Use Describe Extension in Safari in iOS 27

A really fun new feature in iOS 27 lets you customise how websites look in Safari just by describing what you want to see. Now, Apple calls this describing an extension, which sounds quite complicated, but actually it’s really simple. You can tell Safari to always use a certain colour scheme or a certain font, to make pictures greyscale or to make the text larger.

Basically, you can now customise Safari to your exact taste, on any website. Let me show you how it works. And don’t panic, it’s not too complicated.

Before we get started, if you’re new around here, then hi, my name is Jacob. I’m your friendly Apple expert here on YouTube, helping you make the most of your devices. So, please do press subscribe, and then you won’t miss any QuickTips in the future.

Okay, I’m in Safari at the moment, and I’m just browsing the Apple website to see what’s new in iOS 27. It’s just a very long list of text. Whilst it’s interesting to read, for me at least, it doesn’t look very exciting. And this is where Safari extensions come in, because we can now customise how this looks.

I’m going to tap on the page menu button here, and then scroll down a little until it says Describe Extension. At this stage, there are some pre-made ideas to get you started and to help you realise what’s possible. For example, in the Creative section, you can have little fireworks appear each time you tap on the screen. Under the Productivity section, you can add a focus timer that counts how long you’ve been on the website. There are loads of different things that we can use to enhance Safari.

I’m not going to use any of these pre-made ones for now, but I am going to type at the bottom, where it says “Describe something else”. I’m going to try and turn this website into a kind of neon, 90s feel: bright colours, dark backgrounds, all of that good stuff. So, I’m going to type into the box exactly what I want to see.

Now, when you press Enter, Safari is going to have a look and see if there are existing extensions made by developers that might do the job for you. So, for example, there’s no point typing “make me an ad blocker”, because they exist already, and you can get one that’s much more reliable than whatever this would make. But, surprisingly, there’s nothing that quite matches what I need.

So instead, I can tap on Create at the top, and this will build a bespoke extension for my phone. It’ll take a moment, and you can see it working at the top of the web page here. When that finishes, I can try the extension, and the page will change based on what it’s done.

You can see it looks pretty different, but it’s certainly not quite what I had in mind. It’s not perfect, but that’s okay, because at the top of Safari, we can edit the extension before we save it. Here, we can simply type in natural language whatever it is we want to change, and then regenerate it. And yep, that looks much better.

So, now I can press Done, and that extension is saved in Safari on my phone. If I go on to another website, I can tap on the page menu button and find that extension. It will show up alongside the other ones I’ve already installed from the App Store.

There’s no limit to how many you can make, and I’m sure there are going to be some really interesting examples that people share. So, if you’ve got one, let us know in the comments. And when you’ve done that, check out this QuickTip next.