Safari’s advanced experimental features give you access to new browser initiatives, future web tools, element changes, behavior adjustments, and other Apple-developed feature previews. If you use them on your iPhone, you can either make your Safari experience better or mess it up. Resetting the flags provides a fresh start, but this has always been a huge headache – until now.
Why Use Safari’s Experimental Features?
Web developers and WebKit engineers benefit most from Safari’s experimental features menu, as they can try out new features as they develop. They can then submit feedback to Apple to help the company improve and eventually implement these features in a future version of Safari. However, regular iPhone users can use all of the experimental features in exactly the same way.
Experimental Safari WebKit flags, which are disabled by default, are still being tested internally by Apple and are not always ready for use by developers. On the contrary, included ones are a fair game for everyone. Many experimental features are useful, such as responsive image preloading for faster display, lazy loading of images to reduce bandwidth, and smoother link navigation.
I’m especially excited about Scroll to Text Slice, which makes Safari recognize links that highlight certain text on a web page, just like Chrome currently does. The other is the “Link Sanitizer”which will supposedly either remove bloat from hyperlink redirects or invalidate hyperlinks for security analysts to avoid opening malicious content.
How to reset experimental features in Safari?
If you enjoy playing around with Safari’s advanced experimental settings, whether you’re a web developer or just a casual user trying to improve your online game, things can quickly get out of hand.
For years, you could easily reset all experimental Safari flags to their defaults in macOS; just go to “Develop”in the Safari menu bar, then choose “Restore All Defaults”from the “Experimental Features”menu.
But on iOS and iPadOS, users will ask for screenshots of the default flag settings so they can manually change them back one by one. With iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4, this is no longer necessary.
Go to Settings -> Safari -> Advanced -> Experimental Features and then scroll down and click Reset All Defaults. There is no confirmation prompt, so it immediately returns all settings to their defaults.