Distraction Control: In new iOS 18 beta, Safari lets you hide annoying parts of web pages

If you’re looking to switch to Safari but just need that one special feature to give you a push, we might have just the thing: Distraction Control.

It’s a new feature for Safari that went live in the latest iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia developer betas (via MacRumors) — somewhat surprisingly, we might add, as Apple hasn’t previously announced it.

The idea is simple: With Distraction Control, you can hide “distracting” parts of web pages. It’s not an ad blocker, meaning it will not remove dynamic ads from a page. Think of it more as a way to get rid of some really annoying part of a web page that you frequent, like a login prompt. It is persistent, though; if the item you hid didn’t change, it will remain hidden even if you reload the page.

To try it out, open a web page in Safari, tap on the Page Menu icon (the one in the upper left corner), and then tap on “Hide Distracting Items”. You then have to manually choose the part of the page you want to hide. As you do so, Apple will warn you that “hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that update frequently.”

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Bonus: applying the feature does not only remove it from sight, but blows it away with a pretty cool animation. Well done, Apple.

Hiding parts of webpages manually might sound like a tall order, and it probably is in many cases, but I can imagine this feature being useful to someone who has a fairly small number of websites they really love, and just wants to have the best possible experience there.

Distraction Control is currently only live in the latest developer betas, which are rolling out to eligible users now; the feature is not available in the public beta yet, though I imagine it will happen pretty soon.