How to Turn Off the Pop-Up Blocker in Safari for iPhone & iPad

Most iPhone and iPad users will want to enable the pop-up blocker in Safari for iOS in order to prevent annoying popups and nuisances, but sometimes the built-in Safari pop-up blocker is overly aggressive and wrongfully blocks a popup on a site where pop-up usage is required for the site to work as intended. For those situations, users can choose to disable the pop-up blockers in Safari for iOS easily, and it’s just as easy to toggle the feature back on again too.

This may go without saying, but unless you have a specific reason to disable the pop-up blocker in Safari for iOS you will probably want to leave the feature enabled (or turn it on if it is currently disabled). It’s pretty obvious when a popup blocker is preventing the proper usage of a website, so it’s not really a Safari troubleshooting trick and there isn’t much of a mystery involved when popup prevention is interfering with a sites functionality. It’s also a good idea to re-enable the popup blocker in Safari for iOS after you are done using whatever site required it, so that you can prevent the more annoying type of popups from showing up in the future.

How to Disable (or Enable) Safari Pop-Up Blocker in iOS

If you disable the pop-up blocker in iOS, you will allow popups to appear in Safari. If you enable the pop-up blocker in iOS, you will prevent popups appearing in Safari. Here is the appropriate setting to toggle as needed:

1. Open the “Settings” app in iOS and go to “Safari”
2. Under the General Safari settings, toggle the switch next to “Block Pop-ups” to the OFF position to disable the popup blocker, or the ON position to enable the pop-up blocker in Safari



3. Return to Safari and browse the web as usual, the change will immediately carry over

You don’t need to reboot or relaunch Safari, simply toggling the switch off or on will have an immediate impact on whether or not websites and webpages in Safari can open a new pop-up window in Safari on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Keep in mind that pop-ups are almost always opened in Safari will open as a new tab, meaning they can be accessed from the tab viewer, which looks like two overlapping squares.

As mentioned, most users will want to leave the pop-up blocker enabled in iOS Safari. But sometimes turning it off is a necessity. Typically such a situation occurs on some financial websites and login services, often where a temporary pop-up will appear as a pass through, or to display some type of relevant information like a PDF, a report, or authentication details. Of course if you have the pop-up blocker enabled when you try to use one of those types of sites on an iPhone or iPad, the website will usually just fail to work properly and you won’t see the data requested.

Perhaps a future version of Safari for iOS will allow individual websites to open pop-ups as needed, like what is possible with Google Chrome on the desktop, but in the meantime you can control the pop-up blocker and toggle it off and on again easily through iOS Settings on a Safari-wide browsing experience.

This is obviously relevant to iPhone and iPad with Safari, but Safari for Mac also can allow pop-up windows if needed there as well.