Skip to main content

Safari just trounced Microsoft Edge’s AI features

Highlights feature on Apple Safari
Monica White / Digital Trends

Apple has announced a round of new features for Safari at WWDC 2024, and there’s a lot of AI involved. We knew it was going to happen eventually — Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have been trialing and launching new AI features for a while already.

First things first, the new Safari is speedy. On macOS, it’s “the world’s fastest browser,” so we can expect to get some snappy responses when we’re searching the web. Apple also claims that Safari can stream video for four hours longer than Google Chrome can manage before depleting your battery.

Recommended Videos

Privacy features keep getting improved too, using intelligent tracking prevention to help make “private browsing that’s actually private.” This means that as well as protecting your history, Safari also stops websites from seeing what you’re doing as you browse.

We’ll also be able to find important information quicker with the new Highlights feature. It uses machine learning to identify important snippets of information on the page you’re looking at and display them for you to see easily. This includes information like directions, phone numbers, and summaries — the kind of stuff you want to know quickly, without having to find it. It also gives you quick links to learn more about the people, places, music, and movies mentioned on the page.

Reader feature on Safari with generated summary.
Monica White / Digital Trends

The Reader feature now uses AI to generate summaries too, as well as a table of contents to help you navigate quickly.

Viewer mode in Safari with enlarged video playback.
Monica White / Digital Trends

There’s also a new Viewer mode that also lives in the address bar. When you click it, Safari will detect the video on the page and automatically enlarge it, so you can focus on the content you actually want to see. When you click away from the Safari window, it’ll automatically go into Picture in Picture mode so you can continue viewing without having to adjust anything yourself.

This might be only the beginning of Apple’s plans for AI-powered features in Safari but it’s definitely a subtle start. None of it is too in-your-face and there’s definitely a focus on usefulness, rather than arguable gimmicks like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome’s AI browser theme generators. All of the big browsers have AI-assisted writing features too, but Apple’s isn’t just limited to Safari, it’s available system-wide so you can use it in any application you want.

Willow Roberts
Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…
Sorry, Microsoft — AI isn’t the reason people are buying new laptops
Asus Vivobook S 15 CoPilot+ front angled view showing display and keyboard.

New research by the International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that although AI PCs are selling well and will likely continue to, it's not the onboard generative AI that's driving sales -- it's just the usual refresh cycle.

Companies like Microsoft are aggressively pushing the advantages of generative AI for the average consumer's workflow, but the IDC thinks customers aren't responding to the AI features specifically. People need new PCs on a regular basis -- which we call a refresh cycle -- and since so many of the laptops launching this year are AI PCs, the consumers who need upgrades are naturally just buying what's available.

Read more
This was a huge week for AI. Here are the 5 biggest announcements you need to know
Apple Intelligence and Camera Control.

The race toward achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) continued apace with what felt like a monumental week in the rapid development of AI.

From Apple giving us a taste of its Intelligence to huge advances in AI-generated video, let's take a look at some of the top AI stories from this week.
Apple Intelligence soft launches

Read more
Copilot Wave 2: Here are all the new AI features to try out
Copilot Pages open in a graphic.

Microsoft has announced an update to Copilot, the company's all-in-one AI assistant. "Wave 2," as Microsoft calls it, is a series of updates that gives Copilot more capabilities within popular Office applications, Copilot agents for businesses, and even a new feature called Copilot Pages.

Let's start with Pages first. Microsoft calls it a "dynamic, persistent canvas" that's designed for "multiplayer" collaboration, built right into Copilot. Microsoft has been busy integrating Copilot into most every application imaginable, but think of Pages as a way of allowing you to get more done without having to ever leave Copilot itself.

Read more