“Distraction Control’ feature for Safari”—based on the caveats, I wonder how useful this will be in ‘real life’

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This feature is designed to give users more control over their web browsing experience by making it easy to block certain elements on web pages, such as sign-in popups and other content overlays … Apple says that nothing is proactively hidden with this feature; only items that a user manually selects are hidden … Apple also emphasizes that this feature is not meant to serve as an ad blocker. While a user can technically use Distraction Control to hide an ad on a website temporarily, that ad will re-appear when the page is refreshed or otherwise reloaded. In fact, the first time a user activates Distraction Control, Safari will display a pop-up that emphasizes the feature will not permanently remove ads or other areas of a website that frequently change.

I wonder how tedious this will end up being and how easy it will be for developers to work around this feature. :thinking:

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If a user has to manually select items each time they visit the page, a refresh after 15 seconds tag should do the trick.

This is a nonstarter IMO.

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Don’t give them any ideas! :rofl::wink:

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It’s going to be a useful feature. People already use extensions to do this. There aren’t enough people who block annoying non-ad sections of websites to be worth changing the design just to break their customizations. It’s nice to hide things like huge footers, sidebars, cross-promotions, comments, etc.

“While a user can technically use Distraction Control to hide an ad on a website temporarily, that ad will re-appear when the page is refreshed or otherwise reloaded.”

This is confusing. It just means that if you block some ad whose layout is dynamically generate or rotates out, it won’t stick.

If you block the layout element surrounding the ad, it’ll stay blocked until they update the layout of their site/application so that there’s no longer a match for that blocked element.

But again, ad blockers will do this so much better. The only ads that someone should be blocking with distraction control are more quirky ad placements that haven’t made the blocker lists yet.

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What I’m interested in seeing blocked are the annoying panels to sign up, subscribe, etc. i’m hoping this feature will stop those because my ad blockers are not stopping them.

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You’ll be able to straightforwardly block those if they’re on the page. If they’re popup/overlay modals, you’ll have best results with an extension/app like Stop the Madness.

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I have it installed and activated but I still get the frustrating overlays, etc.

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Here is a short video on the feature:

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