iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate gain a new feature in Safari that lets the browser automatically organize tabs by topics. Safari already had an option that allowed arranging tabs by title or by website, but this feature goes a step further and automatically detects when tabs can fall under one topic such as Apple news related open websites cluster together under an Apple Updates folder.
The feature is simple to use but here are a few things to note before we jump into the steps:
- As of the latest developer beta 3 of iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate, this feature only shows in the first tab group in a Safari profile. You cannot enable from any other tab group.
- Enabling this feature in one Safari profile enables it in all Safari profiles. Depending on your browser usage, this might be less than ideal.
Now that this is out of the way, here’s how you can use this feature.
Open Safari and tap on the tab switcher icon.
Tap on the filter icon on the top left. This is the icon next to the search open tabs icon. You’ll see an option called Organize Tabs. Tap on this and you’ll see two options: Automatically Create Topics and Never. On iPadOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate, you will see an additional option called Show Related Tabs, but more on this later.
Once you enabled this option Safari will intelligently detect the topics of your open tabs and create folders within the tab switcher. It will also give the folder a relevant name. This works well but note that this is not a tab group. Tab groups still work in the same old way that they do in Safari.
In this folder, there is a back button that lets you collapse an expanded folder, while the menu lets you copy the links of all the tabs within this folder, close them, or move them to another tab group.
On iPadOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate, you can use an option called Show Related Tabs, which lets you manually group related tabs into topics that Safari recommends. This means that Safari will recommend you the topics, but it’s up to you if you want to group them or not.
Note: you can also drag and drop tabs in and out of the topic folders when you are in the tab switcher view.
This feature does not really work well in macOS and iPadOS. Why? Because of the design. This is how it looks like when you have topics created by Safari. It’s very easy to get confused as to what you’re supposed to tap or click for any particular action. The animations are also clunky and unhelpful.
So far, I’ve enjoyed using this feature on iPhone as it helps in keeping my Safari browser organized. Since the feature is still in beta, hopefully Apple will refine it for iPad and Mac before the final release.
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