Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 187 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

Damn, I can't believe it, they've done it again! They've released a new Safari Technology Preview With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements!

Do you really observe (performance) improvements over regular version? 🤨

I think you’re missing the point of Safari Technology Preview, and Xeenon didn’t claim it had better performance compared to Safari. It isn’t guaranteed to be faster overall, or even stable, but specific things might be.

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.

It would be helpful if they would specify which bugs are being fixed, and under which situations performance is being improved. Whatever happened to proper release notes?

Whatever happened to proper release notes?

MacRumors might pump out the same post every time there's a new STP release (which, by the way, is roughly every two weeks!), but Apple releases very detailed release notes, as noted by xeenon above.

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.

It would be helpful if they would specify which bugs are being fixed, and under which situations performance is being improved. Whatever happened to proper release notes?

There are very detailed release notes (down to the WebKit GitHub link and radar number!) for every Safari Technology Preview release. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-technology-preview-release-notes/stp-release-187

Would be great if Apple looked in the rear view on occasion. There is no support for Safari on OS 10.11 for my 2009 iMac (yeah, still kinda running w/ the OG GPU). Firefox is great for streaming Netflix though.