6 ms·

WebKit Features in Safari 16.1

42 points by alwillis 4y ago

frou_dh 4y ago
That's a welcome surprise that they've added support for the very handy "Scroll to Text Fragment" feature, as seen in Chrome. https://webkit.org/blog/13399/webkit-features-in-safari-16-1/#scroll-to-text-fragment https://webkit.org/blog/13399/webkit-features-in-safari-16-1...
- alwillis 4y ago
  And it’s 100% compatible with Chrome’s implementation: https://wpt.fyi/results/scroll-to-text-fragment?label=experimental&label=master&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/scroll-to-text-fragment?label=experi...
  - frou_dh 4y ago
    Now that I've tried it, is it just me or have they only implemented half of the feature? i.e. you can successfully visit such a link, but there's no way to create such a link yourself?
obblekk 4y ago
I ran the browser bench speedometer2.0 test recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see how much faster safari is than chrome on my macbook air. I'm not sure why I don't find myself using safari more yet, but maybe soon it'll get there.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  I've been using it for years as an alternative to FF, and the only things that sometimes feel sluggish are Google web apps. Honestly, I blame FUD for that one, not the browser itself. The battery life is pretty good too. Extension-wise, I only have Hush and Adguard installed.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Google is known to sabotage other browsers by slowing down or breaking its apps in all but Chrome. See this thread from Jonathan Nightingale: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871243301625856 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871243301625856 Edit. Johnathan Nightingale was General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla. He knows what he's talking about.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Is there an easy way to turn off web push entirely so I don't get spammed with spamification requests?
- ash_gti 4y ago
  There is a setting in Preferences > Websites > Notifications to disable notifications entirely.
- alwillis 4y ago
  Is there an easy way to turn off web push entirely so I don't get spammed with spamification requests? Short answer: yes. In Safari 16.1, select Preferences > Websites and uncheck “Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications”. Details about WebKit’s Web Push implementation and how privacy is handled [1]: [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/ https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/
- jensimmons 4y ago
  Yes, as others said. Also, in Safari you will not get spammed by requests for permission to send notifications. A website or web app can only ask for permission _after_ you've indicated interest with a gesture — like clicking on a "subscribe" bell icon, or a button that says "notify me". They are not allowed to ask you until you've taken the first step.
encryptluks2 4y ago
They are late to the game as always. It seems like Chromium and Firefox are the first to implement, and Safari is consistently last. There are a few standards that Safari has been first to, but it is the exception.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  This is, of course, untrue. Chrome ships hundreds of new web APIs a year. Most of them are Chrome-only non-standards. Firefox and Safari are more closely aligned: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I was specifically referring to CSS features as proposed by standards bodies.
    - jensimmons 4y ago
      Which CSS standards would you most like to see Safari shipping sooner?
      - alwillis 4y ago
        Crickets
    - extra88 4y ago
      Every browser has instances of being the holdout on features, Safari does not stand out, especially amongst CSS features. Safari hasn't shipped touch-action, overflow-anchor, media queries range syntax. Chrome hasn't shipped the new viewport units, font-variant-alternates, or CSS subgrid. Chrome not supporting CSS subgrid is far more consequential than any CSS feature Safari is the holdout on. Edit: Safari also has no support for CSS counter styles or CSS paged media while Chrome and Firefox have at least partial support. Again, those don't seem particularly consequential features for moving web design forward. https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0,firefox+106&compareCats=all https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0,firefox+...
alberth 4y ago
Still no PREFETCH to help websites load faster :( Firefox v2 (2006) and Chrome v8 (2010) have had this feature for well over a decade. A little more on this topic: https://nitter.net/Dieulot/status/1574763586055987200#m https://nitter.net/Dieulot/status/1574763586055987200#m EDIT: I realize there is an argument that this might be used for ad tracking but thought that was solved with some type of cache sandboxing that other browsers already have. EDIT2: People keep saying it’s a privacy issue. Am I wrong in understanding that cache sandboxing mitigates this privacy concern? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365608
- dmitriid 4y ago
  So this was solved by adding immeasurable complexity to a feature whose impact is dubious at best and potentially harmful (slow and/or metered internet) at worst.
  - concinds 4y ago
    > potentially harmful (slow and/or metered internet) at worst iOS and macOS both support low-data mode, which Safari can know about, and disable prefetch in those cases.
- alwillis 4y ago
  Still no prefetch to help websites load faster :( It’s a little more nuanced than that. 1. prefetch has no role regarding initial page load, which is the thing most people care about most; not supporting it has no effect on that. 2. prefetch is a browser hint; during browser idle time, using some heuristic, it downloads resources in the background it thinks you might need or pages you might navigate to next. If it guesses correctly, the next navigation is fast, because the page and its resources, (assuming they have rel=prefetch assigned to them) is already in the cache. If the browser is wrong, there’s no benefit. 3. Users who don’t have unlimited cellular data and pay by the megabyte probably don’t want the browser downloading stuff in the background they didn’t ask for and may not need. 4. There are privacy implications. From Mozilla’s Link prefetching FAQ [1]: Privacy implications Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the Google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth. You can block 3rd party cookies in Firefox, see Disabling third party cookies.) [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefetching_FAQ#privacy_implications https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...
