As someone who likes to compulsively plan for the next meal, I’m always reading online recipe sites. Lately, I’ve been driven nuts by my iPhone crashing while trying to figure out the best way to use sourdough discard (hint: english muffins) or best substitute for fish sauce (because who keeps that around anyway?).
Since these sites are usually full of ad garbage, video players, etc., my initial hunch was that Safari was getting overloaded trying to manage everything. The official Apple support doc suggests clearing the cache or the old fashioned reboot trick.
None of this worked for me.
Instead, I found an obscure discussion post where someone suggested turning off one of Apple’s privacy-enhancing features. I tried this, and immediately the problem was gone. I browsed 10-15 recipe websites, made sure to not dismiss all the corner video players and extra ads, and not a single problem. My iPhone is frustration-free again!
Note: You may be disabling a privacy protection feature that is important to you. I chose to disable this feature because with my web browser useless there wasn’t much privacy to protect anyway. Use your own judgment, though.
If you’d like to try this yourself, here are the steps:
- Open Settings > Safari > Advanced
- Ensure that “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement” is disabled
That’s it! Try opening any old frustrating web sites on your iPhone or iPad and see if the problem is gone. I hope I can save at least one person endless frustration.
