AppleInsider Staff
A new version of Apple's experimental Safari branch was made available to web professionals late Wednesday, bringing a number of API enhancements and folding in patches for the Spectre vulnerability.
Aside from the Spectre mitigations - which match those rolled out to iOS and High Sierra in recent days - the headline feature from the latest Safari Technology Preview is a new experimental storage access API. The API would allow specific third-party cookies to be accessed when requested by the user.
This proposal is designed to help third-party services embedded on a website - the WebKit team holds up commenting widgets and video services as prime examples - read and write their own cookies in multiple contexts.
WebKit would only allow this following a user interaction, like a tap or a click, to avoid surreptitious tracking without the user's knowledge. It would also respect locally-set rules including whitelists and blacklists.
Other changes include wide-ranging improvements to service workers, which allow websites to run processes in the background without the need for user interaction. Enhancements to picture-in-picture, Web Inspector, and the Clipboard API are also included.
Safari Technology Preview 47 is available now for download from Apple's developer website.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
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Andrew Orr
6 Comments
“Drops” = no longer support?
It sounds like Safari is becoming more powerful/customizable. Which is a good thing, because it’s very “bare bones”...
I’ve notice since iOS 11 (that included a new WebKit) some sites don’t render properly. Specifically, video’s on the page autorun automatically in the bottom right. Which is annoying considering I’ve already started another video on the page.
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