Safari, the built-in web browser on a variety of Apple devices, will not undergo a radical overhaul as part of iOS 18. But even just two major changes to the iPhone's default browser hint at Apple's larger strategy of leaning toward machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The two big additions to Safari in iOS 18 promise to let you skim through web pages and pull out the details you need. In a video from Apple's WWDC 2024, Beth Dakin, Apple's senior manager of Safari software engineering, explains that the idea is to provide "an easier way to discover content and streamline browsing."

Even better, Safari's new features are powered by machine learning, but are not part of the Apple Intelligence feature that will be introduced across Apple devices later this year. This means that the Safari improvements will be available not only on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, but also on the iPhone 16 models to be released later this fall.

With this in mind, here is what to expect from iOS 18 Safari after upgrading to the new iPhone software, whether a full version is released later this year or Apple releases a public beta of iOS 18 in July.

Think of Highlights, the biggest of the two improvements in iOS 18 Safari, as a sort of hyper-focused summary tool. However, rather than simply summarizing the content on a page, Highlights uses machine intelligence to identify important information on a particular page and calls it up in a pop-up window while you browse.

In an example used by Apple in the iOS 18 preview, on a hotel web page, Highlights calls up a window that shows the location of the hotel on a map, plus quick links for driving directions and calling the hotel. Other examples of Highlights include a Wikipedia summary of a person, a playback link for a song, or a summarized review of a movie or TV show.

In Apple's demo, it is unclear whether Highlights will appear automatically in Safari or whether a button must be tapped to pop up the Highlights window; according to a footnote on Apple's iOS 18 overview page, this feature only work on U.S. English-language sites, at least initially.

Safari's Reader tool in iOS 18 also includes a summary feature, allowing users to switch to Reader mode to quickly read an overview of a web page; Reader goes one step further and generates a table of contents for web articles, allowing users to see how the page is organized. Perhaps you want to jump to a specific section of an article. Perhaps it could even jump to a specific section of an article.

The AI tools in Samsung's best phones, Galaxy, have added a summary feature, so it would be good to see this built into iOS 18 as well. A concise summary of a web page you stumbled across will give you a good idea of what the article is about, and a table of contents will make it easier to delve into the parts of the topic you are interested in.

The Reader summary tool appears to be limited to English in the initial release of iOS 18, but regional support is much more extensive. Apple has promised availability in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK, in addition to the U.S.

Safari is available on a variety of Apple platforms, and some improvements available in Safari on other devices are will be provided to the web browser. Specifically, Mac users who upgrade to macOS Sequoia will have a new way to view web-based videos with the new Video Viewer, which automatically detects the presence of videos on a page. into a separate window, and when clicked, the viewer becomes a separate picture-in-picture window.

Along with the addition of Highlights and Reader, Safari on macOS Sequoia also promises improved performance. In fact, according to Apple, the updated Mac version will be the world's fastest browser, with battery life up to four hours longer than Google's Chrome browser when playing streaming video.

Safari has undergone more significant changes in previous iOS updates, but that does not negate the importance of what Apple is doing with iOS 18 Both Highlights and Reader lean heavily on machine learning to power the new summary tools, and iOS 18 Safari simply does not have the stringent system requirements that the Apple Intelligence feature demands, but it does offer a taste of what Apple hopes to offer across the iPhone.