alt Hacker NewsCool stuff they're working on tends to take a very long time to reach customers' hands compared to other browsers. Just compare the "stable" and "experimental" graphs on wpt.fyi for Safari.
I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".
It's an own-goal for no reason.
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> I can't think of a single good reason why they don't adopt an "evergreen" 4/6-week update model except Not Invented Here syndrome or "it's not Apple-like, we prefer the OS team (and therefore Marketing) dictating our release schedule, users be damned".
There's a new version of Safari Technology Preview [1] for macOS every two weeks.
There's a new version of Safari released every September for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. This has been the schedule for several years. Since Safari 26 shipped on September 15, 2025, there have been two updates for these platforms:
Safari 26.1 on November 3rd and 26.2 on December 12th.
The Safari team shipped 7 releases this year, averaging 7½ weeks between releases; not a significant difference from 4–6 weeks. Each major release of Safari for macOS runs on the current macOS version (Tahoe) and the two preceding ones—Sequoia and Sonoma.
BTW, there were 9 Safari releases in 2024, averaging 5.8 weeks apart.
It's not the first time Safari shipped a significant new feature before other browsers; :has(), Display P3 color support, JPEG-XL come to mind. At the end of the day, there's no NIH or Marketing team dictating the release schedule.
The web platform doesn’t need to move this fast. Google is, often unilaterally, pushing new features and declaring them standards. In my opinion, the web should not be changing so fast that a truly open source community project couldn’t keep up. I don’t like how the web has become reliant on the largesse of billion dollar corporations.
I recognise that this is a controversial take, but in my opinion what Google is doing is a variant of “embrace and extend”. Traditionally, this meant proprietary extensions (e.g. VBScript) but I think this a subtle variant with similar consequences.