New Safari Design
Although Apple debuted a rather contentious new design for its iPhone Safari browser back in June, it’s made several tweaks since that time, and we think it’s generally much better.
For one, users can now choose whether they want the address bar at the bottom of the screen or back at the top in the more traditional layout. However, those who opt for bottom placement won’t have to suffer through a mess of cluttered buttons, like we saw in the early betas, as the old bottom button bar has also returned. This provides the same quick access to back/forward, sharing, bookmark, and tab overview buttons.
It’s ultimately in the tabs, however, where iOS 15 makes the biggest changes, with the introduction of Safari Tab Groups, which let you organize your tabs in a whole new way, decluttering your main view. Tab Groups sync with your other devices via iCloud, and you can flip between them at any time. This has been joined by a switch to a grid view for open tabs, similar to what Safari looks like on the Mac, rather than the stacked page view from prior iOS versions.
Further, Safari in iOS 15 adds several useful new features such as a customizable start page (which also synced with your iPad and Mac), voice search, and of course, even more privacy features. Safari on iOS will also now support web extensions, although we’ll have to wait for third-party developers to release these before we see how this actually pans out.