Appealing to fans of the bleeding edge, Apple today issued an updated version of Safari Technology Preview.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Safari Technology Preview is an experimental version of Apple’s homegrown web browser. First released in March 2016 and is updated regularly, the build is intended for use by developers looking to test new web and platform features ahead of time.
So what’s new in Safari Technology Preview v157 specifically?
Don’t get unduly excited: there don’t appear to be any major feature additions present. Instead, the latest update is more of a compilation comprised of bug fixes, performance improvements, and quality-of-life tweaks.
Among them, the ‘Elements’ tab in Safari’s web inspector gains support for case-insensitive breakpoints and regular expression matching, and an issue whereby disabling an inline breakpoints would ‘unexpectedly’ remove has been fixed.
Hey: I did say you shouldn’t get excited.
On the .css side there’s support for @font-feature-settings and function values of some alternates; support for font-synthesis longhand properties; and support for last baseline alignment in CSS Grid and FlexBox containers.
Privacy wise, this release caps cookie lifetimes to 7 days for responses from third-party IP addresses, and omits document.referrer for third-party requests when in ephemeral mode.
There are also a number of miscellaneous enhancements to JavaScript, Web API, WebCodecs, Web Animations, and more. See the full release notes for more details.
Download Safari Technology Preview
This build of Safari Technology Preview is available to download from the Apple website for systems running macOS 13 Ventura and macOS 12 Monterey. Note: this version is NOT available for macOS 11 Big Sur, though earlier versions were.
You can download Safari Technology Preview for free. You do NOT need an Apple Developer account to download it. Plus, this version can be installed and used alongside the regular stable version of Safari without conflict, which is neat.
If you already have Safari technology Preview installed then you can update to the latest build (system support dependant) from the Software Update section in System Preferences.