Comment by al_borland
5 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.
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.
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.
I know it's fashionable to forcefully shove the same pet peeves about Chromium into any topic even loosely related, but here I'm talking about Safari webcompat fixes, bug fixes, and improvements having very long delays between being written and landing in customers' hands. I would make the same argument if Chrome never existed. Thank you for presenting the 10,001st reissue of this "controversial take".
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"Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes and follows a novel embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by breaking the web and stomping on the bits. Who cares if it breaks as long as we go forward." https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
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VBScript is a word I hadn't heard in quite a while! Brings back memories of editing 5k line .asp files to find an if statement and then a 1000 lines of html and such. Sadly, I dont' think web development is actual better 20+ years later, just different...
The web platform on your device needs to be locked to a specific version because the OS stopped being updated. Once the OS stops being updated, you're supposed to buy a new device.
You shouldn't be allowed to use an old device with an updated browser, especially not a browser from a 3rd party, because that doesn't help Apple sell more iPads.
> 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/
The Safari/WebKit people are doing good work, yes.
I use Safari as my default, and like every Firefox/Safari user I still get some bugs that don't occur in Chrome (not talking about WebMIDI obviously), so watching that 30 point gap between stable Safari and bleeding-edge WebKit (longer than 7½ weeks) on wpt.fyi was quite frustrating. The average Safari user would have a better browsing experience with a shorter fix delay, that's just the truth. Having to wait for macOS updates holds back the browser, unnecessarily.
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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.