Anika Begay
Not a day goes by that I don’t feel frustrated with the state of the mobile web. I now rarely use my iPhone to read news articles because every time I do, there’s a cookie prompt that gets in the way of what I want to read, or so many ads on a page that I can’t even see the text anymore.
Apple is clearly as frustrated as I am, so they added a Thanos animation to iOS 18 that erases annoying parts of websites.
A new “Distraction Control” feature appeared in Safari earlier this week in the fifth beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. It’s designed to let you temporarily remove annoying and distracting elements from a mobile website, including cookie prompts, ads, those infuriating autoplaying videos that follow you around as you scroll, and more.
The animation is a beautiful nod to Thanos’s snap, and it looks just like I’m brandishing all six Infinity Stones and snapping my fingers to exterminate half the garbage that exists on mobile websites these days. Also, I don’t feel bad about it. This isn’t an adblocker, so it’s only temporary and nothing persists. It still loads the ads so the website owner gets one ad display, no harm done.
MacRumors has a great hands-on video demonstrating how it works, but I just wish there was an easier way to use Distraction Control. In the latest iOS 18 beta 5, you have to tap the same button you would use to enable Reader Mode, which also lets you focus on the text on a website, to hide parts of web pages. If there was a gesture to swipe away those annoying ads, that would make it even more useful.
Unless Apple makes some last-minute changes to iOS 18, this new Distraction Control feature should arrive as part of the final release of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, likely next month.
