Safari

Apple describes the current Safari enhancements on its Apple Intelligence page, and they are organisational rather than conversational.

Tabs can be grouped into topics automatically, so a research session that ballooned into forty open pages sorts itself into clusters. Notify Me monitors a page and alerts you when its content changes — a price, a restock, an updated status. And Apple has extended the ability to create extensions that personalise how a website looks or automate repetitive Safari actions, described from a natural-language starting point rather than written by hand.

Alongside those, from earlier releases: Highlights, which pulls out the key details of a page, and a redesigned Reader that offers a summary and table of contents for long articles. Writing Tools work in any text field, so rewriting a paragraph in a web form does not require leaving the page. And Safari's translation stack — whole-page translation, plus translation of text inside images and paused video via Live Text — is one of the better implementations anywhere, running through Apple's on-device models.

An assistant. There is no sidebar you can open and ask "what is this page arguing?" There is no page-grounded question answering, no comparison of open tabs, no agentic browsing, no model picker. Every one of those exists in Brave, in Chrome via Gemini, and in the newer AI-first browsers, and none of them exist in Safari.

If that is what you came for, the practical answer is an extension. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all publish Safari extensions, and adding one to a browser you already like is almost always a better decision than migrating your bookmarks, passwords and habits to a browser you do not.

This is the part most reviews skate past. Apple Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro, an iPhone 16 or later, an iPad mini with A17 Pro or an M-series iPad, an Apple silicon Mac, or Apple Vision Pro. It needs about 7GB of free storage for the models. Device and Siri languages must match, and only 16 languages are supported as of the 26.1 releases. Devices bought in mainland China are excluded.

A large share of active Apple devices fail those requirements, which means a large share of Safari users have exactly none of the features described above and no upgrade path other than buying a phone.

Where Safari does have a defensible position is in how the AI runs. Apple's architecture prefers on-device processing and routes what it cannot handle locally through Private Cloud Compute, with commitments about not retaining request data. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention blocks third-party cookies by default and hides your IP from known trackers — protections Apple publishes a direct comparison table against Chrome for.

For a certain kind of user, that combination — capable browser, restrained AI, no advertising business underneath — is worth more than a chat sidebar. That is a legitimate position and Safari serves it better than anything else.

Since Safari has no assistant, the realistic way to get one is an extension, and it is worth being precise about what that gets you. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all publish Safari extensions that add a panel, page context and a chat interface. What you gain is the capability Apple has not built. What you lose is the privacy architecture that is Safari's main argument — page content goes to that provider under their terms, not through Private Cloud Compute.

That trade is the actual decision in front of a Safari user, and it is a cleaner one than switching browsers. Bookmarks, passwords, iCloud tab sync and extensions all stay where they are; if the extension disappoints, you remove it.

Worth stating because it is why most Apple users stay. Apple publishes its own benchmark claims — the world's fastest browser, roughly 45% faster than Chrome at loading frequently visited sites, up to five more hours of video streaming on a charge — and those are vendor figures, but the battery advantage on Apple silicon is widely corroborated by independent testing.

Then there is tracking prevention: third-party cookies blocked by default, known trackers denied your IP address, unique tracking parameters stripped from URLs in Private Browsing, and extensions prevented from seeing your browsing without permission. Apple publishes a direct comparison table against Chrome on those points. It is a browser that competes on restraint, and the AI story is consistent with that even when it is frustrating.

Judge Safari as a browser and it is excellent: fast, efficient on battery, private by default, and free with hardware you already own. Judge it as an AI product and it is thin, hardware-gated, and conspicuously unmarketed even by Apple.

The sensible move for most Apple users is to keep Safari and add an assistant extension for the page-chat features Apple has not built. The sensible move for anyone who wants AI woven through their browsing is to accept that Apple is not currently building that browser, and to look at Brave, Chrome or one of the AI-first challengers instead.