Safari Becomes the Best Browser on Mac Beta if You Hate Ads
Like its namesake, Apple’s beta version of Safari 18 can now take a machete to the canopy of ads cluttering your favorite webpage (like this one). Safari lets you read the entire page without seeing any popups, banner ads, video ads, or anything in between, and with Sequoia its getting better. If you’re a Mac user on the latest Mac or iPad beta and don’t want to deal with ad blockers, you should at least give it a spin.
The macOS Sequoia and iPad OS 18 betas are live as of Monday, and if you haven’t yet downloaded it to try it out (remember to back up your computer or else not use your main computer), you’ll find a new button in the URL bar for any page you’re on. Safari detects any site in article format and gets the option for the “Reader” format. And, hey, that includes Gizmodo.com. All you have to do is click on the square icon in the URL bar, then select the “Show Reader” button once it appears.
If you want to watch the video but continue browsing other tabs, click the two right-facing arrows and select “Picture in Picture” mode. This will create a floating video window that you can pause or play. Supposedly, another “Highlights” feature could list relevant page information, such as directions. However, in our tests, that feature did not appear once, even when visiting the site displayed in the macOS Sequoia preview page.
The article then transforms into a simplified format that should maintain images, text, and any in-line embedded links or videos. Gone are any ads or automated video players. If you click on the same button in the URL bar, you can also change the color of the page, the font, and the zoom level. Reader also maintains all the article’s original links, though you’ll need to re-enable Reader on any external page you visit.
It’s fast and—mostly—seamless, and we found a few reasons to read an article the regular way if you’re browsing on Safari. It should work on sites with or without paywalls, though Safari has more difficulty with some sites’ formatting. For instance, Safari failed to load the main images or videos from Bloomberg’s media player.
The feature is much like Firefox’s own Reader mode, but our tests found that Safari’s version maintains both the featured and in-line images far better than Firefox. In Firefox, you’ll occasionally see the automated video players load without any video running in them, but not on Safari. It does the job, though both have some issues. Safari and Firefox have issues displaying text that’s not in your regular paragraph format, such as in boxes or pull quotes. Firefox has one advantage: it can read the text aloud in its best ultra-digitized Microsoft Sam impression.
Safari’s Reader is good enough, though Apple plans to AI-ify Safari with AI-generated summaries of articles in Reader mode. Bing, Chrome, and the smaller Arc Browser already include similar features, though Apple plans to use its “Apple Intelligence” to create a table of contents for the page. Those AI features likely won’t be available until later this year.
Reader can also be a blunt-force way to get around some portion of various sites’ paywalls. We used Reader on multiple pages from The New York Times, which could display a large portion of the text before the page cuts it off. This is less effective on sites like Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, or The Washington Post, which display less text beneath the pay banners before the paywall cuts it off. News site The Information has one of the most notorious paywalls among most news sites, and it seems Safari doesn’t even inspect the page as an article.
There are many other ways of getting around paywalls. Sites like the Internet Archive or 12ft.io can leap over the paywalls on some news sites, but not all. Folks have long been bypassing paywalls with scripts or external sites, so Safari isn’t the best way to access blocked content. Safari 18’s redesign includes a few other highlights that are accessible by the same button. If you’re on a site with a video, such as YouTube, you can hit the button in the URL to bring up the Video Viewer.
