Use Safari “Hide Distracting Items” to Remove Webpage Clutter on Mac, iPhone, iPad

Just about everyone can recognize that the modern web browsing experience has degraded to the point where it feels like you’re playing the classic “kill the pop-ups” game, with seemingly every website cluttering itself with large cookie notices, privacy notices, auto-playing videos, annoying “Sign in with Google/Facebook” pop-ups, pop-ups to “prove you’re a human” with increasingly ridiculous CAPTCHA requests and maneuvers, pop-ups for email harvesting, sign-up requests, obnoxious advertisements, more pop-ups to sign up for newsletters, more pop-ups to sign up for push notifications, and just an endless barrage of annoying and distracting elements bombarding whatever you’re trying to view on the web. Fortunately Safari on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, has a really great feature that aims to improve the annoying and distracting modern web experience.

The Safari feature is called “Hide Distracting Items”, and it lets you select any of the aforementioned annoying clutter, click on it, and make it disappear. You can even use this feature to bypass many article paywalls, adblock detectors, email harvesting content walls, and more.

How to Use Safari “Hide Distracting Items” on Mac, iPhone, iPad

We’re demonstrating this feature on Safari for Mac, but it works the same on Safari for iPhone and iPad too:

1. From Safari, navigate to the website that features the annoying content you wish to remove
2. Select the Reader/Options button in the Safari URL status bar, then choose “Hide Distracting Items”



3. Select the annoying items or page elements that you wish to remove



4. When finished removing the annoying page elements, choose the checkmark to complete using the Hide Distracting Items tool and return to the webpage, which will now be free from whatever the elements are you removed

This feature can be used to hide just about anything from a webpage, and while it may occasionally break the functionality of a webpage, it usually does not for things like articles.

You can use this feature to remove all sorts of annoying stuff, from the endless cookie notices, to auto playing garbage, to sign in requests, sign up requests, and so much more, you can even use the Hide Distracting Items feature as a per-basis ad blocker by using the feature to select and remove ads. The latter is particularly helpful for when ads are blocking page content, or even if you use an adblocker but you get those “Adblocker Detected” pop-ups on webpages which you can easily remove with the Hide Distracting Items feature.

Why the modern web became so annoying with all the layered clutter is complex; from well-intentioned but poorly implemented regulations (which brought us all those annoying cookie notices), to the outright obnoxious like autoplaying videos, to the “prove you’re a human” captcha crap that is particularly prevalent when you’re using a VPN or even a service like iCloud Private Relay to attempt to gain some privacy, and it’s important to remember that for free websites to function then displaying advertising is usually necessary (like on the site you’re reading now), but Jeez Louise when it’s all combined can it be annoying, or, as this feature calls it, “distracting”. Fortunately Safari makes it easy to clean things up a bit with this handy little trick.

You will need to use a modern version of Safari on iOS, MacOS, or ipadOS to have this feature, as it was introduced in Sequoia onwards (iOS 18 onwards for the mobile equivalent).

And note that you can undo the “Hide Distracting Items” changes you made in Safari simply by refreshing the webpage you’re on at any time. So if you do break something on a webpage with this feature, just refresh, and it’ll be back to how it was again.