Safari got more new features in macOS 27 Golden Gate than in any release in years, and most of them are built on Apple Intelligence. Some solve real, long-standing annoyances. One or two will rearrange your browser in ways you didn’t ask for.
Here’s what’s new, what’s worth using and where to find the controls.
Automatic Tab Topics
What it does. Safari uses Apple Intelligence to group related tabs by topic as you browse. Open a few pages about a trip and a few about a work project, and Safari clusters them. As you open new tabs that match an existing topic, Safari adds them to that group. You can save an automatically created group as a regular Tab Group, or close a whole topic at once when you’re done.
Who it’s for. People who routinely have 30 or more tabs open across several subjects. For them, it’s the most useful Safari change this year.
Who won’t like it. Anyone who keeps tabs in a deliberate order. The feature is on by default, and automatic grouping can move tabs or occasionally miss one that belongs.
Take control. In Safari, go to Settings > Tabs and find Organize Tabs. Choose Show Related Tabs to get suggestions you approve yourself, instead of automatic grouping.
Notify Me: page monitoring built into Safari
What it does. Safari watches a webpage and alerts you when something changes. You describe what you’re waiting for in plain language, such as a price drop, a product back in stock or registration opening, and choose how often Safari checks.
How to use it.
- Open the page you want to watch.
- Open the page menu from the button next to the address bar and choose Notify Me.
- Describe what to watch for.
- Choose the frequency: hourly at most, or daily, weekly or monthly, with options for specific days and times.
Where it’s genuinely useful: restocks, price tracking, ticket or course registration, government or visa appointment pages, and status pages you’d otherwise refresh by hand.
Writing a good description. Be specific about the thing you care about. “Tell me when the price drops below $200” gives Safari a clear target, while “tell me about changes” is vague enough to trigger on anything. Name the product, the number or the status you’re waiting for.
Things to know. Because Safari interprets your description, check the first few alerts to make sure it’s watching the right part of the page. And don’t use it for anything time-critical to the minute; the fastest check is once an hour.
Describe an Extension
What it does. You describe what you want a Safari extension to do in plain language, and Safari builds it and adds it to the toolbar. Apple’s example is a button that saves your favorite recipes. Apple also offers starting examples across productivity, focus, creativity, and design and development.
After Safari generates an extension, you can keep refining it with further descriptions, and control which websites it’s allowed to work on.
Where it shines: small, personal tools that would never justify a real extension: hiding a distracting element on a site you use daily, adding a button that copies a page in a specific format or collecting items from a site into a list.
Be sensible with permissions. A generated extension is still an extension. Only allow it on the sites where it’s needed, and review generated extensions from time to time in Safari > Settings > Extensions, removing the ones you no longer use.
Describe an Extension and Notify Me are both Apple Intelligence features. If Apple Intelligence is turned off, or not available in your language, you won’t see them. Curious about how much space Apple Intelligence takes? Our guide to Apple Intelligence storage on macOS 27 has the numbers, and RTX Spark’s AI performance against Apple’s Neural Engine shows how Apple’s on-device AI hardware compares with the competition.
Pull-to-refresh
As on iPhone and iPad, you can now refresh a page on the Mac by scrolling past the top: the page rubber-bands, a refresh indicator appears, and pulling far enough reloads it.
Most people will love it or never notice it. If you find yourself reloading pages accidentally, especially with a sensitive trackpad or a mouse with a free-spinning scroll wheel, slow down at the top of the page. We’ll update this article if a setting to turn it off appears.
Faster, with over a thousand engine changes
Beyond the headline features, Safari’s WebKit engine received a very large number of improvements in this release, and many users report pages loading noticeably faster. For a wider look at how the release compares, see our Golden Gate vs Tahoe performance comparison.
Scrolling is a different story for some. A number of Golden Gate users report scrolling that feels less smooth than on Tahoe, particularly on 60Hz displays, and some point to Apple’s own apps as the worst. If Safari scrolling bothers you, check our choppy scrolling guide, which includes a hidden Safari developer setting worth confirming is off.
Known quirks in Safari on Golden Gate
- Full-screen video controls: some users report that the title bar and window controls appear without a background when you move the pointer to the top of the screen during full-screen video.
- Tab grouping mistakes: automatic topics can misfile a tab. Switch to suggestions if it keeps happening.
- Feature availability: Notify Me and Describe an Extension require Apple Intelligence and a supported language.
Our verdict, feature by feature
- Automatic Tab Topics: keep it if you live in dozens of tabs. Switch to suggestions if you like control.
- Notify Me: the most broadly useful of the new features. Try it on one restock or price you were going to check by hand anyway.
- Describe an Extension: a niche but fun tool for tinkerers. Keep site permissions narrow.
- Pull-to-refresh: harmless for most, occasionally annoying with sensitive scrolling hardware.
If you’d rather not use the AI features
You don’t have to use any of them. Automatic Tab Topics can be set to suggestions in Safari’s settings, and you simply won’t use Notify Me or Describe an Extension. If you want the AI features gone altogether, turn off Apple Intelligence in System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri, and the two features that depend on it won’t appear. Safari’s speed improvements and pull-to-refresh don’t depend on it.
If you do want to go beyond Safari’s built-in conveniences and experiment with larger models yourself, running large AI models locally on a Mac is a good place to see what your hardware can realistically handle.
Keep Safari the way you like it: quick settings
| If you want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Stop automatic tab grouping | Settings > Tabs > Organize Tabs > Show Related Tabs |
| Monitor a page for changes | Page menu > Notify Me |
| Build a small personal tool | Page menu > Describe an Extension |
| Review AI-generated extensions | Settings > Extensions |
| Check for a 60fps rendering cap | Settings > Advanced > Show features for web developers, then Feature Flags |
The short version
- Automatic Tab Topics is excellent for heavy tab users and annoying for tidy ones. Switch it to suggestions if needed.
- Notify Me replaces constant manual refreshing for restocks, prices and registrations. Check hourly at most.
- Describe an Extension makes small personal browser tools possible without code. Limit their site permissions.
- Pull-to-refresh arrives on the Mac. Watch for accidental reloads.
- All of the AI features depend on Apple Intelligence being on and available in your language.