Editorials · Reviewer Insight
iOS 27: All the new Safari features and functionalities launching this fall
Here's everything new that will arrive to Apple's Safari browser this fall.
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
Safari is getting more and more user-friendly with iOS 27. | Image by PhoneArena
iOS 27 is coming this autumn to an iPhone near you, but developers and adventurous users alike can already try it out by taking the beta for a spin.
And aside from the new Siri AI that's the highlight of the release, we also got key improvements to multiple stock Apple apps. One of these that got the most love was none other than Safari, the stock web browser that's available on every iPhone out there.
Here's everything new with Safari in iOS 27 and how it could change your daily smartphone usage habits.
Notify Me: Agentic feature for regular folks
Notify me is a new iOS 27 feature that allows Safari to intelligently monitor websites for changes and promptly inform you. This feature requires you to freely input text as to what Safari should be looking out for and is leveraging the power of Apple Intelligence in the background.
For example, the most mundane but useful use cases will have you open an online store and ask Safari to notify you when a certain unavailable item goes back in stock. Or you could ask the browser to alert you if a major part of the webpage is changed.
I sadly missed to get one of these before the latest price hike. | Images by PhoneArena
An important warning, though: Notify Me performs its checks once per day, so don't count on it to immediately alert you once it detects a change. Rely on it for non-critical use cases.
Honestly, this feature is what I'd daydream about as a teen while I was browsing the web with Firefox more than twenty years ago, and was one feature that I could definitely see coming to the browsing experience. It's a bit surprising that it took twenty years for such a useful functionality to become widely available, but it took the rise of AI and Apple ingenuity to bring that functionality to billions of people.
Hope other browsers catch up, as it's a massive quality-of-life improvement.
Automatic Tab Organization: A small but useful addition
Safari can now automatically group similar tabs together. When you open more than four tabs focusing on the same topic, the browser will clearly group them together in such a way that it's obviously clear what the overarching topic is.
By default, this feature is not enabled; you should explicitly turn it on. You can do that by tapping on the three-line menu in the upper-left corner of the tab view screen and selecting the "Automatically Create Topics" option.
Automatic Tab Organization is the type of new feature that Apple was once known for. | Images by PhoneArena
I've certainly seen other browsers do that automatically, but usually on desktop as the feature is a rarity on mobile. The Browser Company's deprecated Arc browser had a nifty "Tidy" button that automatically grouped similar tabs together, and I'm certain other browsers can do that, too. One thing is certain: Sarari scoring such a functionality is a win-win scenario for all the numerous iOS users out there.
Describe an Extension: Vibe-coding in Safari, sort of
Vibe-coding thanks to AI has turned multiple novice people into hobby programists (sort of), and Apple jumps onto the trend in the most user-friendly way possible. With iOS 27, Safari will allow iOS users to vibe-code a Safari extension and have it automatically enrich their browsing experience.
However, the functionality is severely limited and only supports a handful of prompts; you can't really go above and beyond to describe a very complex extension that violates the guidelines. I know what you're thinking, blocking ads and website trackers isn't supported, Most of the supported changes are visual ones.
It feels like Bill Clinton is still in office. | Images by PhoneArena
Going by Apple's suggestions, I described an extension that can change a website's appearance to closely resemble what the web looked like in the glorious 90s. It changes fonts, colors, adds a gracious amount of borders, and injects a lovely amount of palpable 90s buttons that bring a serious blast from the past.
You can either create an extension for a specific site only or make it a more global setting. You can also add further edits to your extension and update it afterwards. For example, I told it to lean onto read and teal more as that's how I remember the web back then, and Safari updated the extension beautifully.
Safari is smoother
One of the ancient memes and inside jokes in the overarching Apple bubble is the "Safari seems snappier" claim. This has been reiterated one way or another since 2001, when the consumer version of MacOS X launched, and everytime, users have jokingly claimed that Safari feels smoother right after an update.
Apple is surely aware of the joke, but either way, a set of performance improvements has arrived to Safari anyway. Ranging from improved power efficiency to faster JavaScript handling, smoother animations and website graphics, as well as page content loading faster, all of these are part of the improvements that Safari is about to score this fall.
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