New WebKit Features in Safari 15.5

https://webkit.org/blog/12669/new-webkit-features-in-safari-15-5/

by feross • 4 years ago

66 87 4 years ago

etchalon3• 4 years ago

It seems like Apple is accelerating WebKit/Safari changes.

agust• 4 years ago

They have accelerated and started hiring massively around October last year, that is when several regulators started investigating the browser engine ban on iOS (the CMA in the UK first).

jinder2• 4 years ago

Correct - after years of deliberately hobbling Safari so you couldn't build quality app experiences, they suddenly start releasing lots of useful improvement just as regulators are sniffing around.

SemanticStrengh7• 4 years ago

any links? (on the hirings)

SemanticStrengh7• 4 years ago

it was an abandonware until last year

etchalon3• 4 years ago

They’ve consistently added features with every OS release cycle.

Which isn’t nearly as fast as other browsers move, but it was never abandonware.

JanSt5• 4 years ago

I keep hoping for the bluetooth api to be added at some point. Still unlikely unfortunately :-(

akmarinov• 4 years ago

0 chance of that happening

JanSt5• 4 years ago

yeah, apple is pretty stubborn on that one. I’m glad we have Chrome

olliej• 4 years ago

Yeah, I am forever thankful that my browser isn’t vending my Bluetooth devices to random websites. I don’t understand why so many people want so much of their machine state to be vended to random websites.

JanSt5• 4 years ago

That's not how it would work. You would need to grant permission to websites and there are good use cases. No website could just randomly scan.

mtomweb10• 4 years ago

Scanning is native only. Web Bluetooth does not slow scanning and you have to specify specific device categories or services to connect too without being able to work out what devices are there first.

Read the security section on the Web Bluetooth spec.

dmix• 4 years ago

`inert` sounds like something that could be abused, similar to how websites (annoyingly) try to block you from easily right-click saving photos.

evan_• 4 years ago

`inert` doesn't let you do anything you couldn't do before, it just does it with one attribute instead of a half-dozen attributes and CSS rules that need to be applied to the element and its children.

You can defeat right-click save-as about ten different ways already so that ship has sailed. And all of those can be defeated using the Application tab in the Chrome dev tools or mitmproxy etc.

teg4n_• 4 years ago

It’s desperately needed to implement current patterns like model dialogs in an accessible way. It doesn’t do anything JavaScript can’t already do so I don’t think it’s any worse for abuse.

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

Still waiting for Apple to enable PREFETCH

https://caniuse.com/link-rel-prefetch

It's been there since Safari v13.1 but disabled by default.

(PreFetch is what allows https://instant.page to load assets super fast.)

webmobdev2• 4 years ago

And also extensively used for privacy invasive tracking (1) there is no same-origin restriction for link prefetching and (2) it allow cookies to be planted from tracking servers. ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe... ).

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

I thought CSP mitigate this risk.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...

phillipseamore• 4 years ago

Still waiting for MSE and fullscreen API support in iOS Safari for better media support without having to roll out an app. Both have been available on iPadOS for a few years now.

charlescooper• 4 years ago

I have been using Firefox & macOS for about the last 4-5 years. I primarily use it because I enjoy the bookmark sync between my Mac and linux desktops and because I try using open-source software as much as reasonably possible. However I will used a closed-source product when I feel it is better than the open source option. (E.g. MS Excel) It seems like Safari has been rapidly improving as of late. Any recommendations to try it again over Firefox? Would be a bit annoying to find some sort of "bookmark sync" solution again, but something good probably exists out there.

corrral3• 4 years ago

The main selling point is that it's far more respectful of system resources than its big two competitors. Noticeably lower power use, reduced effects on performance of other software outside the browser.

If the rest of your stuff is also Apple, browser sync is a pretty solid Just Works thing, which can be a benefit of using it, but you're not all-Apple, so that benefit's out.

[EDIT] "So what are the downsides?" worse dev tools, worse add-on ecosystem. Sometimes it's missing engine features that FF and Chrome have (this never hinders me at all in practice, with my usage patterns, and in fact I'm usually glad when they choose not to uncritically and promptly implement every single feature Google adds to Chrome, but I understand it bothers some people a lot, so would definitely count against Safari if those features are things you really want/need)

bastardoperator• 4 years ago

This is exactly why I use safari, it's not perfect, but it respects the battery life to a noticeable extent.

danielvaughn• 4 years ago

I didn't know that it was lighter on system resources, that's interesting. Makes me wonder if a FF-based Electron would ever take off, because the main issue with Electron apps is the insane amount of memory consumption (last I checked anyways). Especially if you have multiple electron apps running simultaneously.

lowwave• 4 years ago

and in fact I'm usually glad when they choose not to uncritically and promptly implement every single feature Google adds to Chrome, but I understand it bothers some people a lot, so would definitely count against Safari if those features are things you really want/need)

Thanks someone for bring it up. More features Chrome add are in the larger scheme of thing invates our privacy, WebTorrent (leaks IP addresses of the other peers). WebGPU leaks hardware info finger printing, etc.

