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Apple Launches 'Safari Technology Preview' Browser for Web Developers

Won't change much. Compared to Chrome, the feature set is terrible. I'm not talking about "Extensions" other user facing features.
As a frontend developer, I see every day quirks and stuff that Safari doesn't support and chrome does.
 
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Frankied22 said:
Will it finally support webm?
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My recollection is that Apple believes WebM, based on the VP8 codec, likely infringes on the MPEG LA patents (regardless of intention of the VP8 developers), and because of that they have no plans to ever add support for WebM. It's not just a matter of not having gotten around to it yet.

I love the purple icon (I seem to recall the WebKit nightly builds used to have Safari's normal blue icon, but with the silver edge replaced by gold), and will likely download it to test some things, but I fully expect there to be a bunch of non-developer users who will switch to it as their day-to-day browser and then complain loudly that "Safari is broken!"
 
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ericinboston said:
You mean, like, that new weblink thing where you can click on a "link" in the middle of a webpage and be taken to another webpage!? COOL!!
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I think you are confusing Safari for Mac OS X with Safari for iOS. That's two vastly different applications.
 
fabiopigi said:
Won't change much. Compared to Chrome, the feature set is terrible. I'm not talking about "Extensions" other user facing features.
As a frontend developer, I see every day quirks and stuff that Safari doesn't support and chrome does.
Click to expand...

You know, this is why they have built-in feedback. Utilize it and maybe Apple will implement these features. There is a reason why this is a labeled as a Technology Preview.
 
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fabiopigi said:
Won't change much. Compared to Chrome, the feature set is terrible. I'm not talking about "Extensions" other user facing features.
As a frontend developer, I see every day quirks and stuff that Safari doesn't support and chrome does.
Click to expand...


But until Google gets their act together in-terms battery optimisation and efficiency, Chrome will never be a option for me on notebooks. It's not as terrible on Windows as on Mac OS X, but it's still bad. And there has been tremendous issues with Chrome's "Hardware Acceleration" on Windows 10, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards.

It's most obvious with the new MacBook 12-inch. You can slice off 2-4 hours of battery life running the same web content using Google Chrome compared to Apple Safari. And that's with Chrome's pepperflash disabled using about:plugins. The CPU utilisation with Chrome is 80-120% (above 100 means it's running in turbo boost), while with Apple Safari it's rarely above 10%. The difference is quite ridiculous.

Even worse scenarios are Mac notebooks with both integrated and dedicated graphics card, as Google Chrome for some reason insists on activating the dedicated graphics card all the time for no apparent reason. Running Apple Safari compared to Google Chrome on my MacBook Pro 15-inch with Retina sporting the GeForce 650m was quite ridiculous, not only in battery life but even more so in heat and fan noise.


And it's getting really annoying that Google simply refuses to add HLS support in Chrome. It shouldn't be hard to do at all, but they insists on it being a non-standard they simply won't support forcing me to either use services like Twitch.tv with Flash Player, or use another browser entirely.
 
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RamGuy said:
But until Google gets their act together in-terms battery optimisation and efficiency, Chrome will never be a option for me on notebooks. It's not as terrible on Windows as on Mac OS X, but it's still bad. And there has been tremendous issues with Chrome's "Hardware Acceleration" on Windows 10, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards.

It's most obvious with the new MacBook 12-inch. You can slice off 2-4 hours of battery life running the same web content using Google Chrome compared to Apple Safari. And that's with Chrome's pepperflash disabled using about:plugins. The CPU utilisation with Chrome is 80-120% (above 100 means it's running in turbo boost), while with Apple Safari it's rarely above 10%. The difference is quite ridiculous.

Even worse scenarios are Mac notebooks with both integrated and dedicated graphics card, as Google Chrome for some reason insists on activating the dedicated graphics card all the time for no apparent reason. Running Apple Safari compared to Google Chrome on my MacBook Pro 15-inch with Retina sporting the GeForce 650m was quite ridiculous, not only in battery life but even more so in heat and fan noise.


And it's getting really annoying that Google simply refuses to add HLS support in Chrome. It shouldn't be hard to do at all, but they insists on it being a non-standard they simply won't support forcing me to either use services like Twitch.tv with Flash Player, or use another browser entirely.
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Above 100% has nothing to do with turboboost. Modern browsers are multi-threaded applications, and over 100% (assuming we're talking about Activity Monitor here) means the application is utilizing at least two threads, the total of which is about 120% of one core. The maximum for one process is about 400% on a dual-core + hyper-threading CPU, because four cores are made available to the operating system.
 
djang0 said:
This just goes to show how iPad Pro is not really a laptop replacement after all (just one example out of many). It's a marketing gimmick.
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Or maybe that the Pro hardware was released before they made the software. Could be either.
 
saintforlife said:
Anybody know why Apple stopped making the Windows version of Safari?
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Other people picked up the ball, and made browsers for Windows (and Linux) that are based on or derived from (Apple created, but now open source) WebKit. No need for Apple to duplicate that effort, especially for someone else's OS platform.
 
firewood said:
Other people picked up the ball, and made browsers for Windows (and Linux) that are based on or derived from (Apple created, but now open source) WebKit. No need for Apple to duplicate that effort, especially for someone else's OS platform.
Click to expand...

Not to mention Safari for Windows was outdated within a month of release. It was kind of garbage.
 
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Frankied22 said:
Will it finally support webm?
Click to expand...

Google Movie?

I hope never!

If they start supporting Google's formats, why not also support .mkv, whatever Microsoft cooks out, whatever Adobe cooks out, etc. etc. etc.

People complained about QuickTime's .mov, that came in a time where there were no standards, and now they expect Apple to support Google's arrogance in a time that there are standards?
 
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I hope they can add a dark theme to Safari Preview like in Chrome DevTool add-on, I felt it's easier on the eye when I stare at the console whole day...
 
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STP.png


Bring this to the Apple TV.
 
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saintforlife said:
Anybody know why Apple stopped making the Windows version of Safari? What could motivate Apple to bring Safari back to Windows?
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At the time of launch in 2007 there were no fast, standard compliant, dominate browsers on Windows. In 2008 Chrome launched that used WebKit at the time and quickly became dominate. They discontinued Safari in 2010 I think because Chrome out stripped it and it needed a lot of work, Chrome had far surpassed Safari in speed, features and stability and it wasn't core to what Apple did.

With Chrome of WebKit there might be some reason to get back into it but doubt it. It was great to begin with given the original offering but by 2010 compared to the others it was pretty crap.
 
Glad they're finally fixing IndexedDB. It's been broken for a while. I actually gave up using it because it was so unreliable on Safari.
 
Of course, Apple has for a long time offered Nightly builds of WebKit, the open source browser engine that today runs on hundreds of millions of devices and powers Apple's Safari. However, getting access to these builds takes a bit more effort than using the new Safari Technology Preview browser.
Click to expand...

Getting Webkit is as simple as clicking a link and opening an application, which automatically updates itself every night via Sparkle; not exactly more effort than clicking a link and opening an application, which automatically updates itself every two weeks (by requiring opening another app to do it no less).

That aside, the cool thing for me is that this adds the stuff that will be in the new Safari application, not just the rendering engine. Webkit always used the existing Safari UI, only offering the under-the-hood changes of the new engine. This adds the option to use new application features beyond the engine, while still giving frequent updates to the engine as well.
 
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