How to Enable Experimental Features in Safari Mac and iPhone?

As with any software development, browsers also follow a life cycle for introducing new features. Edge and Chrome browsers offer beta, developer and canary channels for previewing or testing features before they are available for public use. In addition, you can use flags to test experimental features on the stable version. Though Safari browser does not offer different channels, you can enable experimental features on the stable version from the settings page both on Mac and iPhone/iPad.

Why You Need Experimental Features in Safari?

Safari is a platform dependent browser that works only on Apple devices. Due to this fact, common features that work on Chromium based browsers may not work on Safari unless Apple enable support for them. For example, Chrome by default uses QUIC protocol with HTTP/3 support. This HTTP/3 feature is an experimental feature as of Safari 16 in iOS/macOS. If your organization has an infrastructure to use QUIC protocol, then you should enable that HTTP/3 experimental feature in Safari. Otherwise, functionalities related to QUIC will not work on Safari while they work fine on Chrome.

Enable Experimental Features in Safari Mac

To use experimental features, you should first enable “Develop” menu.

• Open Safari and go to “Safari > Settings…” menu.

• Go to “Advanced” section and enable “Show Develop menu in menu bar” option.

• Now, you will see “Developer” and “Feature Flags” tabs are added in Safari settings. Go to “Developer” tab and customize the developer options which you want to use.

• There will also be a new “Develop” menu added in Safari’s top menu bar.
• Open any website and go to “Develop > Feature Flags” menu to go back to the flags settings section.

• You will see a huge list of features and some of them are enabled by default.
• Use the search box to filter items and click the checkbox in front of any item to enable it.
• You can find whether the flag is testable, stable or in preview mode under the last column.

• If you have enabled or disabled too many items in the list, click on the “Reset Feature Flags” option. This will reset the experimental features section to its initial settings.

You can expect “Stable” flags will be removed and become part of the default Safari app sooner. As mentioned above, HTTP/3 experimental flag available in Safari 16 has been removed and now it becomes part of default Safari 17.

Note that Apple changed the experimental features settings in Safari 17 version. On earlier versions, you can enable the flags from “Develop > Experimental Features” menu without going to settings section. Now, you need to do this from “Feature Flags” settings tab.

Enable Experimental Features in Safari iPhone

You can also enable or disable experimental features in Safari iPhone or iPad app.

• Open “Settings” app and scroll down to find “Safari” option.
• Tap on it to open Safari settings page.

• Scroll down to the bottom and tap on “Advanced” option.

• On the next page, tap on “Experimental Features” showing as a last option.

• You will see a huge list, turn the switch on or off the enable or disable the required features.

• Like macOS, scroll to bottom of the list and tap “Reset All to Defaults” to reset experimental features list to its original state.

How to Know the List of Experimental Features?

Apple uses WebKit browser engine and release new WebKit experimental features frequently. You can get the latest updates from the Apple’s official WebKit blog. For example, Safari version 16 includes important features like Web Push to use push notifications, Passkeys, Apple Pay support, lazy loading of images and support for installing Web Inspector Extensions.

Final Words

There are many experimental features enabled by default both in Mac and iPhone. Do not change the default settings unless you know what you are doing. Otherwise, it may break some websites or does not allow the browser to work properly. Good thing is that you can easily reset experimental features list to original settings and bring the site or browser to working condition.