fabiospampinato 4y ago
Still no regex lookbehinds, I dream of the day when (if) they'll ship in Safari.
nozzlegear 4y ago
Really looking forward to playing around with this passkeys thing. If I understand it correctly, I can't implement it as the only authentication method for my website unless I'm okay with locking my users down to one single device? Edit: to clarify, if my user set up passkey on their iPhone and that's the only method of authentication for my website, they just wouldn't be able to sign in if they lost that iPhone? The key can't be recovered, transferred or backed up? I'm okay with that (I own several yubikeys myself), just want to make sure I understand it correctly.
- alwillis 4y ago
  It’s going to take a while before there’s a critical mass of passkey users to make this viable. Because it’s based on Webauthn, I believe a website can fall back to using a compatible security key (like a YubiKey) as authentication.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ylk 4y ago
  > to clarify, if my user set up passkey on their iPhone and that's the only method of authentication for my website, they just wouldn't be able to sign in if they lost that iPhone? That used to be the case. Since iOS 16 they are also synced via the iCloud Keychain: "Passkeys on iPhone require that you use iCloud Keychain. If you don’t have iCloud Keychain turned on when you try to save a passkey, you’ll be asked to turn it on. Passkeys also require that two-factor authentication is enabled for your Apple ID." https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/sign-in-with-passkeys-iphf538ea8d0/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/sign-in-with-passkeys...
  - nozzlegear 4y ago
    Perfect, thanks!
willmeyers 4y ago
love Safari but literally cannot not make it my daily driver unless webRequestBlocking is supported (mainly for ublock origin).
- freediver 4y ago
  You may want to check Orion browser in this case. (dev here)
- concinds 4y ago
  Seconded. Their excuses for removing support are baffling (guess what? most current Safari adblockers still request access to "data from all websites", which is exactly what "Content Blockers" were supposed to prevent. So now, instead of open-source uBlock having access to all websites, people use proprietary extensions that have the same access. Ugh.)
shantara 4y ago
For some reason, WebM video is supported in macOS version of Safari, but not in iOS or iPadOS.
- extra88 4y ago
  The reason is probably to avoid the hit to battery life mobile devices would take from playing files using non-hardware accelerated video codecs.
Fudgel 4y ago
I was really hoping import maps would be merged in to Safari as it has already landed in webkit: * https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220823 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220823 * https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/blob/main/README.md
concinds 4y ago
It seems the criticism on Safari hasn't evolved alongside WebKit's efforts. It's true that WebKit is no longer lagging behind web standards (with the notable exceptions of PWAs and prefetch). Though I'll note that much of the criticism (see: IndexedDB) wasn't Apple lacking standards support, but having buggy implementations. I can't speak to Safari's dev tools because I just use Chrome's. But if critics keep focusing on webcompat, they might comfort the WebKit team into thinking that all the criticism is unwarranted, and that Safari has caugh up. That's not the case when it comes to the user experience, where Safari still lags far behind. Just weeks ago, Safari lost me a few tabs, twice. The tabs kept the favicon, but became "Untitled", and when you clicked on them, they were just blank, and the "back" button was disabled. Does this version fix it? No clue, because they never acknowledged that bug publicly. Never had a bug like that on Chrome, in the decade I've used it. Safari still doesn't allow users to select multiple tabs to move them to other windows or move them to tab groups. Firefox and Chrome both can. The "back" button is still finicky. The button bizzarely feels more reliable than the trackpad gesture. The full-page animation makes it feel much slower than Chrome, which doesn't have a page-back animation except a small left arrow no the side. There's a huge bug, that's survived for many years and which I encounter very frequently: when you Google something, click on a result, then go back, you end up at the Start Page rather than the Google search, which isn't even in the History. How? Extension support on iOS is far better than competitors, but on the Mac, Apple's clearly saying "fuck you" to extension developers. Forcing devs to pay, making basic APIs unavailable without good reason (webRequest blocking; they really should just implement whatever gorhill tells them to; I thought they disliked ads and tracking?), and cluttering users' Applications folders with browser extensions unlike every other browser. Why can't I use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension with Safari? uBlock Origin? SingleFile? There's a long-tail of extensions that Safari will never support, due to the Safari team's practices. And why lack support for profiles? I don't want to switch user accounts; I just want to be able to segregate work and personal, so my URL autocomplete doesn't show personal stuff at work. That's a basic requirement in the era of screen sharing and streaming. Tab groups are an encouraging feature, that shows Apple cares about power users, but Safari still feels too "restricted" and rigid. There's a strong feeling that "Apple knows best" and feel they can dictate the user experience, which just doesn't work for something as personal as a browser. No, it wouldn't be "un-Apple-like" to roll out Profiles, or proper extension support that don't clutter the apps folder. Worried about malware extensions? Then improve your analytics, and rely on Apple's ability to remote-uninstall bad extensions, like Firefox and Chrome have done. They're just hurting power users, with little benefit for average users who mostly don't install extensions anyway.
Tepix 4y ago
We still have to wait a bit longer for web push on mobile safari. I hope it's worth the wait
ksec 4y ago
Just lost a sessions with about 200 Tabs updating to Safari 16.1. Sigh.

