Introducing Safari Technology Preview
Ricky Mondello (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Starting today, there’s a new, convenient way to see what features and improvements are coming to Safari and other applications that use WebKit. Safari Technology Preview is a version of Safari for OS X, distributed by Apple, that includes a cutting-edge, in-development version of the WebKit browser engine. It’s a great way to test upcoming WebKit features and give feedback to the people building them when it’s most useful — early in development.
Safari Technology Preview is a standalone application that can be used side-by-side with Safari or other web browsers, making it easy to compare behaviors between them.
[…]
It’s now possible to programmatically copy and cut text in response to a user gesture with
document.execCommand('copy')anddocument.execCommand('cut'). Having this ability may eliminate some websites’ last need for the Flash plug-in.
Once installed, updates will come every two weeks through the Mac App Store — but you have to initially install from the website download. And unlike Webkit nightly builds, Safari Technology Preview is signed by Apple, which allows it to work with iCloud features (bookmark and tab syncing, etc.).
By the way, I’d just like to point to the Mac App Store review guidelines:
2.6 Apps that are “beta”, “demo”, “trial”, or “test” versions will be rejected
Just in case you thought you might be able to get away with this, as a third-party developer. Not that you did, of course.
I’m seeing a weird issue where Safari Technology Preview keeps relaunching itself after I quit it. I can’t get it to stay out of my Dock. I think this is caused by RescueTime.
This may be related to the fact that installing Safari Technology Preview broke my compiled AppleScripts for Safari. They now try to talk to Safari Technology Preview even when I’m already in Safari. I think this is because Safari and Safari Technology Preview have the same CFBundleSignature (sfri)—not the case with WebKit Nightly—but the preview has a higher version number. Even though my scripts mention Safari by name, the creator code is what gets saved during compilation. The fix is to change:
tell application "Safari"
to:
tell application id "com.apple.Safari"
since the apps have different CFBundleIdentifiers.
A public beta to fix this in EagleFiler is available.
Update (2016-04-13): Ricky Mondello notes that the second version of Safari Technology Preview has a bundle identifier distinct from regular Safari’s. It is now stp1.
