News

Apple’s Safari Technology Preview 80 Brings Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

Apple on Wednesday released Safari Technology Preview 80, the latest version of their developer preview web browser. The preview version of Apple’s popular browser offers developers and other interested users the ability to try out features that may or may not, debut in future public release versions of Safari.

Release 80

WebGPU

  • Updated setBlendColor, setViewport, setScissorRect in GPURenderPassEncoder
  • Replaced unsigned longs in WebGPU with uint64_t
  • Standardized WebGPU object reference counting and creation logic
  • Removed WebMetal experimental feature in favor of WebGPU

Web API

  • Implemented ResizeObserver
  • Added support for “noreferrer” window feature to window.open()
  • Added support for <object>.contentWindow
  • Changed window.closed to true immediately when close() is invoked
  • Changed to close the service worker database on network process suspension
  • Changed Fetch to allow used body replacement in Request constructor
  • Fixed HTML fragment serialization to not strip whitespace from URL attribute values
  • Made someWindow.frames, someWindow.self, someWindow.window always return someWindow, even without a browsing context
  • Removed conditional parsing of <noembed> content in the HTML parser
  • Fixed the loadstart event for XMLHttpRequestUpload to be correctly initialized
  • Fixed getBoundingClientRect returning an empty rect on a collapsed range
  • Fixed the select element not showing a popup if the element lost focus while the popup was previously shown
  • Pasting a table from Confluence strips table cell content
  • Updated to ensure resetting the storage quota takes into account third party origins

SVG Animation

  • Fixed SVG Animation (SMIL) on <text> or <tspan> to work correctly on the second run

Media

  • Added support for muting screen capture and camera/microphone independently

CSS

  • Implemented white-space: break-spaces value
  • Removed functionality for -apple-trailing-word
  • Allowed FontFace names which start with a number

Accessibility

  • Prevented <svg> elements with labels and no accessible contents from getting exposed as empty AXGroups
  • Changed to automatically compute accessibility labels for Apple Pay buttons

Web Inspector

  • Added support for showing WebGPU contexts in the Canvas Tab
  • Added support for showing the resource initiator in the summary of the headers in the Network Tab
  • Adjusted the energy impact thresholds in the CPU Usage Timeline
  • Ensured that the Script Profiler debugging thread is not counted as part of the page usage in the CPU Usage Timeline
  • Disabling a breakpoint for a specific event listener no longer removes it from the list of breakpoints
  • Prevented breakpoints for attribute modifications from firing when breakpoints are disabled
  • Prevented single clicks from following links in text editors that are not read-only

Safari Extensions

  • Legacy Safari Extensions (.safariextz files) are no longer supported. Safari App Extensions and Content Blockers, which can take advantage of powerful native APIs and frameworks as well as web technologies, can be distributed with apps in the App Store or from developers’ websites. You can learn more at developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/.

The update can be downloaded from the Safari Technology Preview website, or if the browser is already installed, it can be updated via the “Update” tab in the Mac App Store. Full release notes for the update are also available on the Safari Technology Preview website.

While the preview is intended for use by developers and advanced users, in order to provide Apple with feedback on the development of the Safari browser, it can be run side-by-side with the release version of Safari. The app doesn’t require a developer account to download and install. For more information, visit the Safari Technology Preview website.

Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.