iOS 17 brings several upgrades to Safari, the iPhone's default browser, and the combination may be enough to set you apart from third-party browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

You'll have to wait until the fall to try these out for yourself (unless you want to try out the iOS 17 developer beta), but thanks to Apple's detailed WWDC 2023 presentation, we already know quite a few of the features that will be added to Safari. These updates should have the cumulative effect of making browsing simpler, more productive, and more secure, and we can't wait to try them out for ourselves.

A summary of the top 7 new features of Safari in iOS 17 can be read below. If you're interested in other incoming updates for your iPhone, you can also check out our guides to FaceTime, AirDrop and the new Journal app in iOS 17.

Apple's biggest announcement for Safari this year is a new profile system. Similar to the iOS-wide Focus mode, profiles allow users to set up individual open tabs, tab groups, history, and favorites. By switching between work and personal profiles, or setting up a profile for each project you are working on, you can easily focus on the task at hand.

Whatever you use Private Browsing mode for, you don't want anyone who happens to look at your iPhone to see the contents of your tabs. Fortunately, iOS 17 locks these tabs when not in active use and requires a Face ID or Touch ID check to reopen them (depending on the iPhone).

If you're using Safari, you're most likely searching for something. And usefully, iOS 17 brings some improvements to this. Apple promises that search results in Safari will be more relevant, as well as easier to read. The demo showed some regular search results below a widget showing the current score of the MLS match the user is looking for.

There's definitely not much point in opening a private tab if other websites can still monitor what you're doing. In a further enhancement to Safari security, the Private Browsing window in iOS 17 now blocks tracking cookies and removes the URL tracking tags that some websites add to the end of links that would otherwise monitor your adventures on the web .

Your iPhone is already smart enough to detect when a website's authentication code enters the Messages app and pops up the code at the top of the keyboard for easy entry. This system will be extended in iOS 17 to include the Mail app, which is expected to make logging in even more efficient.

Users of iCloud's Keychain feature will be able to share their username and password with specific groups in iOS 17, and their credentials will be automatically updated if they change anything. This feature works across iOS apps, but Safari is probably the one that will make the most use of this collaborative feature.

A nice quality-of-life feature in iOS 17 is the ability to pause all GIFs that appear on the iPhone by default, including Safari. Using the animated image toggle in the accessibility settings, the only GIFs that will play when browsing the web will be the ones you set to play.