safarilogoApple today seeded developers with new versions of Safari for OS X Mavericks (Safari 7.1) and OS X Mountain Lion (Safari 6.2) to parallel continued work on OS X Yosemite. In particular, Apple is asking developers to test general website and extension compatibility for several reasons.

Please test general website compatibility.
- Subpixel rendering is now on by default for all web content. Web sites or in-app web views with extremely tight design constraints may render differently.
- CSS object model getters will return fractional double values based on subpixel layout and rendering metrics instead of rounded integral values.

Please test extension compatibility.

Apple also documents several new WebKit features included in the new versions of Safari including support for WebGL, which allows users to view 3D content without plug-ins. WebGL has been present in Safari for OS X for several years, but is disabled by default. It's clear, however, that Apple is looking to take WebGL mainstream, pushing development on OS X Safari and bringing it to Safari for iOS later this year with iOS 8.

Update: Many non-developers are reporting that the Safari 7.1 beta is even showing up for them in the Mac App Store update section.

Top Rated Comments

tywebb13 Avatar
116 months ago
Apple accidently indexed the file Safari7.1MavericksSeed.pkg in the file

index-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

giving ALL the public with mavericks access to it.

They should have only put it onto the developer and public beta testers index files.

It should not go onto

index-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

until safari 7.1 is actually officially publicly released.

This would explain why you are seeing it in your mac app store even if you are not a developer or public beta tester.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
tywebb13 Avatar
116 months ago
I put a message about it in apple's developer forums and apple acted pretty quickly on it and have now removed the file Safari7.1MavericksSeed.pkg from index-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz

Hence it is no longer publicly available to everyone. (But is still available to developers via the mac dev center).
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
PocketSand11 Avatar
116 months ago
These updates always make Safari sna– faster for me, but I really wish they'd bring back the Activity Window that listed all the page resources to get their URLs. It was great for downloading videos and such (for personal use!). For some reason, the web inspector doesn't have any similar functionality, and they removed the Activity Window after Safari 5 I think.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Emulsion Avatar
116 months ago
'Apple looking to take WebGL mainstream.'

Wrong. It hasn't gone mainstream because Apple hasn't implemented the web standard yet. So developers haven't implemented it because of Apple holding out.

There's a difference.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
xeni Avatar
116 months ago
I'm not a dev either but if you signed up to get Xcode, then you will get these updates i think.
Not sure if signing up for the Yosemite beta did the same thing.

EDIT: ...or not? http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2aec4h/safari_71_developer_preview_in_app_store/
Looks like Apple may have goofed up.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
iBug2 Avatar
116 months ago
Apple does not seem to be serious about their browser any more. It was very innovative when it was launched but now I think FireFox and Chrome are way ahead.

Ahead in terms of what? Safari is way more faster than both of those browsers and uses a lot less energy. I keep Firefox because I need its addons every now and then but I have no use for Chrome.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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