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Comment by culi

6 days ago

Props to the Safari team. They surprised us all when they suddenly shot to the top of interop-2025 this October

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

54 comments

culi

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ChadNauseam  6 days ago

I didn't realize it was tracked like this, but I have noticed that as of iOS 26, Safari has gotten a huge number of great web features. It has WebGPU of course, but many small things like fixing up missing parts of the OPFS API that make it actually usable now. Now they even have the field-sizing CSS property [0], fixing imo the most glaring ommission from CSS: the inability to make text input boxes grow to fit the input text!

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

  • rendaw  6 days ago

    I thought that was supposed to be fixed by contenteditable plaintext-only. Why was field sizing still necessary?

    • extra88  5 days ago

      `contenteditable` is an HTML attribute but it depends on JavaScript to do anything useful. This problem is one of layout, CSS's domain, so `field-sizing` solves it while leaving HTML form elements to do the actual job of taking input.

    • hombre_fatal  6 days ago

      At least recreate their demo for us to showcase the fix. But I feel like it would be a let down that answers your question.

al_borland  6 days ago

This seems like a bit of a trend with Safari. Around big releases Apple will announce how Safari is the best at X, but other times of the year it gets a lot of flack. I assume this is due to Safari’s more traditional release schedule vs other browsers continuously shipping feature updates.

  • concinds  6 days ago

    Cool stuff they're working on tends to take a very long time to reach customers' hands compared to other browsers. Just compare the "stable" and "experimental" graphs on wpt.fyi for Safari.

    I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".

    It's an own-goal for no reason.

    • simondotau  6 days ago

      The web platform doesn’t need to move this fast. Google is, often unilaterally, pushing new features and declaring them standards. In my opinion, the web should not be changing so fast that a truly open source community project couldn’t keep up. I don’t like how the web has become reliant on the largesse of billion dollar corporations.

      I recognise that this is a controversial take, but in my opinion what Google is doing is a variant of “embrace and extend”. Traditionally, this meant proprietary extensions (e.g. VBScript) but I think this a subtle variant with similar consequences.

      16 replies →

    • alwillis  6 days ago

      > I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".

      There's a new version of Safari Technology Preview [1] for macOS every two weeks.

      There's a new version of Safari released every September for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. This has been the schedule for several years. Since Safari 26 shipped on September 15, 2025, there have been two updates for these platforms:

      Safari 26.1 on November 3rd and 26.2 on December 12th.

      The Safari team shipped 7 releases this year, averaging 7½ weeks between releases; not a significant difference from 4–6 weeks. Each major release of Safari for macOS runs on the current macOS version (Tahoe) and the two preceding ones—Sequoia and Sonoma.

      BTW, there were 9 Safari releases in 2024, averaging 5.8 weeks apart.

      It's not the first time Safari shipped a significant new feature before other browsers; :has(), Display P3 color support, JPEG-XL come to mind. At the end of the day, there's no NIH or Marketing team dictating the release schedule.

      [1]: https://webkit.org/downloads/

      3 replies →

  • halapro  6 days ago

    Safari has been releasing a lot more often than it used to. My personal gripe with Safari is how they decided to deal with extensions, forcing every developer through their hellish App Store submission experience.

alwillis  6 days ago

> They surprised us all when they suddenly shot to the top of interop-2025 this October

Not all of us were surprised; some of us have been watching the Safari team shipping the latest HTML and CSS features for a few years now.

madeofpalk  6 days ago

This is not all that surprising. While the Chrome team is out there evangelising things like WebPCIe or whatever, Safari's been shipping features clients actually want, like blurred backgrounds for years before anyone else.

  • cosmic_cheese  6 days ago

    Imagine if the literal army of Chromium/Blink engineers threw their entire weight into making the fundamental building blocks that everybody uses better instead of niche things that only a tiny fraction sites and web apps will ever need.

MintPaw  6 days ago

Hm, I know that Safari doesn't support 64bit wasm, which is a very important feature that Chrome and Firefox both have, but this seems to say they have "100% webassembly support".

https://webassembly.org/features/

neo_doom  6 days ago

Fascinating tracker. So we started 2025 with nearly every browser under 80% and ending the year with every browser with >98% interop? That's a lot of amazing work done by a lot of teams. Incredible!

  • TheCoreh  6 days ago

    Just to clarify the meaning of the measurement, it doesn't mean they're 98% interoperable across everything, it's across the specific set of goals for 2025. (Which is still really good!)

    I think they realized that shipping the features out of sync meant nobody could use them until all browsers adopted them, which took years, so now they coordinate

    • lelandfe  6 days ago

      All of the above and even more so to have those features behave identically across the member browsers.

65  6 days ago

Safari became the new IE for a while, the amount of problems I've had with Safari CSS animations and SVGs is endless.

It's good they're trying to not make Safari suck as much.

  • Unai  6 days ago

    Safari is still the new IE. Well, not really "new", it has been IE all along. It's the only non-evergreen browser that remains, and I don't get why this isn't mentioned every time Safari is brought up. All of their spec implementations are meaningless when the only version that matters is the one forever stuck in whichever oldest iPhone n% of people still use.

    Caniuse is pointless, their new "baseline" score is pointless; as long as enough people keep using their (perfectly fine and working) iPhones after official support stops and as long as they are not allowed to install a different browser (engine), that's the only data point you need to look at when choosing which browser features to use.

  • robertoandred  5 days ago

    The only people who think Safari is the new IE are people who weren’t around for IE.

    • culi  5 days ago

      it's also not possible for Safari to be the new IE because they don't have 95% marketshare. And IE's unique problem was that they pushed features that only they supported. Safari's problem is it doesn't support certain features

      Also the thing is that there are plenty of features supported by Safari and Firefox that Chrome is slacking on. Nobody every complains about those features though because nobody would try to use a feature not supported by Chrome in the first place

    • alwillis  5 days ago

      > The only people who think Safari is the new IE are people who weren’t around for IE.

      Absolutely true! I've said the same thing many times myself.

      Stating that Safari is the new IE is one of the answers to:

      "Tell me you didn't do web development in '90s and have no idea what you're talking about without telling me you didn't do web development in '90s and have no idea what you're talking about."

pie_flavor  6 days ago

My favorite is finally supporting `arbitrary-subdomain.localhost`. Been a real pain in the neck to add Safari-specific fallbacks for my usage of that.

zwnow  6 days ago

Does it still expand an svg to full size if u omit width and height attributes because u control the size in a parent container? Fuck safari

socalgal2  5 days ago

interop-2025. It does not mean Safari supports all the latest stuff. It means, "for some small subset of stuff here's the percent that's supported".

Of course Safari pushes to have anything they don't want to support not in that subset.

hoten  6 days ago

I wonder if Ladybird has explored running these interop tests yet. Or maybe these are just a subset of WPT?