Use safari profiles on the go

2 min read

This quick-change feature will super-charge Safari on your iPhone or iPad

One of our favourite iOS/iPadOS 17 features is Safari Profiles, which enables you to have separate and different personalities when you browse the web. You might have a Work profile that you use during office hours. And then you might have a Play profile for the fun stuff such as social media and other non-work activities.

Each profile exists separately from the other(s): if you’ve watched Severance on Apple TV+ it’s a bit like that but without Christopher Walken. And if like us you’re really bad for having dozens of Safari tabs open at once, it’s going to save you stacks of time and effort. It’ll feng shui your Favourites, tame your tabs and streamline your Safari experience.

Favourites, tabs and syncing

What makes Safari Profiles particularly useful is the fact that each Profile can have its own Favourites folder or folders, as well as its own selection of tab groups – so, for example, in our Work profile we have a tab group for social media, another tab group for our content management system and work planners and so on. Switching to our Personal profile makes them all disappear, replaced by a different set of tabs, tab groups and favourites.

The other big benefit of Safari Profiles is that they sync, so if you have iOS 17 on your iPhone, iPadOS 17 on your iPad, and macOS Sonoma on your Mac, the same profiles are available across all your devices.

How to Use Safari Profiles

1 Start from scratch

The first thing we need to do is go into Settings > Safari and then scroll down to the new Profiles section. When you’re here for the first time, there’s just one thing to click: the New Profile link. So let’s click that one now.

2 Make it nice

As you can see, you need to give your new profile a name and an icon. If you don’t like the icon or colours in the main block, tap the ‘…’ icon for more options (shown here). Once done, there are a few more steps to consider.