With iOS 18.4, Apple made a small tweak to Safari that could be polarizing because it puts your search history front and center. When you open up a new Safari tab and then tap into the search field, Safari shows your recent search history.
In iOS 18.3.1, opening up a new tab and then tapping into search does not show your history, and the view remains on the personalized Safari home page. iOS 18.3.1 has no clear view of prior searches at all, except that a recent search will show up in your suggested results if you search for the same thing again.
As noted by 9to5Mac, having Safari search so visible may not always be desirable if you're ever in a situation where you hand your iPhone or iPad over to someone else to let them use Safari or another app.
Of course, if you don't ever let anyone use your devices, having recent search available at a tap has the potential to be useful if you're often using the same search terms multiple times. Apple also offers a Private browsing mode where searches are not saved.
There is no setting in iOS 18.4 to disable the recent search view, but Apple may opt to tweak the feature before the beta sees a public launch. Users can also opt to clear their search history at any time with the "Clear All" option.
Tuesday October 13, 2026 5:29 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple has launched a new "Switch to Safari" marketing campaign that encourages Chrome users to switch to Safari as their web browser of choice on the Mac.
"Safari is a more powerful and private browser than Chrome," says Apple.
Apple has a new "Switch to Safari" page on its website that outlines more than 10 reasons that Chrome users should switch to Safari, including faster performance...
Apple is considering changes to Safari on the iPhone Duo that would give websites access to more of the outer display, although the company has yet to settle on an approach.
The challenge is allowing pages to occupy the area beneath Safari's side-mounted controls without making parts of a website inaccessible. In an Friday, October 23 WebKit post, Apple's Jen Simmons explained that an...
Sunday October 25, 2026 4:07 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Earlier this month, a security researcher discovered that private cryptographic keys associated with eight of Indian company eMudhra's intermediate certificate authority (CA) certificates were weak. The compromised keys could have allowed attackers to impersonate legitimate websites, potentially putting users' sensitive information at risk. However, there is currently no evidence that the keys...
A good change. As sometimes you just want to tweak a recent search and have to annoyingly retype it all.
I mean, typing the first character or two should do the trick for that. The privacy advantage of the current approach is that it doesn't disclose which suggestions are previous searches and which are search engine suggestions.
