Apple added Distraction Control to the Safari web browser in the iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia 15 betas released Monday. The new feature allows users to remove elements they find irritating or distracting from web pages.
Some have called Distraction Control an ad blocker. It’s not. Or certainly not a very good one.
Safari Distraction Control isn’t an ad blocker
An ad blocker is software added to a web browser to automatically remove advertisements from web pages. Many people use them, even though the only reason so many websites are free to use is because ads pick up the costs of producing and hosting the site’s content.
When Apple seeded iOS 18 beta 5, iPadOS 18 beta 5 and macOS Sequoia 15 beta 5 to developers Monday, some people were quick to label the new Distraction Control feature an ad blocker. But it’s missing nearly all the features of one.
True, the addition to Safari does allow users to hide advertisements. But this must be done manually, one at a time. And the change doesn’t carry through to other pages from the same site. For example, you can read a news article on a website and remove all the ads from the webpage. Switch to another article on the same site, and there’s nothing hidden on that page. All the ads are back.
That’s not how a real ad blocker works. They detect adverts and remove them automatically on every web page.
Not only ads
Distraction Control is not limited to scrubbing advertising. Just about anything on a webpage can be labeled distracting and hidden, including images, embedded videos and even paragraphs of text.
Apple seems to intend the new Safari feature to be just what the name describes: Distraction Control. If there’s something on a website you find distracting, you can hide it.
It would perhaps be more accurate to describe the Safari Reader built into the web browser many years ago as an ad blocker. It allows users to view a copy of web pages with everything but the text and images stripped out. And even Reader isn’t a very good ad blocker.
Using Safari’s new Distraction Control feature
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac
In the just-released betas of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia 15 — at this point available only to developers — Distraction Control is activated by tapping in Safari’s Address Bar and selecting Hide Distracting Items. Next, tap on the item on the web page you want to hide. It’ll be outlined in blue, with a button labeled Hide. Tap the button and the item will disappear in a cool cloud effect.
Just note that iOS 18 beta 5, iPadOS 18 beta 5 and macOS Sequoia 15 beta 5 mark the first appearance of Safari Distraction Control. The feature could change substantially before the public release of these operating systems this autumn. Apple could even remove it entirely.
