Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 110 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

[MacRumors]

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced four years ago 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 release 110 includes bug fixes and performance improvements for WebRTC, Web Authentication, Web Animations, Web API, Media, CSS, Layout, Rendering, Accessibility, JavaScript, Storage Access API, Text Manipulation, Security, and Web Inspector.

The current Safari Technology Preview release is the built on the new Safari 14 update included in macOS Big Sur with support for Safari Web Extensions imported from other browsers, tab previews, password breach notifications, web authentication with Touch ID, and more.

The new Safari Technology Preview update is available for macOS Catalina and macOS Big Sur, the newest version of the Mac operating system that's set to be released 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.

Article Link: Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 110 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

 

[Digital Jive]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

 

[MikhailT]

• Added a functional WebRTC VP9 codec
• Allowed registering VP9 as a VT decoder

Does this mean Youtube 4k support?

 

[EmotionalSnow]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

Habits are hard to break
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• Added a functional WebRTC VP9 codec
• Allowed registering VP9 as a VT decoder

Does this mean Youtube 4k support?

Safari 14 has support for watching 4K on YouTube on iOS & tvOS - maybe they'll add support for it on macOS too

 

[now i see it]

To any of you who download the Preview and play with it... Is it more of a curiosity? Or does the Safari Preview sometimes render webpages correctly when the official iOS Safari will not?

 

[Mac Rules]

Hmm not seeing 4K here, I've even enabled the VP9 decoder in experimental settings...

 

[Vashetti]

Just tested with both 'VP9 decoder' and 'WebRTC VP9 codec' in Experimental Features enabled and YouTube still won't show anything about 1080p.

 

[Mac Rules]

To any of you who download the Preview and play with it... Is it more of a curiosity? Or does the Safari Preview sometimes render webpages correctly when the official iOS Safari will not?

Its a fully functioning and generally very stable preview of the features you will get in Safari a few months ahead of time. The STP has nothing to do with iOS other than sharing a codebase at a later date when it moves to production

 

[Big Bad D]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

Great. That bug made previous version next to unusable. Unclear how that got through quality control as so repeatable bug.

 

[ChrisMoBro]

Only Apple would sell 5k iMacs that only support 1080p on YouTube on their native browser. Come on, Apple, it’s 2020!

 

[willjobsX23]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

This also happened to me!

 

[tosbsas]

only thing is that some extensions will not work if you set preview as default. kind of thinking about going beta, but there is no way back then

 

[coolfactor]

I use the regular Safari and the Tech Preview side-by-side for different sites and barely notice a difference. Overall, Safari remains my favourite browser.
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They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

Zero crashes here. Maybe something related to your settings? Do you have it open a particular page? Do you have it remember opened tabs? I don't have any of that... just opens to a blank page, not a site.

 

[CarlJ]

Just tested with both 'VP9 decoder' and 'WebRTC VP9 codec' in Experimental Features enabled and YouTube still won't show anything about 1080p.

It’s possible that YouTube is doing some (now outdated, for STP) browser sniffing on their end, and not sending/offering the 4K VP9 version to STP.

 

[maxsquared]

It’s possible that YouTube is doing some (now outdated, for STP) browser sniffing on their end, and not sending/offering the 4K VP9 version to STP.

I was my thought, however, if after I changed browser agent, it still the same, unless they are doing something more clever than just browser agent.

 

[lkrupp]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

That NEVER happens to me. I’ve been using Safari Technology Preview as my primary browser for over a year now and it very stable.

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

I upgraded to Mojave finally with so far no issues except no more Safari Technology Preview available.

Is there anywhere to get Safari Technology Preview at all anymore for Mohave? I had a lot of tabs saved there and have no way to retrieve them without switching back to High Sierra.

 

[MauiPa]

They have fixed that annoying bug that caused it to crash whenever you opened a new window. Even though I knew about it I still did it 10 times a day out of habit.

literally, that never happened to me. I am always updated to latest (actually on Big Sur t the moment)
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Only Apple would sell 5k iMacs that only support 1080p on YouTube on their native browser. Come on, Apple, it’s 2020!

hmm, YouTube is google, they couldn't possibly be doing anything nefarious, now could they? Don't know technically why this is the case, but chances are google is using proprietary tech

 

[sdf]

Only Apple would sell 5k iMacs that only support 1080p on YouTube on their native browser. Come on, Apple, it’s 2020!

You're aware Safari shows what's delivered to it, right?

 

[nutmac]

Safari Technology Preview is a newer build than Developer Beta released yesterday:

• Safari AppleSeed Developer Beta: 15610.1.20.4
• Safari Technology Preview: 15610.1.21.0.2

VP9 is only on the Technology Preview.

 

[nvmls]

And there we go, another half baked release. Since previous version, it can't even open local .html files.

Many of you call this "stable".
Impressive.

 

[Birkan]

So I tested VP9 support using a website that checks media mime support and STP release 110 indeed supports VP9 on the browser side. However, YouTube did not load any VP9 video in my limited testing so far. The nice thing is VP9 decoding is provided by VideoToolbox (VT) which can be used by any macOS app (video player, transcoder etc) going forward which is great. Hopefully, they will also expose VP9 encoding functionality in VT as well.

PS: Upon further inspection, they only seem to support VP9 codec inside MP4 container for now, unless I missed something. Most if not all VP9 videos in YouTube seem to use Webm container instead of MP4. However, they seem to support Webm/VP9 on iOS so it might be coming to the macOS in the upcoming STP releases.

 

[maxsquared]

So I tested VP9 support using a website that checks media mime support and STP release 110 indeed supports VP9 on the browser side. However, YouTube did not load any VP9 video in my limited testing so far. The nice thing is VP9 decoding is provided by VideoToolbox (VT) which can be used by any macOS app (video player, transcoder etc) going forward which is great. Hopefully, they will also expose VP9 encoding functionality in VT as well.

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View attachment 934492

This was something I was looking for.

Hopefully it will be hardware accelerated as well, as it's currently dreadful with Chrome, and my MBP 16 runs pretty hot.

This is one single feature that's on top of my wishlist of Mac OS and iOS.

 

[justperry]

I've played around with STP, doesn't really make much of a difference with the normal installed version, have some fixes and some extras, but I can't really see what makes it better.

And there we go, another half baked release. Since previous version, it can't even open local .html files.

Many of you call this "stable".
Impressive.

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You might be better off with a different OS, seems like you are always complaining, never one good word for macOS.

 

[nvmls]

You might be better off with a different OS, seems like you are always complaining, never one good word for macOS.

We use every single platform OS.

The bugs are there, it's not a subjective thing.

Have had good words on macOS & Apple several times when credit is due, many examples below.

Good words 1
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We want Apple & Safari to succeed tremendously, otherwise we wouldn't waste our time reporting bugs.

Some others say it's "stable", and that's fine if it makes you happy, but we will disagree on its current state.