42 points by alwillis 4y ago

That's a welcome surprise that they've added support for the very handy "Scroll to Text Fragment" feature, as seen in Chrome. https://webkit.org/blog/13399/webkit-features-in-safari-16-1/#scroll-to-text-fragment https://webkit.org/blog/13399/webkit-features-in-safari-16-1...

alwillis 4y ago
And it’s 100% compatible with Chrome’s implementation: https://wpt.fyi/results/scroll-to-text-fragment?label=experimental&label=master&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/scroll-to-text-fragment?label=experi...
- frou_dh 4y ago
  Now that I've tried it, is it just me or have they only implemented half of the feature? i.e. you can successfully visit such a link, but there's no way to create such a link yourself?

obblekk 4y ago

I ran the browser bench speedometer2.0 test recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see how much faster safari is than chrome on my macbook air. I'm not sure why I don't find myself using safari more yet, but maybe soon it'll get there.

rpastuszak 4y ago
I've been using it for years as an alternative to FF, and the only things that sometimes feel sluggish are Google web apps. Honestly, I blame FUD for that one, not the browser itself. The battery life is pretty good too. Extension-wise, I only have Hush and Adguard installed.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Google is known to sabotage other browsers by slowing down or breaking its apps in all but Chrome. See this thread from Jonathan Nightingale: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871243301625856 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871243301625856 Edit. Johnathan Nightingale was General Manager and Vice President of the Firefox group at Mozilla. He knows what he's talking about.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Is there an easy way to turn off web push entirely so I don't get spammed with spamification requests?

ash_gti 4y ago
There is a setting in Preferences > Websites > Notifications to disable notifications entirely.
alwillis 4y ago
Is there an easy way to turn off web push entirely so I don't get spammed with spamification requests? Short answer: yes. In Safari 16.1, select Preferences > Websites and uncheck “Allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications”. Details about WebKit’s Web Push implementation and how privacy is handled [1]: [1]: https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/ https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/
jensimmons 4y ago
Yes, as others said. Also, in Safari you will not get spammed by requests for permission to send notifications. A website or web app can only ask for permission _after_ you've indicated interest with a gesture — like clicking on a "subscribe" bell icon, or a button that says "notify me". They are not allowed to ask you until you've taken the first step.

