Safari profiles clutter your tabs
Safari profiles can be found in iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and macOS Sonoma and will be available this fall to everyone with a suitable device. Apple will help you better organize open tabs. You can divide the tabs over multiple profiles, so that you can, for example, separate work and private life. You can also use Safari profiles to ensure that two or more people can use the same browser on an iPad. It could be a step towards user profiles on the iPad, but it’s not there yet.
- Why Safari Profiles?
- Safari profiles: this is how it works
- Create Safari profiles
- Switch between Safari profiles
- Safari profiles on Mac
Why Safari Profiles?
Too many tabs open in the browser is a problem. They make your Mac slow and it becomes cluttered. We spend so much time on the Internet and tend to open a new tab for every search that it quickly becomes chaos. You use some for shopping, others for work and perhaps a few to investigate a medical problem. With Safari Tab Groups, Apple has previously tried to bring more order to the chaos. This allows you to organize Safari tabs into groups. In the latest updates to iOS, iPadOS and macOS, Apple goes a lot further: Safari profiles are introduced.
This allows you to keep browsing between different projects or topics separate. Not only are the tabs separated, but also bookmarks and Safari extensions.
Safari profiles: this is how it works
For example, you can create a tab group about shopping in the ‘Personal’ profile. They will then be in a different profile than the tabs and tab groups that you use for your work. This way you can concentrate better on your work and you won’t be distracted by Amazon deals or sports scores.
Tabs opened in different Safari profiles remain almost completely separate. For example, you can log in to a website in one profile, but this does not mean that you are also logged in in the other profile. This way, two users (each in their own Safari profile) can go to the YouTube website and watch with their own YouTube account. You don’t get in each other’s way.
Yet they are not completely separated from each other. You can move a browser tab or tab group between profiles. They are also synced via iCloud, so the profiles you create on the iPhone also appear on the iPad.
Create Safari profiles
To create Safari profiles on your iPhone or iPad, do the following in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17:
- Open the Settings app and go to Safari.
- Scroll down to Profiles.
- Tap New Profile.
- Give the profile a name and icon. These appear as a background color in the tab switcher.
- Then create some more profiles.
Switch between Safari profiles
You can switch between profiles once created. To do this, tap the tab switcher at the bottom right of the screen. You will now see a window with open browser tabs. Tap the tab group switcher in the center and a tab group popup will appear. Here you can switch profiles so that a tab can now be viewed in another Safari profile.
You can view and change a profile’s properties at any time by returning to the Settings app.
Safari profiles on Mac
You can also create profiles in Safari on the Mac. You do this as follows:
- In the menu bar, go to Safari > Settings.
- Open the Profiles tab.
- When you create a profile for the first time, you will see an explanation and you can immediately start creating your first profile.
- Give your profile a name, icon and color. This color will be used as the background on the tabbed overview.
- With the plus sign at the bottom left you can always create a profile again, for example for Study, Work and Personal. You can choose the name yourself.
Besides profiles, it also helps you be smarter with your Safari tabs. You can read more about it here:
- Group your tabs: This is how tab groups work in Safari
- Using favicons in Safari: this is how you get icons on tabs
- This is how you can close Safari tabs automatically
- Sync Safari tabs between iPhone, iPad and Mac
More about iOS 17
iOS 17 is the major update for the iPhone in 2023. If you want to know whether your iPhone is suitable for iOS 17, you will find the suitable models in our article. The most important improvements are the interactive widgets, a new Phone app with a new calling screen, more extensive AirDrop, a new Standby mode when your phone is horizontally connected to the charger and more. Also read our articles with the best iOS 17 features and interesting iOS 17 details and discoveries. The release date of iOS 17 is September 18, 2023. The most recent stable iOS version is iOS 17.1.1.
