Safari is getting its biggest feature update in years with iOS 27 — and most of it requires Apple Intelligence.
Apple is adding several new capabilities to Safari. Automatic Tab Organization clusters open tabs by topic, so couch-shopping results do not bleed into trip-planning pages. A new "Create an Extension" option lets users describe what they want a browser extension to do and have AI generate it; Apple seeds the prompt screen with suggestions ranging from citation generators to styling pages like it's 1995. A "Notify Me" feature lets Safari watch a webpage for changes — concert ticket drops, product restocks — at a maximum frequency of once per day. The Passwords app also gains a hands-free update flow: Apple Intelligence navigates to a site, signs in, and swaps a weak or compromised password automatically.
The catch is in the fine print. Automatic tab grouping, custom extensions, and website monitoring all require Apple Intelligence, which is limited to iPhone 15 Pro and later. Older devices get the performance improvements — faster JavaScript, better battery efficiency, smoother animations — and the new "Ask to Browse" parental controls, but none of the AI features. That is still a sizable chunk of Apple's installed base left out.
The once-per-day ceiling on Notify Me is worth calling out: this is not a real-time alert system, so anyone banking on a ping the moment a sold-out item restocks will be disappointed. Tab-grouping AI and AI-generated extensions are not new ideas — Arc and various Chrome experiments have tried both — but Apple's version ships natively to a massive user base all at once when iOS 27 lands this fall.