Safari 14
Safari 14 brings improved performance, customizable start pages, a Privacy Report to see which cross-site trackers are being blocked, and a new tab bar design that provides tab previews so you can see what you have open at a glance. Today’s update also removes Adobe Flash.
I’m seeing a bug [Update (2020-09-19): fix] that affects sending the selected text to a system service or Quick Action.
For the first time, WebKit’s tracking prevention measures are exposed to the user (beyond enabling the Intelligent Tracking Prevention debug mode).
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The Privacy Report means, quite simply, that WebKit’s global tracking protections, such as truncating all cross-site referrers and blocking all cookie access in third-party context have been applied to all the cross-site HTTP requests sent from the site, including but not limited to those shown in the Privacy Report.
The purpose of this approach is without a doubt to just show how the biggest trackers on the web have been prevented from cross-site tracking, but the measures are not limited to just these domains. Nor are WebKit’s ITP measures applied to these domains automatically (I repeat: WebKit does not use blocklists - it classifies domains algorithmically).
The Safari 14 release notes didn’t mention an important new feature: support for web extensions. Probably because there aren’t any Safari web extensions yet! But support is indeed there for web extensions in Safari 14 for Catalina and Mojave. Previous versions of Safari already had support for Apple-specific app extensions, such as my own StopTheMadness, but Safari 14 also supports the cross-platform WebExtensions API used by Firefox and Google Chrome. Unfortunately, that support is not complete. Ever since the Big Sur beta was released at WWDC in June, I’ve been working on a brand new Safari web extension that I’m really excited about, and I think you will be too. I would love to release it now that Safari 14 is publicly available, but I can’t, because I found a bug in Safari’s web extension support that’s a showstopper for my extension. In short, the bug is that
run_at document_startis not reliable in Safari.
Update (2020-09-28): Lloyd Chambers:
Some websites that used to work fine, e.g., Chase.com are drawn with a blank area, a refresh is required.
Save Image As... is not working at all. I get a rainbow beachball, then nothing.
Update (2020-12-08): Mr. Macintosh (MacRumors):
Apple has just released a Mojave Supplemental Update that address all the problems that the previous Safari 14.0 and 2020-005 Security Updates! This news comes one day after Apple pulled both software updates from the software update catalog.
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Top Site is gone, Basically the start page is trying to mimic iOS Safari. You can tell by its much narrower design.
Favourite icon now force you to use Small Tabs when you have many tabs. Compared to previously where you still have text next to those tabs. To restore the larger tabs you will have to do without Fav icons. And that is backwards.
Show Tab Preview still loads all tab, which will causes performance and memory issues if you have lots of tabs opened.
I use Little snitch. The new version of safari tried to open every single one of my bookmarks.
Very annoying.
Has Apple released any major N.0 software updates in the past 5 years that wasn't half-baked? I guess this is what happens when they release software based on what Tim Cook's calendar says and also ignore like 95% of all bug reports submitted. One would hope that with extra money and manpower (and more customers who depend on their products) they'd get better at this, not worse.
Safari 14 is a non-intuitive mess. With prior safaris I’ve always been to figure out how to configure it. Not Safari 14, which is totally opaque to users.
I want to add more frequently visited sites (since top sites is gone). But I can’t figure out how to do it. Safari Help offers none. Apple support website offers zero help.
Anybody?
Apart from Top Sites going, I'm also constantly seeing available RAM dropping right down to a few per cent and everything running very slowly. Closing Safari immediately brings it back up to 70%+. I'm doing this on Firefox and memory is remaining around 70%, around where it would have been on Safari 13.
I know this is a 2012 Mac Mini but it's got max available Ram, 16 GB and I've never noticed any performance drop offs with past updates.It's running at about 50% of Fusion capacity. It's always run as fast as I've wanted as a generalist domestic user.
So far the 14 update seems to offer features I'm not interested in at a cost of Top Sites which I used a lot and a near unusable Mini, unless I turn Safari off and use another browser. I'm going to swop all "open in selected browser" options from Safari to Firefox or Opera. Whether I will ever bother to swop them back is doubtful unless the replacement browser fouls up.
I know this is an older post… but wow I really miss Top Sites. I just filed a Feedback Assistant "suggestion" for its return. Please, Apple… listen to your customers on this..
