Safari 16 Announced
What’s new in Safari and WebKit (Hacker News):
Explore the latest features in Safari and WebKit and learn how you can make better and more powerful websites. We’ll take you on a tour through the latest updates to HTML, CSS enhancements, Web Inspector tooling, Web APIs, and more.
Safari 16 brings support for Web Inspector Extensions, so you can enhance Safari’s built-in browser developer tools. This can be especially helpful when using powerful third-party frameworks and services — perhaps your team uses React, Angular, Vue, or Ember; or maybe a popular test suite or another developer service.
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After years of collaboration by engineers working on various browsers to figure out whether or not they would even be possible, Container Queries are finally here. Similar to Media Queries, Container Queries allow you to adjust the layout or styling of a particular item on your web page based on the size of its container rather than the size of the viewport. They’ll be an invaluable tool for creating reusable components in a design system.
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Web Push is coming to Safari 16 on macOS Ventura. This lets you remotely send notifications to users of your websites and web apps — and deliver those notifications even when Safari isn’t running.
[…]
Subgrid takes Grid to another level, providing an easy way to put grandchildren of a grid container on that grid. It makes it possible to line up items across complex layouts without being constrained by the HTML structure.
Previously:
6 Comments RSS · Twitter
"Web Push is coming to Safari 16 on macOS Ventura"
You know I am getting really sick and tired of this bullshit where Safari only has certain features on the latest macOS. It is quite clearly just some kind of surreptitious punishment for remaining on an older but still supported OS version.
It's actually causing problems now: For example, users of Safari 14/15 on Catalina. Websites assume Safari 15 can show WebP - but it can only do that on Big Sur or later. I am slowly seeing more and more broken images on sites because of this. The sites don't understand that Safari 14/15 can only show WebP on Big Sur. But it's not like sites can check if the user is even on Big Sur, because Apple froze the exposed Mac version number at 10.15 due to "Privacy".
Ultimately though, there is NO valid technical reason why Safari 14/15 could not have supported WebP on Catalina, or why Safari 16 could not support web push on all supported OS versions.
@Mike Richardson that is just lazy developers who aren't using the picture element or reading the browser accept header. There's really no excuse for the WebP breakage.
Sure, it's always those "lazy" developers. Give them a Rube Goldberg machine of possibilities, and denounce them for being lazy if they miss one alternative that doesn't happen on any of their test machines. But never, ever, blame those who created the Rube Goldberg machine.
"that is just lazy developers"
That's not how this works. These teams have huge backlogs of things they have to do. If Apple breaks some feature for users on old devices, who are probably making up a tiny percentage of all visitors to that site, and who are going to update at some point anyway (or just switch to Chrome), that issue never gets prioritized. It's not lazy to not fix a problem that will go away on its own, and that only affects a few users who can easily fix the problem themselves by switching browsers. It's making good use of the resources you have by allocating them to problems that actually matter.
The actual issue here is Apple: if they want people to use Safari instead of switching to Chrome, they have to start caring about these things.
Proper testing on Safari requires buying a dedicated €1430 machine (256GB doesn’t cut it for macOS and XCode) for iOS and macOS since 11.0 plus a used Mac for macOS until 10.15. You’ll need to buy another new machine in 5–7 years. Safari requires the most patches and is also by far the hardest to look for.
Properly optimized images are a pain because you have two dimensions to cover. You have a dimension of screen sizes and another dimension of supported formats. That last one still exists only because of Safari. (It will exist for at least four more years due to A9–A10 devices being forever stuck on Safari 15.)
> the browser accept header
That’s another thing Safari is the only browser not to do.
