The best Safari extensions for iPhone and iPad
Safari on iPhone and iPad has supported proper web extensions since iOS 15, and the selection has settled down a lot since then. Some of the early favourites are gone, some changed names, and a few new ones are now worth the space on your Home Screen. Here are the ones we keep installed in 2026.
If you have never switched one on, the steps are the same for all of them: Settings app, then Apps, Safari, Extensions, and turn the extension on. There is a walkthrough in How to translate a website in Safari on iPhone and iPad.
1. Mate Translate
Mate for iPhone and iPad comes with a Safari extension that does two things Safari's own translator does not. It translates whole pages between 248 languages instead of the couple of dozen Apple covers, and it translates only the sentence you select, leaving the rest of the page alone.
Select some text and a Mate button appears next to it; tap it and the translation opens in a panel with pronunciation and synonyms. For a whole page, tap Translate to English in the bar Mate shows on foreign-language pages.
On iOS 18.4 and later you can also set Mate as the system translator, so the Translate item in the text-selection menu opens Mate in Safari, Mail, Messages and most other apps. The free Basic style covers all the languages; the Advanced and AI styles, offline translation and camera translation are part of Mate Pro, and one subscription covers your Mac, iPhone, iPad and browser extensions. See Mate for iPhone and iPad.
2. 1Password
1Password stores your logins, passkeys and card details and fills them in for you. On iPhone it works both through the iOS AutoFill row above the keyboard and through its own Safari extension, which also handles cards and identities. Shared vaults let a family or a team use the same set of logins without sending passwords around.
Apple's built-in Passwords app does a lot of this now and is free. 1Password is worth it if you want shared vaults, items that are not passwords, and the same vault on Windows and Android.
3. Hush Nag Blocker
Hush blocks cookie banners and consent nags. It is free, open source, and built as a content blocker, which means it hands Safari a list of rules and never sees the pages you visit. There is nothing to configure: switch it on and the banners mostly stop.
4. StopTheMadness Pro
StopTheMadness is not an ad blocker. It undoes the things websites do to break your browser: disabled right-click menus, text you cannot select or copy, blocked keyboard shortcuts, autoplaying video, login forms that submit themselves, and tracking parameters stuck on the end of links. The Pro version covers Safari on iPhone and iPad as well as Safari, Firefox and Chrome on the Mac.
It pairs well with Mate: pages that block text selection also block translating a selection, and StopTheMadness gives the selection back.
5. AdGuard
AdGuard blocks ads and tracking scripts in Safari, and pages load faster because less is downloaded. The free version covers Safari ad blocking; a paid tier adds DNS-level filtering that also works outside the browser and custom filter rules.
6. Ghostery Ad Blocker
Ghostery does the same job with a different emphasis: it shows you which trackers were on a page and lets you decide per site. If you want to leave ads alone on sites you want to support and block everything elsewhere, this is the one with the controls for it. Note that the old Ghostery Lite listing was for the Mac; the current iPhone and iPad app is listed as Ghostery Ad Blocker.
7. Grammarly
Grammarly checks what you write in Safari text fields and flags spelling, grammar and clumsy phrasing. Installing it also installs the Grammarly keyboard, which does the same in other apps. It is useful for native speakers and more useful if English is not your first language.
If you are writing in a language you are still learning, translate your draft with Mate first and let Grammarly tidy the English afterwards.
8. Instapaper
Pocket, which used to be our pick here, was shut down by Mozilla in July 2025. Instapaper does the same job: save an article from Safari, read it later in a clean layout, offline if you want, with highlights and notes. Its Safari extension can archive an article as you save it, tag it, and send it to a Kindle.
9. Block Distracting Websites
A blunt tool for a real problem. Pick the sites that eat your afternoon, set a timer, and Safari refuses to load them until it runs out. You cannot talk yourself out of it halfway through, which is the point.
10. Amplosion
Amplosion redirects AMP links to the normal version of the page. AMP pages are a stripped-down copy served from someone else's servers, and they often behave badly with other extensions. Amplosion is open source and includes Home Screen widgets showing how often it has fired.
It also helps Mate, because a full-page translation of the real page tends to go better than one of the AMP copy.
11. Achoo
Achoo shows you the HTML of the page you are on, with syntax highlighting, and lets you edit the page to preview a change. Nothing is saved; reload and the page is back to normal. It is a small, cheap tool that is very handy if you build websites and only have your phone with you.
What we dropped
Three extensions from the earlier version of this list are no longer here. Pocket was shut down in July 2025. Pinterest does not offer a real Safari web extension on iPhone, only a share-sheet action, so it does not belong in a list of extensions. Honey was removed after the 2024 reporting on how it handled affiliate links; PayPal disabled the behaviour in January 2026, but we would rather not recommend it.
Safari extensions on iPhone are ordinary apps, so you install them from the App Store and switch them on in Settings. Two or three good ones make more difference than ten you never think about.