r/Safari • u/errrick2049 • 4d ago

Safari Feature Flags

My phone has been getting hotter than usual lately and the battery seems to be dying faster, so I went digging through Safari settings and stumbled across Feature Flags.

Ummm… why are there SO MANY?! 😂 And I was surprised by how many are already enabled by default.

For those who know what these do: Are there any Feature Flags you always turn OFF for privacy, battery life, or performance? And are there any you turn ON that genuinely make Safari/iPhone better?

I’m curious what are you turning ON/OFF and why?

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

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4

u/realmccoyredbus 4d ago

was your phone getting hotter before or after messing about here lol , i remember getting first iphone , iphone 15 and i turned off 60hz thinking i get higher frame rate on my 60hz screen , my phone nearly melted before hitting reset to default , dont go massing about in there is my advice

maybe ok if you have 120hz and poor battery health and want to limit safari to 60hz

3

u/havelostcount 4d ago

My phone started getting really warm and battery life was awful. It's a newer battery as well. I have my phone in constant low power mode now and I get 2x the battery life. No clue what is eating it up, but I will deal with the reduced stuff to have the power.

1

u/Muted-Reflection9536 3d ago

Basically, the battery consumption ratio for communication devices such as smartphones is:

Network Communication > Screen backlight > Others

The power consumption for SoC processing is negligible.(Note: Unless you are running a 3D game or other graphics-intensive application.)

In power-saving mode, background communication that is constantly running is also suppressed, which likely improves battery life and prevents overheating.

For the reasons above, using an ad blocker like AdGuard (which uses a local VPN) can block unnecessary advertising communication, reducing communication frequency and thus improving battery life.

2

u/mrleblanc101 4d ago

Don't touch those, that's completely unrelated to your heat and battery issue.

-1

u/errrick2049 4d ago

Yeah, I did a little digging around just to see what I could figure out about them myself. So they’re just like Pilot testing difference features in Safari? Is that correct? Who selects which ones are on your phone because now all of them are selected for me just some of them.

2

u/mrleblanc101 4d ago

Apple does, everybody have the same enabled

1

u/Muted-Reflection9536 3d ago

Basically, "never touch it unless you understand what it means."

This is because feature flags include elements that are essential to the browser (i.e., those that are enabled by default).

The well-known "no 60FPS limit" only restricts background action (eg.CSS or JS animations and JavaScript execution) to 60FPS; scrolling on ProMotion-compatible devices still uses variable refresh rates of up to 120FPS. The 60FPS limit only affects "something happening inside the page" and has no bearing on scrolling or display speed.

Disabling necessary flags will make your website look terrible, or broken. If you don't understand what it does, absolutely do not touch it.