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Comment by arkon_hn | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention how updates are tied to OS updates...

What Updates tied? App Store updates use same networking and storage as OS? Why it is bad?

because updating a single app via the app store is faster than updating the whole OS. Having a security vulnerability in a browser could be fixed immediately, but having to ship out a whole new OS leaves it open for a while. Especially with users generally being against/too lazy to do OS updates

Exactly this. We so often see people still using iOS versions from ~4 years ago despite having options to update. Apple holds the ecosystem back.

Except that they can and have pushed security updates that are not necessarily OS updates. Granted the process is still through the settings app, but the point still stands. They have a channel for pushing yellow and red alert updates. Anything else can easily wait a couple of months.

Hasn't been the case for some time.

Not true.

MacOS releases a new version each year, the current MacOS landscape looks like:

- MacOS Sequoia (previous version, everything works as expected)

- MacOS Tahoe (current version, broken experience, basically Apple's "Windows Vista/8 moment")

- MacOS Golden Gate (next version, fixes what was broken in Tahoe, comes out in a month)

I'm on MacOS Sequoia because I have things that can't be broken by updating to Tahoe.

I also cannot test how my websites/webapps will work in a month, because Safari's beta (called Safari Technology Preview) only works on Tahoe and Golden Gate.

I cannot wait a month to update to Golden Gate because Golden Gate drops support for my iMac.

And I can't test the new version of Safari on my Windows or Linux devices because Safari isn't available for them.

I can test the Webkit browser, but that doesn't include the Safari specific changes that apple makes which I need to be able to test.

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So, I can't test Safari until I wait a month and purchase a new apple machine.

(Oh by the way, apple keeps cancelling orders for new machines)

> And I can't test the new version of Safari on my Windows or Linux devices because Safari isn't available for them.

You can download three Linux-compatible WebKit-based browsers from Apple's WebKit page:

Epiphany Technology Preview: https://webkitgtk.org/epiphany-tech-preview

WPE: http://wpewebkit.org/download

WebKitGTK: http://webkitgtk.org/download

There are subtle differences. From the top of my head, differences with osx include the font rendering and the tab order (which is broken for everything except form elements).

I get it; when Safari was available for Windows, the font rendering was different from the Mac version.

A non-evergreen browser in 2026 should be publicly ridiculed any time its name is brought up.

Web developers who think you need the latest and greatest features to build a hypertext document are the ones who should be ridiculed.

Thankfully, people with ridiculous opinions ridicule themselves. Like pretending the web is just documents, as if we were living three decades ago. Or pretending that "latest and greatest features" is the only reason to keep a browser updated. Or pretending that new features are somehow bad or not useful. Or defending poor Apple for wanting people to spend a grand on new hardware to update be able to update their browser.

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