> allow users to erase unwanted content from any webpage of their choosing. Users will have the option to erase banner ads, images, text or even entire page sections, all with relative ease.

The erasure is said to be persistent... with the option to revert changes and restore the webpage to its initial, unaltered state

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/30/apple-to-unveil-a...

I would very much love to be able to make persistent content deletions on a site wide basis.

For instance, some news sites insist on embedding persistent auto playing video that adds nothing additional beyond the text version of the story.

Let's imagine these features are extremely effective and widely adopted, and the advertising market evaporates. What do people think is going to happen to the content ecosystem - suddenly all the low quality ad sponsored clickbait will disappear?

Personally, I think if the only way to earn a living is to convince people to pay for content, we will see much more polarization as consumers self select into their information silos, and producers are incentivized to produce content that flatters their readers sense of superiority and/or aggrievement.

Probably a lot more UI dark patterns such as the “Click here to read more” embedded inside an ad, login pages embedded in ads, etc. Can’t erase that stuff if you want to get to the content. And of course the immortal ad that randomly decides to move around the screen.

Check out those illegal live tv streaming sites if you wanna see how bad this can get.

You can commonly block elements with ad blockers, e.g. ublock

Sure, but it's not exactly user friendly to get it to work site wide, unless I'm blocking something simple like a graphics file by name.

Having the browser use machine learning to write the equivalent of a Greasemonkey script for the site with an easy way to revert changes would be much more user friendly.

There is an element picker in ublock

If you don’t want to wait, the iOS and Mac AdGuard apps already allow this. It’s very effective and I use it semi regularly to hide support chat popups and signup forms.

There are probably other apps with that feature too if you don’t like AdGuard

I use AdGuard for this too, it's great.

How about fixing Siri? I’m totally bought in to Apple’s stuff but Siri is beyond embarrassing at this point. It shouldn’t take several seconds to respond to basic commands.

Siri isn't that slow for me generally, but the responses are relatively primitive compared to GPT. Very likely Siri is lagging GPT based agents due to the high processing cost of LLM queries.

Startups can launch with today's GPT agents because their utilization is relatively tiny. Siri operates at planet scale, plus Apple is committed to on-device privacy, so they need to develop highly optimized on-device models.

No doubt this is going to drive a major hardware upgrade cycle for Apple.

Only extremely basic requests are processed on device, like “what time is it”. Anything else is still processed on Apple’s servers.

I think “intelligent search” is going to build on Siri and Spotlight, adding LLM for things like summaries and suggestions.

This should bring a 10x magnitude of improvement and justify hardware upgrades to satiate the RAM and coprocessor thirst of LLMs.

Spotlight does pretty extensive if “traditional” index-based search of your local personal data, along with certain privacy-preserving web queries. You can imagine what on-device LLM-powered summaries would bring to this type of search and suggested actions.

Wait 6 months when the model will be on your watch. Lag gone, answers 99% improved.

I’d rather have an improved Safari with useful AI features (not just another “chat with …” app)… Siri they can fix whenever or rip it out entirely.

If Web Eraser is true, I can’t see how Meta and Microsoft are going to stay out of the phone hardware game. That feature is basically war lol.

Meta is fine; they'll just funnel you to the app instead.

The model can interact with Meta’s app for me.

You can erase stuff on any app?

Aspirational feature request based on using ChatGPT Vision. Funnel me into your app to enforce your adtech, I use the robot to interface to your app.

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak

i never had a real reason stop using safari for my purposes though this might be it if some un-optional AI button slams me in the face every time i open safari, ruined like every other thing running on CPU I used to love

your move, apple

EDIT:

> users will be treated to a new user interface (UI) for customizing popular page controls

> This feature is not automatically enabled in test builds of Safari 18 and instead requires manual activation from the page controls menu.

i remain cautious optimistic

how long until there are ads injected into the article contents so that AI will include it in a summary, or SEO hacks are replaced with server side text insertions specifically for the AI spiders?

Not long at all. Much faster than we want. That pollution will fund the massive infra demands.

Spider-specific content is a great way to get doomed into the bottom ranks of SEO.

> Apple is testing a version of its Safari web browser that includes UI tweaks, advanced content blocking features, and a new AI-powered tool dubbed Intelligent Search, AppleInsider has learned.

Intelligent search? I wonder if Apple will drop their Google Search deal

Unlikely; this will likely be focused on on-device search of your personal or other local data and relevant context from the web. This has always been Apple's focus, and the opportunity to 10X this with LLMs is profound. Access to your private data has always been the key to making a breakthrough intelligent agent and Apple is better positioned to make headway here than anyone else (except maybe Google Pixel but the marketshare is tiny).

There is really no need for Apple to step into web search when (1) they don't inherently have a value-add beyond making your searches more private, which they already can do, and (2) from a revenue standpoint they already tax Google billions a year for preferred placement.

This is total speculation on my part, but I read an article recently claiming that Apple had struck a deal with Google to leverage their Gemini models. Here’s an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/technology/apple-google-a...

Broken link?

Why would Apple give up 18 billion dollars (per year) from Google?

Privacy? That's just a marketing slogan, they are tracking you across first party apps. And privacy is never worth 18 billion dollars.

The one where Google pays them $20 billion a year?

Seems extremely conservative/boring/not useful.

Boring is good. If there’s AI in the product, I want it to be 100% accurate. Not 99% accurate. Zero hallucinations. I use MacOS because it’s very predictable and I don’t have to tinker. If this means dialing back to only a subset of LLM capability then that’s perfect.

Super ducking accurate.

Tell me you haven’t used Autocorrect much since iOS17 without telling me.

It really has gotten a lot better. Even lets me lazily type fairly me-specialized things once I made enough manual corrections. Like iRacing iRating RocketLeague carball etc. It sucked at first because it lost all the prior training, but it retrained fairly quickly. I almost never have to hit backspace these days.

Not on iPad IMO.

Typing on iPhone has never been harder.

> 100% accurate

> Zero hallucinations

I hate to break it to you, but you're not getting that from any software, let alone probabilistic AI models

Yeah but there's no evidence to support its going to be 100% accurate. Also accuracy is barely relevant to these features.

"Safari, I want to watch latest X videos."

"Sure thing! Loading xvideos!"

Except Apple is a puritanical company, they'll probably block any porn related anything going through the AI.

I’m more excited for them adding the uBO element zapper to Safari than any of the AI stuff.

Not exactly super exciting. What would be cool is if Apple would create some truly AI-first powerful experiences (like Rabbit R1's "LAM" capabilities but at apple scale and quality) but I reckon they're so careful as to not upset the App Store revenue (Which relies a lot on us downloading and using individual apps).

Similar to "Vision Pro", how do you think Apple will call their version of AI?