Extensions to make Safari even better [Awesome Apps of the Week]

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Awesome Apps of the Week
iOS 15 brings plenty of new features to iPhone and iPad. Safari Extensions in iOS 15 make Safari the best mobile browser.
Photo: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

iOS and iPadOS 15 have been out for a couple weeks now, and as with most new iOS releases, they usher in plenty of new apps to take advantage of the latest features. This week, we’re talking all about iOS and iPadOS Safari extensions.

Safari extensions for iOS and iPadOS

Extensions allow third-party apps to improve or supplement your browsing experience. This week we’re featuring a few that are absolutely genius that you should check out.

Overamped

Overamped for iOS
Overamped ditches those buggy, annoying AMP experiences for the full website experience.
Screenshots: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

Remember when Google was going to make the web more accessible and more useful by introducing AMP? I do, and I’ve been angry about it since. With Overamped, you can finally kick AMP pages to the curb and enjoy the web the way site creators intended.

For those unfamiliar, AMP is a way for websites to serve the contents of their site in a lightweight, quick to load format specifically for Google to display on mobile devices. And while many sites have taken advantage of AMP because it helps them rank higher in Google Search, the end user experience is almost always utter garbage.

Overamped is a super-basic extension that simply grabs the original URL for websites and blog posts and ensures that when clicking links within Google’s results, you go to the sites URL, and not the Google AMP page. This means images and media work as expected, scrolling behaves correctly, and when copying the link to share, you’re sharing the real deal. Best of all, it works invisibly behind the scenes, giving you the best experience without any work at all.

Price: $1.99

Download From: App Store

Achoo HTML Viewer and Inspector

Achoo for iOS
If you’ve ever wanted to see the source of a website on your iOS device, Achoo makes it delightfully simple.
Screenshot: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

This might be a very niche extension to feature, but it’s one that I’m incredibly excited for because it takes something that was a pain in the ass on iOS and makes it a little easier. Achoo is an html source viewer and editor that allows you to both view the source code of a webpage on your iPhone or iPad, and also edit things on the page as well.

If you’ve ever done any kind of web development or design, you’ve likely used dev tools in Safari or Chrome to see the html structure of a webpage, or to make a small change to see how something might look. Now, you can bring some of that experience to iOS and iPadOS as well.

Whether you’re just curious about how a page is made, or want to dig in a little deeper to see what’s behind an annoying pop-up window, Achoo could come in extremely handy.

Price: 99 cents

Download from: App Store

Noir – Dark Mode for Safari

Noir for iOS
The Noir extension gives websites without a dark mode the black-out treatment.
Screenshots: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

Have you woke up in the middle of the night to Google some obscure fact you saw on TikTok, only to sear your retinas with the blinding white light of the search results page? If that’s ever been you, you should check out Noir.

Noir is another incredibly simple extension that makes websites that don’t natively offer dark mode have a dark mode. Whether it’s a google search, wikipedia, or your favorite Apple blog, Noir can flip those bright white webpages into something more nighttime friendly. Noir also allows for site-by-site settings, giving you the ability to switch dark mode on or off for a given page if things aren’t working as expected.

Whether you’re always running your device in dark mode, or you simply trying to discreetly read about freshwater eels and the bermuda triangle, Noir can be an extremely handy extension.

Price: $2.99

Download from: App Store

1Password

1Password Extension on iPadOS 15
1Password for iOS and iPadOS now offers the same fully-featured extension as their desktop app.
Screenshot: Ian Fuchs/Cult of Mac

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you weren’t using Dashlane – the official password manager of Cult of Mac – and instead were still using 1Password. Did you know it’s one of the first (if not the first) password manager apps to support an iOS and iPadOS Safari extension?

Designed to match to their desktop browser extension, the 1Password extension on iPhone and iPad gives you full access to your 1Password vault directly within your browser. Now, in addition to using 1Password to quickly fill in a username or password, you can also use it to generate new passwords more easily on the go. This also means you can stop loading 1Password in slide over or split view to bouce between your browser and your password manager.

While it’s only a matter of time before other password managers follow suit, 1Password subscribers can take advantage of Safari extensions right now on iOS 15.

Price: Free (requires subscription after 14-day free trial)

Download from: App Store

Are you a developer (or anyone, really) with a new app or new update you want considered for a future Awesome Apps of the Week post? Send them over to @IanFuchs* on Twitter or email* ian@cultofmac.com.

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