Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 131 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

Wednesday September 1, 2021 10:33 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced in March 2016. Apple designed the ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari.

Safari Technology Preview Feature
‌Safari Technology Preview‌ release 131 includes bug fixes and performance improvements for Web Inspector, CSS, Web API, JavaScript, Platform Features, Media, Web Audio, WebRTC, Payment Request, WebCrypto, Accessibility, and Rendering. Apple warns that Tab Groups do not sync in this release.

The current ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ release is built on the Safari 15 update included in macOS Monterey, and as such, it includes several Safari 15 features. There's a new streamlined tab bar with support for Tab Groups to organize tabs, along with improved support for Safari Web Extensions.

Live Text allows users to select and interact with text in images on the web, but the macOS Monterey beta and an M1 Mac is required. There's also Quick Notes support for adding links and Safari highlights to remember important information and ideas.

Other updates include WebGL 2 and new HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features.

The new ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ update is available for both macOS Big Sur and macOS Monterey, the newest version of the Mac operating system that's set to release this fall.

The ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ update is available through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences to anyone who has downloaded the browser. Full release notes for the update are available on the Safari Technology Preview website.

Apple's aim with ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ is to gather feedback from developers and users on its browser development process. ‌Safari Technology Preview‌ can run side-by-side with the existing Safari browser and while designed for developers, it does not require a developer account to download.

Tag: Safari Technology Preview

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Top Rated Comments

elptdbi3lYI

68 months ago

Tab bar still extremely buggy, sidebar stuff still not fixed.
[SPOILER]Just revert to Safari 12.0 design, pls.[/SPOILER]

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

chucker23n1

67 months ago

I’m happy to hear that. It’s super cool that it works for you. That’s awesome. For me I’ll stay in the slow lane. I got burned really bad a long time ago, so I’m unwilling to go there again.

To be clear, I didn't mean to invalidate your experience — just that mine, luckily, has been better. (And I do some web dev so it's useful for me — not just so I can get a sneak peek at new UI features, but also to test new web specs.)

However if it’s running well for many of you I suspect those new features will make it into plain Safari sooner than later… 🙃

I expect all of this to be rolled into Safari 15, and for that to ship with Monterey, presumably in October. So about six weeks from now.

And yeah, aside from the controversial tab change (which have mostly been corrected, but still aren't ideal IMHO), and for missing tab groups sync (which makes the feature a lot less useful for me, but which will presumably launch later this year when it's stable), I would say recent Safari TPs are perfectly reliable and Safari 15.0 should launch quite well.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

SFjohn

67 months ago

I haven't found most Safari TPs to be noticeably less reliable than their regular releases.

I’m happy to hear that. It’s super cool that it works for you. That’s awesome. For me I’ll stay in the slow lane. I got burned really bad a long time ago, so I’m unwilling to go there again. However if it’s running well for many of you I suspect those new features will make it into plain Safari sooner than later… 🙃

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

chucker23n1

67 months ago

Why? What's so special about Safari versus the features of Firefox?

Updating Safari update WebKit, which in turn gets used by other apps. This means their releases aren't just relevant for Safari itself, but they also have to ensure that any app that uses WebKit (which could well be half if not more of the apps you use) also remains compatible.

That's not true of Firefox or Chrome. You can embed Chrome (CEF) in apps, which is what Electron apps do, but then you actually embed a specific version in them; you don't get Chrome's updates.

Apple backports Safari for two macOS release. Could they do so for more? Probably, with more engineering efforts and perhaps some tradeoffs, sure.

I personally just don't like being railroaded into spending all this money just to make Tim Cook's stockholders happy, when most of the time all of the bugs aren't even worked out by the time the next yearly OS version is released.

It's not really a ploy to make shareholders rich, though. Like, sure, Apple could increase the team size of Safari and then offer Safari for more older releases. They could also increase the team size of macOS and then find ways to offer macOS for older Mac hardware. But at the end of the day, everything in engineering is about tradeoffs, and this is the cutoff they've been going with.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

chucker23n1

67 months ago

I haven't found most Safari TPs to be noticeably less reliable than their regular releases.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

SFjohn

68 months ago

Everybody running Safari Web Previews should get medals. That stuff is buggy as hell. I’m staying with regular old Safari releases that actually work.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 131 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

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