They're behind on features _and_ you have to work around their aggressive privacy choices. It's my least favorite testing phase in any release.
I worked on a media heavy fashion site a few years ago and dealing with Safari not allowing you to dynamically add new audio/video elements with auto play (or to auto play at all in low battery mode) was a real headache. By default it’s great, just offer the option to get permission for experiences that require it.
Currently most solutions are to load a number of empty audio buffers when the user first clicks and repurpose those for auto playing content later.
If a user has visited a multimedia focused web site (eg: online catwalk show), why not allow them to opt in for that session rather than force them to have a cut down experience?
There are work arounds? Looks like they need to be even more aggressive.
And yes. Making a streaming application. The CDN that the media is provided through uses cookies to coordinate "side band" metadata. On Safari, there's no way to get at the metadata due to the cookie policy. So, you get the media, but literally no metadata or features associated with it. It's a worse experience for any Safari user and doesn't actually enhance their privacy in any way whatsoever.
The workaround was to get the streaming provider to allow the correlation ID that would normally be conveyed through a cookie to be conveyed through URL parameters instead.
So.. to the extent that I could track you between two sessions, the workaround means I still can. Not that I need to track you, but because I need to correlate two streams between two different servers onto one device.