encryptluks2 4y ago

They are late to the game as always. It seems like Chromium and Firefox are the first to implement, and Safari is consistently last. There are a few standards that Safari has been first to, but it is the exception.

dmitriid 4y ago
This is, of course, untrue. Chrome ships hundreds of new web APIs a year. Most of them are Chrome-only non-standards. Firefox and Safari are more closely aligned: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I was specifically referring to CSS features as proposed by standards bodies.
  - jensimmons 4y ago
    Which CSS standards would you most like to see Safari shipping sooner?
    - alwillis 4y ago
      Crickets
  - extra88 4y ago
    Every browser has instances of being the holdout on features, Safari does not stand out, especially amongst CSS features. Safari hasn't shipped touch-action, overflow-anchor, media queries range syntax. Chrome hasn't shipped the new viewport units, font-variant-alternates, or CSS subgrid. Chrome not supporting CSS subgrid is far more consequential than any CSS feature Safari is the holdout on. Edit: Safari also has no support for CSS counter styles or CSS paged media while Chrome and Firefox have at least partial support. Again, those don't seem particularly consequential features for moving web design forward. https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0,firefox+106&compareCats=all https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0,firefox+...

alberth 4y ago

Still no PREFETCH to help websites load faster :( Firefox v2 (2006) and Chrome v8 (2010) have had this feature for well over a decade. A little more on this topic: https://nitter.net/Dieulot/status/1574763586055987200#m https://nitter.net/Dieulot/status/1574763586055987200#m EDIT: I realize there is an argument that this might be used for ad tracking but thought that was solved with some type of cache sandboxing that other browsers already have. EDIT2: People keep saying it’s a privacy issue. Am I wrong in understanding that cache sandboxing mitigates this privacy concern? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27365608

dmitriid 4y ago
So this was solved by adding immeasurable complexity to a feature whose impact is dubious at best and potentially harmful (slow and/or metered internet) at worst.
- concinds 4y ago
  > potentially harmful (slow and/or metered internet) at worst iOS and macOS both support low-data mode, which Safari can know about, and disable prefetch in those cases.
alwillis 4y ago
Still no prefetch to help websites load faster :( It’s a little more nuanced than that. 1. prefetch has no role regarding initial page load, which is the thing most people care about most; not supporting it has no effect on that. 2. prefetch is a browser hint; during browser idle time, using some heuristic, it downloads resources in the background it thinks you might need or pages you might navigate to next. If it guesses correctly, the next navigation is fast, because the page and its resources, (assuming they have rel=prefetch assigned to them) is already in the cache. If the browser is wrong, there’s no benefit. 3. Users who don’t have unlimited cellular data and pay by the megabyte probably don’t want the browser downloading stuff in the background they didn’t ask for and may not need. 4. There are privacy implications. From Mozilla’s Link prefetching FAQ [1]: Privacy implications Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the Google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth. You can block 3rd party cookies in Firefox, see Disabling third party cookies.) [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefetching_FAQ#privacy_implications https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...

fabiospampinato 4y ago

Still no regex lookbehinds, I dream of the day when (if) they'll ship in Safari.

nozzlegear 4y ago

Really looking forward to playing around with this passkeys thing. If I understand it correctly, I can't implement it as the only authentication method for my website unless I'm okay with locking my users down to one single device? Edit: to clarify, if my user set up passkey on their iPhone and that's the only method of authentication for my website, they just wouldn't be able to sign in if they lost that iPhone? The key can't be recovered, transferred or backed up? I'm okay with that (I own several yubikeys myself), just want to make sure I understand it correctly.

alwillis 4y ago
It’s going to take a while before there’s a critical mass of passkey users to make this viable. Because it’s based on Webauthn, I believe a website can fall back to using a compatible security key (like a YubiKey) as authentication.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ylk 4y ago
> to clarify, if my user set up passkey on their iPhone and that's the only method of authentication for my website, they just wouldn't be able to sign in if they lost that iPhone? That used to be the case. Since iOS 16 they are also synced via the iCloud Keychain: "Passkeys on iPhone require that you use iCloud Keychain. If you don’t have iCloud Keychain turned on when you try to save a passkey, you’ll be asked to turn it on. Passkeys also require that two-factor authentication is enabled for your Apple ID." https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/sign-in-with-passkeys-iphf538ea8d0/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/sign-in-with-passkeys...
- nozzlegear 4y ago
  Perfect, thanks!