By using web browser I expect some sort of sandboxing. Why do I need all these features in a document based viewing portal?

jazzyjackson2• 4 years ago

I moved from Firefox to Safari solely because I can two-finger pinch into a grid view of open tabs - and also it has a 'share' button that integrates with my Mac and allows me to dump websites as PDFs to my knowledge repo (DEVONthink), I was never able to organize bookmarks in a way that I looked at them ever again.

There's a pretty slick tab grouping interface but I always forget its there.

eyelidlessness3• 4 years ago

Another cool Safari tab UI feature, if you use the bottom URL bar, is you can swipe between tabs without even viewing the tab grid view at all. And if you’re at the end of the tab list, another swipe will create a new tab.

The swipe feature also makes more obvious, but easier to work around, bugs in the open in new tab -> back button feature (which is also awesome, when it works).

lazyjeff2• 4 years ago

While we're making wishlists for Safari, the one I think would have the most real world impact is AV1 support, to have a modern royalty-free codec across all browsers if Safari adds it. Safari is the last holdout. Considering the large proportion of internet usage is to transfer video, the savings in storage and transmission would be non-trivial.

aluminum96• 4 years ago

Apple is very close with the media entities that receive royalties from MPEG, h.264, etc, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

galad872• 4 years ago

Until there are enough devices with an av1 hardware decoder, any storage and transmission saving is lost to the higher energy usage and worse battery life for the end user.

lazyjeff2• 4 years ago

My phone already has av1 hardware decoding (pixel 6). But anyway it's a chicken/egg problem, where the broader hardware decoding will come once browser support is there. The long-term impacts are more significant.

Also, energy use worldwide might decline if fewer datacenters are needed to store/transmit videos. Kind of hard to measure and compare against enduser devices, but it's another factor to consider.

SemanticStrengh7• 4 years ago

webkit leads the dance for once, with their amazing h265 support

babypuncher• 4 years ago

I do not expect this to happen until Apple starts including a hardware decoder in their silicon.

eyelidlessness3• 4 years ago

I could have sworn this landed some time ago, so I looked it up. Turns out I was partly right. Partial WebKit support was added in 2020[1], but it depends on which decoder is available. According to metadata on the commit, it looks like this shipped in Safari 15.4. No telling if/when they’ll add hardware support, but they’ve been more receptive to royalty free codecs in recent years then their historical reputation suggests.

1: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/db84a4ca534c01144461...

ksec2• 4 years ago

Safari media support requires OS update, not the browser or engine.

leeoniya• 4 years ago

Fixed scrolling background-attachment: fixed

oh, joy! only took 8+ years:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23236158/how-to-replicat...

rikschennink• 4 years ago

Haven’t checked yet but assume that canvas memory management is probably still broken.

no_way• 4 years ago

I am still insanely upset that there are a lot of years spanning bugs which aren't fixed in Safari or even acknowledged in their bug tracker, but the situation is getting a lot better with the release frequency and new features so at least there is hope for things to get better from here.

mtomweb10• 4 years ago

I understand the feeling, we’d stopped bothering to lodge tickets until this year. If you find ones that haven’t got attention and they’re still important, tweet at webkit or Jen. They’ve been really good with bugs recently and they are getting fixed.

If you do find new bugs I would encourage you to make tickets.

SemanticStrengh7• 4 years ago

when will they support sharedworkers..

Daiz2• 4 years ago

Gotta say, really disappointed with the fact that instead of Safari making 100vh actually mean 100% of viewport height like it's supposed to, they instead present us with all these new viewport units, all to fix a problem that was caused by their own deviation from the spec to begin with. And of course they're not going to do anything about 100vh even with all these new units, because how else are we going to force developers to use our special units to cater to our browser's quirks!

lilyball2• 4 years ago

What spec? I just looked up what the issue is with vh on mobile and the very first resource I found talked about how the spec isn't clear on how it's supposed to behave in the presence of movable chrome, like the address bar on mobile browsers.

It also says that Safari's initial implementation updated `vh` when the address bar changed visibility and this caused a bad jump in layout, which is why they changed it to ignore the address bar so it's a fixed value instead. And it says Chrome mobile followed suite as well, which means it's not just Safari that thinks the "fixed value" approach is better on mobile.

Daiz2• 4 years ago

I've yet to meet a single developer who likes what Apple did with 100vh. And it's why all my projects to date that want to use viewport height in CSS have ended up adding a JS snippet that sets a --vh CSS variable to window.innerHeight on resize, because I have no interest in dealing with Apple's special boy CSS behavior. And really, even Apple itself admits that their 100vh solution is troublesome - they wouldn't have introduced all these new units otherwise! Even if the saner solution would have been to just change their idiosyncratic 100vh behavior to what developers actually expect from it.

intellix• 4 years ago

Safari is like internet explorer and where I spend the majority of my day fixing issues related to quirks and bugs

New WebKit Features in Safari 15.5

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