Post

If you write code to make websites (HTML, CSS, JS, Web API, Media) and you get frustrated trying to wrangle your code to work in Safari, which bugs are blocking you? Which existing features would you most like to see improved? If you got a chance to order priorities which effort would you put first?

Usually the features I want to use are available in the last few versions of Safari, but often not enough versions to cover my customer base. It's a big ask, but I believe that updating Safari from the app store instead of the OS would fix this problem.

I’m not sure the App Store helps in this case; if Safari uses features, APIs, etc. in a new version of iOS that don’t exist in older iOS versions, those customers wouldn’t be able to upgrade to the latest Safari anyway…

Then perhaps those features could be gated based on os version/capabilities. To a point of course. This is something that every other browser is already doing.

I understand that Safari has a kind of deep OS integration that the other browsers do not, but its JS and CSS features that I want more frequent updates for. I believe those should be among the most independent parts from the OS.

I did some research to see what Apple is doing with CSS features, for example: - Safari 18.0 shipped 8 new CSS features on Sep. 16, 2024 - 18.2 shipped 21 new CSS features on Dec. 11, 2024 - 18.4 shipped 9 new CSS features on March 31, 2025 38 new CSS features in about 6 months seems pretty good?

I guess it depends. CSS Grid shipped pretty much simultaneously in Safari, Firefox and Chrome in 2017, has 98% support and only about 25% of sites use it. There are other issues at play besides availability in everyone's browser.

And I bet it was usable in Chrome much earlier.

Not necessarily; the WebKit team has beat Google to the punch a lot more lately. WebKit invented a way to implement :has, which for 20 years, was thought to be impossible. WebKit 15.4 shipped :has in March 14, 2022; Chrome didn’t ship it until August 30, 2022: webkit.org/blog/13096/c...