Apple on Thursday seeded developers, and those in the AppleSeed program, with a new version of Safari for both OS X Mavericks (Safari 7.1) and OS X Mountain Lion (Safari 6.2). The update includes several upgrades to the WebKit engine that powers the browser.
Release Notes for the Seed:
Focus Areas
Please focus testing on the following areas:
- Please test general website compatibility.
- Subpixel rendering is now on by default for all web content. Web sites or in-app web views with extremely tight design constraints may render differently.
- CSS object model getters will return fractional double values based on subpixel layout and rendering metrics instead of rounded integral values.
- Please test extension compatibility.
New WebKit Features
- WebGL. Safari support for WebGL allows developers to create 3D experiences that work natively without plug-ins.
- IndexedDB. The IndexedDB API allows web developers to store structured data for web applications that work online or require large amounts of data to be cached client side.
- JavaScript Promises. Safari enables JavaScript authors to more naturally work with asynchronous programming patterns.
- CSS Shapes and Compositing. Using CSS, websites can now easily flow text around images and geometry shapes, and perform image compositing operations on DOM elements.
Version 7.1 could be the last major update to Safari for Mavericks, as the launch of OS X Yosemite will include the all-new Safari 8.
