How to Use Apple's Distraction Control Feature in Safari

With the rollout of iOS 18 this fall, Apple is introducing some big changes to its iPhones: more customization options for home screens, a redesigned Control Center, support for the RCS text messaging standard, and of course a bunch of generative AI features put under the umbrella of Apple Intelligence. Individual iOS apps are getting upgrades too, including Safari, and one of the new features you'll notice in the web browser once you've got iOS 18 installed is the option to remove "distracting" items from a page. It's called Distraction Control, and the idea is you can cut out pieces of a page you're not necessarily interested in, like images or menus. This isn't the Reader mode that reformats pages so only the main text and images are showing (and which itself is getting an update in iOS 18). It's not an ad blocker either, because you won't be able to persistently hide ads or any other frequently updated content. But it is a potentially useful tool to improve the web browsing experience.