Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 187 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced in March 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari.
Safari Technology Preview 187 includes fixes and updates for Accessibility, Animations, CSS, Forms, Rendering, Scrolling, Storage, SVG, Web API, and WebGL.
The current Safari Technology Preview release is compatible with machines running macOS Ventura and macOS Sonoma, the latest version of macOS that Apple released in September 2023.
The Safari Technology Preview update is available through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences or System Settings to anyone who has downloaded the browser. Full release notes for the update are available on the Safari Technology Preview website.
Apple's aim with Safari Technology Preview is to gather feedback from developers and users on its browser development process. Safari Technology Preview can run side-by-side with the existing Safari browser and while designed for developers, it does not require a developer account to download.
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Top Rated Comments
It’s a testing ground for technologies that might eventually make their way into the release version of Safari. Web developers can test the latest WebKit version, report bugs, test experimental and developing standards, etc. It isn’t a straight “beta of the next Safari”.
But it often does include performance improvements for specific things, which will eventually make it into Safari (for example, a couple of years ago I identified a performance regression in certain types of MP4 files played in Safari and this was reported and fixed in Safari Technology Preview, and the fix was in the next public Safari release). It also often includes new bugs, because it’s an in-progress build with web technologies that may not even have a finalised standard yet (a recent example being CSS nesting, which went through several iterations).
So non-developers probably shouldn’t be using Safari Technology Preview.
In fact the release notes for Safari and Safari Technology Preview over the past few years have become increasingly detailed. It's not uncommon for Apple/WebKit to also do a deep dive on the specific changes and features for Safari point releases, including explanations of changes and code examples. For example, this one last month:
https://webkit.org/blog/14787/webkit-features-in-safari-17-2/
I highly recommend following the WebKit RSS feed: https://webkit.org/feed/
You'll get a lot more out of it than you will from MacRumors' generic filler posts.