willmeyers 4y ago

love Safari but literally cannot not make it my daily driver unless webRequestBlocking is supported (mainly for ublock origin).

freediver 4y ago
You may want to check Orion browser in this case. (dev here)
concinds 4y ago
Seconded. Their excuses for removing support are baffling (guess what? most current Safari adblockers still request access to "data from all websites", which is exactly what "Content Blockers" were supposed to prevent. So now, instead of open-source uBlock having access to all websites, people use proprietary extensions that have the same access. Ugh.)

shantara 4y ago

For some reason, WebM video is supported in macOS version of Safari, but not in iOS or iPadOS.

extra88 4y ago
The reason is probably to avoid the hit to battery life mobile devices would take from playing files using non-hardware accelerated video codecs.

Fudgel 4y ago

I was really hoping import maps would be merged in to Safari as it has already landed in webkit: * https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220823 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220823 * https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/WICG/import-maps/blob/main/README.md

concinds 4y ago

It seems the criticism on Safari hasn't evolved alongside WebKit's efforts. It's true that WebKit is no longer lagging behind web standards (with the notable exceptions of PWAs and prefetch). Though I'll note that much of the criticism (see: IndexedDB) wasn't Apple lacking standards support, but having buggy implementations. I can't speak to Safari's dev tools because I just use Chrome's. But if critics keep focusing on webcompat, they might comfort the WebKit team into thinking that all the criticism is unwarranted, and that Safari has caugh up. That's not the case when it comes to the user experience, where Safari still lags far behind. Just weeks ago, Safari lost me a few tabs, twice. The tabs kept the favicon, but became "Untitled", and when you clicked on them, they were just blank, and the "back" button was disabled. Does this version fix it? No clue, because they never acknowledged that bug publicly. Never had a bug like that on Chrome, in the decade I've used it. Safari still doesn't allow users to select multiple tabs to move them to other windows or move them to tab groups. Firefox and Chrome both can. The "back" button is still finicky. The button bizzarely feels more reliable than the trackpad gesture. The full-page animation makes it feel much slower than Chrome, which doesn't have a page-back animation except a small left arrow no the side. There's a huge bug, that's survived for many years and which I encounter very frequently: when you Google something, click on a result, then go back, you end up at the Start Page rather than the Google search, which isn't even in the History. How? Extension support on iOS is far better than competitors, but on the Mac, Apple's clearly saying "fuck you" to extension developers. Forcing devs to pay, making basic APIs unavailable without good reason (webRequest blocking; they really should just implement whatever gorhill tells them to; I thought they disliked ads and tracking?), and cluttering users' Applications folders with browser extensions unlike every other browser. Why can't I use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension with Safari? uBlock Origin? SingleFile? There's a long-tail of extensions that Safari will never support, due to the Safari team's practices. And why lack support for profiles? I don't want to switch user accounts; I just want to be able to segregate work and personal, so my URL autocomplete doesn't show personal stuff at work. That's a basic requirement in the era of screen sharing and streaming. Tab groups are an encouraging feature, that shows Apple cares about power users, but Safari still feels too "restricted" and rigid. There's a strong feeling that "Apple knows best" and feel they can dictate the user experience, which just doesn't work for something as personal as a browser. No, it wouldn't be "un-Apple-like" to roll out Profiles, or proper extension support that don't clutter the apps folder. Worried about malware extensions? Then improve your analytics, and rely on Apple's ability to remote-uninstall bad extensions, like Firefox and Chrome have done. They're just hurting power users, with little benefit for average users who mostly don't install extensions anyway.

Tepix 4y ago

We still have to wait a bit longer for web push on mobile safari. I hope it's worth the wait

ksec 4y ago

Just lost a sessions with about 200 Tabs updating to Safari 16.1. Sigh.