At the WWDC 2017 event held in early June, Apple announced the next release of macOS operating system for the Mac and MacBook products, labeled as macOS High Sierra. MacOS 10.13 High Sierra, due to release in this fall, brings some new features and useful refinements to built-in apps including Safari, Photos, Mails and more.
In the preview of macOS High Sierra, we can see that a series of new features are coming to the Safari web browser. One of the most welcomed features could be the auto-play blocking, which prevents unexpected and unwanted videos with audio from auto-playing, and that helps users browser in peace. The feature is enabled by default for all sites in macOS High Sierra developer beta, yet you can also modify the per-site settings in Safari to enable specific sites to auto-play media when visiting them.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention is a new WebKit feature introduced into Safari for Mac to reduce cross-site tracking and third-party cookies. The similar function appeared in iOS 11 under the Safari setting “Try to Prevent Cross-Site Tracking”. Apple have found that numerous trackers behind popular websites were silently collecting user data, which make the browsing experience increasingly sluggish.
To solve this issue, Safari now employs machine learning to help identify advertisers and others who track users’ online behavior and to remove cross-site tracking data they leave behind, without affecting the helpful cookies like those containing localized or login data. The feature increases user privacy and boost overall browsing speed.
Safari also introduces personalized browsing settings for individual websites. Users can easily customize page zoom, text size, location services, notifications, camera, microphone, content blockers and more, on a per webpage basis.
Besides, the Safari Reader mode is automatically activated for web articles that support this mode, allowing users to browse websites without ads, navigation and other distractions.
According to Apple, its current version of Safari is fastest web browser in macOS when compared with Chrome and Firefox (in its words, Safari is the world’s fastest desktop browser), yet it is expected to be faster in browsing speed and higher in battery efficiency running on the comprehensively-updated macOS High Sierra.
What feature(s) do you expect most in the upcoming macOS 10.13 High Sierra?