macOS 11.3 Developer Beta has been released and good news – it includes Safari 14.1 which hopefully includes a lot of the improvements that exist in Safari Technology Preview. I’m hoping that what we’ll see, with the move to Apple Silicon based Macs, that there will be more frequent updates of Safari particularly when it comes to the Webextensions API which at the moment the absolute bare minimum. What I’m hoping is that when Apple embraces more of the Webextensions API that any changes make their way back into the other browsers which will make extension developers more willing to target Safari. At the moment I use Ad Guard Safari Extension although it would be nice for uBlock Origin to be made available for Safari.

It looks like the first couple of updates were solely focused on fixing major bugs and security fixes with the next release bring in new features as part of the equation. There is also a corresponding Xcode 12.5 that being released along side macOS 11.3. It will be interesting to see whether, once the transition to Apple silicon is complete, whether they move to a rolling release schedule where major releases are instead replaced with new features, enhancements, bug fixes etc. are rolled out when they’re ready rather than being held back for ‘the big release’.