, I think it’s silly that “Open in New Tab” doesn’t put that new tab in the background by default. As stated before — this is the very reason we choose this option in the first place.

Do you use Safari on your iPhone, or have you been tempted to switch to Chrome, Opera, or something else as a default go-to browser?