By: Nick Gambino
A new feature just hit the iOS beta – Distraction Control. This was a surprise to many as the feature hadn’t been previously announced at WWDC or anywhere else. It’s actually a really cool and useful feature that will most likely become popular amongst iPhone users.
Distraction Control is designed to make web browsing on Safari a whole lot easier by removing the things you hate most about it. There’s nothing more irritating than forced pop-ups and redirects that make it tough to visit some websites.
This new iOS feature acts as a barrier wall to keep these annoying assaults out of your web browsing experience. Distraction Control helps prevent things like sign-in windows, little pop-up banners and other things that clutter your screen and ruin the experience.
If you’ve ever been on a low-quality site that is designed to make it hard to read an article either because it’s obscured by graphics or is determined to redirect you somewhere, you know how frustrating this can be.
You can decide to hide distracting items by going to the Safari search field, scrolling down to “Hide Distracting Items” and then tapping it on.
Once you do this, Distraction Control will give you a little “hide” prompt on things like ads, autoplay videos and even cookie preference windows. When tapped, it will disappear the distracting item in a Thanos-esque particle flitter. It’s a bit of a dopamine hit, I’m not gonna lie.
Now to clarify, this is not a permanent ad blocker and is not intended as such. This feature is built to keep distracting elements as well as the occasional ad at bay on the device you’re using.
“Hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that update frequently,” a pop-up notice from Apple reads.
This is currently in beta, but I’m almost positive we’ll see it in the public launch of iOS 18 later this year.
